A Native Heritage: Images of the Indian in English-Canadian Literature 9781487585846

Citation preview

leslie monkman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Language and Literature at Queen’s University.

Disparity and division in religion, technology, and ideology have characterized relations between English-Canadian and Indian cultures throughout Canada’s history. From the earliest declaration of white territorial ownership to the current debate on aboriginal rights, red man and white man have had opposing principles and perspectives. The most common ‘solutions’ imposed on these conflicts by white men have relegated the Indian to the fringes of white society and consciousness. This survey of English-Canadian literature is the first comprehensive examination of a tradition in which white writers turn to the Indian and his culture for standards and models by which they can measure their own values and goals; for patterns of cultural destruction, transformation, and survival; and for sources of native heroes and indigenous myths. Leslie Monkman examines images of the Indian as they appear in works ranging from Robert Rogers’ Ponteah, or The Savages of America (1766) to Robertson Davies’ Pontiac and the Green Man (1977), demonstrating how English-Canadian writers have illuminated their own world through reference to Indian culture. The Indian has been seen as an antagonist, as a superior alternative, as a member of a vanishing and lamented race, and as a hero and the source of new myths. Although white/Indian tension often lies in apparently irreconcilable opposites, Monkman finds in the literature surveyed complementary images reflecting a common humanity. This is an important contribution to a hitherto unexplored area of Canadian literature in English which should give rise to further elaboration of this major theme.

This page intentionally left blank

Leslie Monkman

A Native Heritage IMAGES OF THE INDIAN IN ENGLISH-CANADIAN LITERATURE

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 1981 Toronto Buffalo London Reprinted 2017 ISBN 978-0- 8020-5537-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875 -8683-6 (paper)

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Monkman, Leslie, 1946A native heritage Includes index. ISBN 978-0- 8020-5537-8 (bound). - ISBN 978-1-4875 -8683-6 ( Pbk.) 1. Indians of North America in literature. 2. Canadian literature (English) - History and criticism.• 1. T itle. c81-094258-5 c8101 .91 3520397 PSl803.153M65 PR9l85.6.153M65

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and a grant to the University of Toronto Press from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

For Marni

This page intentionally left blank

Contents PREFACE

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS �

1 Introduction 3 2 Indian Antagonists 7 3 Indian Alternatives 28 4 Death of the Indian 65 5 Indian Heroes 96 6 Indian Myths and Legends 127 7 Conclusion 161 NOTES

167

INDEX

187

This page intentionally left blank

Preface 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. For their assistance and advice in the preparation of that study I am indebted to Douglas Daymond, Margaret Hundleby, and my dissertation supervisor, Clara Thomas. I also wish to thank my parents and the family ofD.A. Riggs for their understanding and support. The revision of this dissertation for publication was first proposed by Pro­ fessor Thomas and encouraged by Jean Jamieson, Jean Wilson, and Gerald Hallowell at the University of Toronto Press. The study now focuses exclu­ sively on images of the Indian in English-Canadian poetry, fiction, and drama. Rather than proceeding strictly chronologically, A Native Heritage combines specific analyses of works from various periods with identification of patterns linking each era of English-Canadian literary history. In addition to thanking my editors and the secretaries of the Department of English at the University ofGuelph, I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness toDouglas Riggs (1918-78) for his friendship, confidence, and generosity.

LM

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments GEORGE BOWERING, for quotation from 'Hamatsa,' in The Gangs of Kosmos, Toronto: House of Anansi Press 1969, reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press and George Bowering. (The poem also appeared in Touch: Selected Poems 1960-1970, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1970.) Canadian Literature, for permission to incorporate material from 'Coyote as Trickster in The Double Hook' Lll (Spring 1972) 70-6 and from 'Richardson's Indians' LXXI (Summer 1979) 86-94

DON GUTTERIDGE, for quotation from Tecumseh, reprinted by permission of Oberon Press Journal of Canadian Fiction, for permission to incorporate material from 'Beauti­ ful Losers: Jesuit Myth and Mohawk Legend' III, 3 (1974) 57-60 and from 'The

Tonnerre Family: Mirrors of Suffering' 27 (1980) 142-50

WATSON KIRKCONNELL, for quotation from 'The Alaska Crossing,' in Centennial Tales and Selected Poems, reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press A.M. KLEIN, for quotation from 'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga,' in Collected Poems of A.M. Klein, edited by Miriam Waddington, copyright© McGraw-Hill Limited 1974. Reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited PATRICK LANE, for quotations from 'For Simon Fraser' and 'Treaty-Trip from Shulus Reservation,' in Beware the Months of Fire, Toronto: House of Anansi Press 1974, reprinted by permission of the author IRVING LAYTON, for quotation from 'Iroquois in Nice,' in The Shattered Plinths, reprinted by permission of The Canadian Publishers, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto

xii Acknowledgments DOUGLAS LEPAN,

for quotation from 'A Country without a Mythology,' in The U1/ounded Prince and Other Poems. Permission to reprint this extract has been

granted by the author. DOROTHY LIVESAY, for quotations from 'Prophet of the New World' and 'Arte­ facts: West Coast,' in Collccced Poems: The Two Seasons, copyright © Dorothy Livesay 1972. Reprinted by permission of McGraw-Hill Ryerson Limited TOM MARSHALL,

for quotation from 'More Definitions,' in The White City, reprinted by permission of Oberon Press SUSAN MUSGRAVE, for quotation from 'Cultus Wawa,' in Selected Strat'1berries and Other Poems, 1977, reprinted by permission of Sono Nis Press JOHN NEWLOVE,

for quotations from 'The Pride,' in The Fat Man, and 'Crazy Riel,' from Black Night Window, reprinted by permission of The Canadian Publishers, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto; and for quotation from 'Resources, Certain Earths,' in Moi•ing i�1 Alone, Contact Press 1965; second edition, Oolichan Books 1977. Copyright 1965, 1977 by John Newlove. Reprinted by permission of John Newlove EJ. PRATT, for quotation from 'Brebeuf and His Brethren,' in The Collected Poems of E.J, Prall, reprinted by permission of Gage Publishing Limited AL PURDY, for quotation from 'The Children,' in Stmdance at Dusk, reprinted by permission of The Canadian Publishers, McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto C.G.D. ROBERTS,

for quotations from 'The Vengeance of Glooskap' and 'The Departure of Glooskap,' in Poems by Charles G.D. Roberts, © 1907, Copp Clark Publishing, reprinted by permission of Copp Clark Publishing

scorr, for quotations from 'Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris' and 'Powassan's Drum,' in The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scou, reprinted with the permission of John G. Aylen, Ottawa, Canada DUNCAN CAMPBELL

FREDERICK GEORGE SCOTT,

for quotation from 'Wahonomin,' reprinted by per­

mission of F.R. Scott T

F.R. SCO T,

for quotation from 'Breboeuf and His Brethren,' in The Eye of the Needle (Montreal: Contact Press 19 57), reprinted by permission of F.R. Scott RAYMOND SOUSTER, for quotation from 'La Crosse,' in The Years, reprinted by permission of Oberon Press

This page intentionally left blank

A Native Heritage

This page intentionally left blank

I

Introduction Disparity and division have characterized relations between white and Indian cultures throughout Canadian history. From the earliest declarations of white territorial ownership to the current debates on aboriginal rights, red man and white man have had opposing perspectives and principles. The most common 'solutions' imposed on these cultural collisions have relegated the Indian to the fringes of white society and consciousness. An examination of Canadian literature written by whites at first suggests a similar pattern. Only a few dozen works by white writers directly concern the Indian and his culture. Yet if white writers offer relatively few insights into the red man's world, they have repeatedly found in the confrontation of native and non­ native heritages a unique focus for the exploration of their own concerns and culture. In each era of Canadian literary history, writers have turned to the Indian and his culture for standards by which to measure the values and goals of white Canadian society, for patterns of cultural destruction, transfor­ mation, and survival, and for new heroes and indigenous myths. 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 at 1976, the revised edition of the Literary History of Canada spoke of 'the historical absence of an Indian presence in Canadian literature.'• 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 Water­ ston, 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

4 A Native Heritage new publications in the spring of 1974, George Woodcock commented: 'Indians are, this season, an even hotter topic than oil.' 4 Development of this interest by contemporary writers and critics con­ tinues an English-Canadian literary tradition. From Robert Rogers' Pon­ teach, or The Savages of America (1766) to Robertson Davies' 'Pontiac and the Green Man' (1977), white writers have illuminated their own and their readers' worlds through reference to native cultures. These two plays indicate the chronological boundaries of this book and also demonstrate the absence of a strict chronological development in the roles assigned to the red man in Canadian literature. The image of a barbaric savage that dominates many early works recurs in twentieth-century frontier fictions. Similarly, Davies adopts a primitivist perspective closely related to Rogers', two cen­ turies earlier. In Rogers' play, the Ottawa chief who led a confederacy of forces against the British in 1763 represents a standard of insight, restraint, and dignity by which the dramatist measures the white man's ign obility and venality. 'Pontiac and the Green Man' displays a similar pattern as Davies dramatizes a trial at which Robert Rogers (the green man of the title) was charged with treason. In this trial, the original Ponteach is crucial evidence, and Rogers emerges as a hero by virtue of his identification with the Indian leader. All the white Canadian writers who have written about the Indian approach Indian culture as outsiders. The anthropological accuracy of each work varies greatly according to direct experience, personal study, and acceptance or rejection of prevailing social stereotypes, but no white author writes as a red man. Direct descriptions of the North American Indian expe­ rience must come from the rapidly growing body of works by red artists defining their own culture, past and present. To the literary critic, the anthropological truth of a work is less important than how the white writer uses his knowledge of the red man. In Northrop Frye's terms, the treatment of the Indian is often 'external' and 'rhetorical'; thus, Eli Mandel speaks of 'the oddly strained effect of Indian and northern imagery in Canadian writing, as if Trinity College graduates were to wear war paint.' 5 Yet even when works move 'from things outside personality to a place somewhere inside personality,' from 'rhetoric' to 'literature,' they do so less in relation to the Indian than in relation to the white man's world illuminated by reference to red culture. 6 The need to include essentially 'rhetorical' works for discussion in this book has been established by Leslie Fiedler in another context: 'A nation which expurgates from its anthologies those great bad poems it has loved, quite like a nation which refuses to include in those anthologies its great good

5 Introduction

ones, is a nation with only half a memory.'' In relating literature and culture, even works in which the Indian plays a significant but secondary role must be considered if recurring images and attitudes in English-Canadian literary history are to be identified. 8 The concepts of the savage and the primitive introduced in the first two chapters of this book encompass the various perspectives adopted by white writers. Each concept is opposed to the idea of civilization - in thfs context, a term identified exclusively with white culture. Writers who depict the Indian as a savage associate him with values opposed to white control, orthodox Christianity, and ordered landscapes. The author who finds an alternative in red culture associates white culture with rational order, monotheistic reli­ gion, and technological supremacy; yet rather than identifying the Indian in terms of animalistic irrationality, pagan superstition, and nomadic disorder, the primitivist writer finds vital spontaneity, natural religion, and harmony between the red man and the natural landscape. If the Indian in literature helps define white culture, the central facts of his history since the arrival of the white man relate to the displacement, erosion, and death of indigenous cultures. Treating the Indian as a doomed figure of the past, white writers locate images of a lost heroic vitality and subjects for cultural elegies in his world. For other writers, the condition of the contem­ porary Indian is evidence of the failure of values and systems imposed by the white man. Finally, the history of the red man, past and present, serves as a memento mori for a white culture subject to the same destruction that either transformed or obliterated North American Indian cultures. While some writers remind us of the fragility of every culture, others locate unique sources of strength and vitality in Indian history and culture. For these writers, the Indian is no longer a foil for white culture but rather an indigenous ancestor in a land where the white man is still an immigrant. Red heroes fill the vacuum created by the absence of white aboriginal traditions on this continent, and the dream of a distinctive national literature focuses on the history and heritage of the red man. In Indian myths and legends, white writers find a new understanding of the landscape and its gods and discover rhythms, images, and structures that enable them to communicate in a new and powerful idiom. In a note to his I Ching Kanada (1976), Dave Godfrey recalls that he 'once defined a Canadian as someone forced to choose between being an American and being an Indian.' 9 Translated into choices between savagery and civilization, primitivism and progress, or indigenous traditions and imported values, this dichotomy underlies many of the works discussed here. Images of savage antagonists, primitive alternatives, and the Indian dying as

6 A Native Heritage

a victim of white civilization are means by which writers illuminate the character and culture of the white man in Canada. Yet many poems, plays, and novels also envisage an integration of red and white cultures in which the Indian, his heroes, and his myths gain new recognition and respect and the white man gains a sense of a shared heritage. These works provide less evidence of a culture 'forced' into a choice between being 'Indian' or 'American' than of a people engaged in a continuing, and still unrealized, 'quest for the peaceable kingdom' in which red man and white man are reconciled in a common humanity. 10

2

Indian Antagonists The absence of written historical records among the Indians of northern North America led many observers from the Renaissance onwards to dis­ miss the pre-white history of the 'new world' as an age of unbroken darkness. J. Mackay gives early literary expression to this view in Quebec Hill or Cana­ dian Scenery (1797). Mackay acknowledges that the landscape of Lower Canada was populated while the Greek and Roman empires rose and fell, but he considers these inhabitants benighted until the arrival of the white man: No musty record can the curious trace, Engross'd by annals of the savage race: Involv'd in darkness their achievements lay Till fam'd Columbus sought a western way.' In Canada: A Descriptive Poem, published nine years later, Cornwall Bayley echoes Mackay, referring to the long and dreary night that spread chaos over the valley of the St Lawrence before the white man's arrival. Mackay and Bayley's perspective reappears at the end of the nineteenth century in Agnes Maule Machar's 'The New World,' a lyric poem which opens portentously: 'One hemisphere lay hid in misty night;/ God said, "Let there be light".'2 As late as 1941, Stephen Leacock was writing that after the voyage of the Vikings, the continent remained, as it had been for uncounted centuries, empty. We think of prehistoric North America as inhabited by the Indians, and have based on this a sort of recognition of ownership on their part. But this attitude is hardly warranted. The Indians were too few to count. Their use of the resources of the continent was scarcely more than that by crows and wolves, their development of it nothing. 3

8 A Native Heritage In the images of an empty landscape, chaotic darkness, and predatory ani­ mals are the sources of the Indian's emergence as a savage antagonist in English-Canadian literature. Unlike primitivism or other forms of relativism that link white and red worlds, the casting of the Indian as savage depends on separation of these worlds. The Indian need not be simply the negative antithesis of the white man, but definition of him as savage will always override any positive indi­ vidual traits. 4 Should he oppose white civilization, he becomes the demonic antagonist of an ordained mission to bring civilization to the new world. The Indian is most frequently cast as red savage in works dealing with two central concerns of the early white settlers: possession of the land and con­ version of its aboriginal inhabitants. As savage antagonist, the red man enables writers to emphasize and honour white territorial or religious achievements. Others discover in the conventional demonic red savage images and epithets that can be transferred with dramatic impact to white opponents, French or American. Finally, John Richardson's Wacousta (1832) not only casts a white renegade as the demonic leader of red savages but through an exploration of the causes and character of his savagery sug­ gests the potential savagery of all men. SAVAGE LANDSCAPES

In his study of the depiction of the Indian by Canadian historians, James Walker notes that 'of the long string of epithets used to describe the Indian, "savage" predominates.' 5 Given their primary concern with the development of white culture in Canada, the casting of the Indian as savage antagonist is not surprising.6 Literary chronicles of frontier relations between white man and red man often reveal the same bias when they honour the achievements of white explorers and pioneers. The narrative poems of immigration and settlement written before 1840 consistently present the Indian as the savage inhabitant of a landscape that must be tamed and as the antagonist of the white men who will tame it. Published in 1789, Thomas Cary's Abram's Plains identifies the double task of the European immigrant: How blest the task, to tame the savage soil, And, from the waters, bid the woods recoil! But oh! a task of more exalted kind, To arts of peace, to tame the savage mind; The thirst of blood, in human breasts, to shame, To wrest, from barbarous vice, fair virtue's name;

9 Indian Antagonists

Bid tomahawks to ploughshares yield the sway, And skalping-knives to pruning hooks give way.7 In the dichotomies of tomahawk and ploughshare,'savage soil' and domesti­ cated nature, and'savage mind' and 'exalted' white destiny are the sustain­ ing images of subsequent works in this distinctive subgenre. Oliver Goldsmith reveals little interest in the conversion of warring Indian to pacific farmer; instead, he repeatedly identifies the red man with the 'beasts of prey' who prowl the landscape surrounding the site of The Rising Village (1825). Order is paramount in the ideal system posited by Gold­ smith, and as a violator of 'civilized' principles of order in his resistance to white settlement, the Indian becomes a gothic extension of the darkest forces of nature. When his role as antagonist to the ordered village has ended, Goldsmith's savage Indian simply retreats 'to distant regions.' In his stead are the village and agricultural community that reflect Goldsmith's highest ideals of order, industry, and British patriotism. The tension between art and nature, resolved so conclusively in The Ris­ ing Village in favour of British civilization, is also a central dichotomy in Joseph Rowe's 'Acadia.' 8 Unlike his predecessors, Howe does not present the new world prior to the arrival of the white man as an environment of unrelieved barbarous darkness. Instead, Part I of'Acadia' acknowledges the existence of a vital culture before the white man's arrival and depicts the harmony between the Micmac and his environment in images borrowed from the idyllic world of conventional pastoral literature. Only the poem's emphasis on the Indian's unrelenting propensity for warfare anticipates the demonic savage who emerges in the poem's second part. Rowe's Micmac initially regards the colonist as a god, but quickly shifts from acolyte to antagonist and declares 'war, eternal war' on the white invaders. At first Howe attempts to modify the presentation of the Indian as warring killer by suggesting that whites violated Micmac shrines and graves. Yet this attempt at a balanced perspective quickly gives way to the assumption that the Indian must submit to white civilization, and in the second section of the poem, the· Indian is damned as a savage antagonist. In the description of a massacre of a settler and his family, Rowe's Indian sounds 'the war-cry of a fiend from Hell,' and only the most sensational passages of John Richardson's later novels equal Rowe's graphic account of the slaughter: The wretched Mother from her babe is torn, Which on a red right hand aloft is borne, Then dashed to earth before its Parent's eyes,

10 A Native Heritage

And, as its form, deform'd and quivering lies, Life from its fragile tenement is trod, Nor does the boy escape - the smouldering fire Is stirred, - and, as its feeble flames aspire In wanton cruelty they thrust his hands Into the blaze, and on the reddening brands Like Montezuma bid him seek repose. (p 25) The landscape, benevolent and beautiful in the first part of the poem, is now sinister, as the Indians, having massacred their victims, 'with horrid gesture and demoniac strain/ Then plunge into the forest depths again.' Despite the apparent respect for Micmac culture in the first part of his poem, Howe casts the red man as demonic savage when red culture conflicts with that of the white man. In poems honouring the white pioneers of Nova Scotia, the Micmacs can be 'free sons of the forest' only until they resist those encroaching pioneers. 9 In 'The Micmac,' Howe acknowledges that the white man has dispossessed the Indian who now roams the landscape as a wander­ ing drunkard. Yet Howe still avoids coming to terms with the white man's responsibility for destroying Micmac culture; having divided red and white cultures into savage and civilized orders he can only say, 'make us forget what he is now' when confronted by the white man's victim. '0 After 1840, the Indian as savage antagonist disappears from narrative poems of immigration and settlement. Alexander McLachlan's 'The Emi­ grant' (1861) replaces the conventional battle between savage Indian and civilized white settler with an equally conventional literary set piece in which doomed red savage fights doomed red savage. This battle, performed before a white audience initially alarmed by word of massing tribes, confirms the victory of white civilization. The Indian is no longer a formidable antagonist but instead hastens his own demise in intertribal wars. 11 Later in the nine­ teenth century, Isabella Valancy Crawford's 'Malcolm's Katie' (1884) illus­ trates a prevailing shift away from images of red savage warriors and towards identification of a unique harmony between the red man and the landscape. The Indian as savage antagonist survives, however, in other poetic genres and in historical fiction and drama of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning with Wacousta (1832) and ending with Hardscrabble (1851) and Wau-Nan-Gee (1852), John Richardson repeatedly exploits the Indian as savage antagonist. In Wacousta, the assault on British forts at Detroit and Michilimackinac by massed Indian tribes led by Pontiac in 1763 provides the historical framework. Pontiac succinctly defines the political situation by

11

Indian Antagonists

noting that the white man has established forts 'encircling the country of the Indians like a belt of wampum round the waist of a warrior.' The territorial imperialism of the white man has led the Indians to war. Ironically, it is the whites who are hemmed in during the attacks, isolated in their garrisons by the red men who surround them. A similar pattern underlies Hardscrabble and Wau-Nan-Gee, the first two novels of a projected trilogy focused on events surrounding an Indian massacre of the inhabitants of Fort Dearborn in August 1812. The Indians in Richardson's novels are cast as demonic savages if they oppose whites' territorial designs. Twenty years after the 'legions of devils' and 'fiend-like bands' who massacre the white inhabitants of Fort Michili­ mackinac in Wacousta, the corrupted Pottowotamies of Wau-Nan-Gee pro­ vide the ultimate portrait of degenerate savagery in Richardson's work: 12

Squatted in a circle, and within a few feet of the wagon in which the tomahawked children lay covered with blood, and fast stiffening in the coldness of death, now sat about twenty Indians, with Pee-to-tum at their head, passing from hand to hand the quivering heart of the slain man, whose eyes, straining as it were, from their sockets, seemed to watch the horrid repast in which they were indulging, while the blood streamed disgustingly over their chins and lips and trickled over their persons. So many wolves or tigers could not have torn away more voraciously with their teeth, or smacked their lips with greater delight in the relish of human food, than did these loathsome creatures who now moistened the nauseous repast from a black bottle of rum.... ') Intensifying the identification of the red man as savage in sensational images of animality and cannibalism, Richardson repeatedly exploits the threat and circumstances of Indian massacres for the same effects as those of contem­ poraries such as Goldsmith and Howe.•• Consolidation of the white man's victory over Indian culture after Con­ federation does not lead to the disappearance of the Indian as demonic savage in Canadian literature. Indeed, when writers honour the white man's exploration and settlement of the land, the red man is repeatedly the savage antagonist. Thus the Iroquois of Archibald Lampman's 'At the Long Sault: May, 1660' are reminiscent of Howe's Micmacs in their appearance as 'sleepless wolves, a ravening pack,' pitted against Daulac and his compan­ ions like 'devils panting for prey.'' 5 Similar identifications recur in Charles G.D. Roberts' first novel, The Forge in the Forest (1896) and, thirty years later, in Merrill Denison's radio plays on Pierre Radisson and the Battle of Seven Oaks. Ralph Connor's The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail (1914) main-

12

A Native Heritage

tains this perspective in twentieth-century fiction about the western frontier, and Thomas Raddall's Roger Sudden (1944) reveals a contemporary novelist caught between obvious respect for Indian culture and an historical thesis that demands that the Indian be savage antagonist. Set in the Alberta foothills in 1885, The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail describes the reverberations of the Second Riel Rebellion among the Indians and whites of that region. Ultimately these tensions reduce to the conflict between the North-West Mounted Police and the Piegan Indians, led by a Sioux emigre from the United States, Copperhead. Apparently to avoid obvious historical associations, Connor distinguishes his Sioux chief from that other American chief whose influence was feared during the rebellion: 'in this same old Copperhead we have the acutest Indian brain in all the western country. Sitting Bull was a fighter, Copperhead is a schemer.' 16 Copperhead's elusiveness and several romantic complications involving his white pursuers are central to the plot. For Connor and his predecessors, the impulse for war defines the Indian, and The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail plays with many of the conventions associated with the Indian in the American 'western.' Predictably, Connor's sympathies are primarily with the forces of white law and order, but he dramatizes their tenuous control in the face of the threat posed by Copper­ head's attempt to lead a confederacy of Piegans, Bloods, Crees, and Black­ foot. Associated with the 'pagan rites' of Indian medicine men, the Sun Dance Canyon is an appropriate setting for Copperhead's demonic machina­ tions and the 'mystic magic power' and 'rhythmic cadence' of his 'rich reso­ nant voice.' As the white hero and his halfbreed scout listen to Copperhead's address, an astonishing transformation sweeps over the scout: For that hour at least the half-breed was all Sioux. His father' s blood was the water in his veins, the red was only his Indian mother' s. With face drawn tense and lips bared into .a snarl, with eyes gleaming, he gazed fascinated upon the face of the singer. In imagination, in instinct, in the deepest emotions of his soul Jerry was harking back again to the savage in him, and the savage in him thirsting for revenge upon the white man who had wrought this ruin upon him and his Indian race. (p 191) The outbreak of this controlled but undying 'savage spirit' against 'British law and civilization' is the mainspring of the novel's plot. Connor separates red and white culture and the scout's interiorization of the conflict between the two heritages does not represent a union of those worlds.

r 3 Indian Antagonists

The white hero, of course, averts disaster by his courage, and the novel ends with pacification of the Indians. Connor's characterizations of such figures as Crowfoot and his descriptions of the Piegan camp indicate some sympathy and familiarity with the world of Metis and Indian. Yet he dis­ misses Riel as 'vain and empty-headed' and as 'the blood-lusting Riel' and presents the outcome of the Rebellion of 1885 as a necessary victory for white civilization. The land must be controlled by the British crown; to oppose that control is to be a savage. Raddall's Roger Sudden is set on the eighteenth-century Nova Scotia fron­ tier. The hero confronts the virgin forest with an axe and with images remi­ niscent of the early frontier poems of this region: 'You swept away the shadow and the mystery and the menace, and opened it to the broad sky where the winds blew always and there was light. You were a god with a flaming sword, sweeping away the darkness that nourished things savage and evil, and while a tree stood high enough to cast a shadow you would go on and on and on!" 7 In the years following this initial encounter, Roger's illu­ sions about the glory of clearing the forest swiftly evaporate, and his images of the 'savage and evil' human inhabitants of the new world are modified, if not fundamentally changed. After a scalping raid on Halifax, Roger joins a squad of rangers in pursu­ ing their Micmac attackers, and as he stares at the head of an Indian slain during the raid, he perceives an elemental conflict between the red man and white man: 'The glazed black eyes seemed to bulge from some emotion within, the lips snarled apart and showed two rows of strong white teeth. They uttered no sound, yet those eyes and lips conveyed to Roger a vast and terrible hatred that would go on, long after the flesh was dead. Weird! We can kill, but can we conquer that? he wondered.' For Roger, the Indian embodies a savage order destined to oppose white civilization; halfbreeds are 'half-man half-beast,' and the full-blooded Micmac is a terrifying and unregenerate savage. Captured by the Micmacs, Roger initially perceives them in terms which confirm his view that they are 'two-legged wolves.' Tortured but not killed by the tribe, he spends four years as a captive and alters many of his views as he 'goes Indian' in appearance, receives a new name, and even begins to perceive the seasons in the animistic images of his captors. Yet when a Mic­ mac woman offers herself to him, he rejects this 'splendid animal at his feet': 'all his instincts rebelled. To mate with this wild thing, to produce hybrid things, half beast and half himself, and to live year in year out among these mockeries, like a man shut up in a room hung with distorted mirrors ... ugh! Darkness! Darkness!' Raddall's hero sees a chasm between red and white worlds, and savage and civilized orders.

14 A Native Heritage

Subsequently sold as a prisoner to the French at Louisburg, Roger is told that he looks 'like a savage,' and when he finally returns to Halifax, his escape is likened to 'a return from the dead.' In Halifax, Roger becomes one of the most powerful merchants in the growing settlement by employing many of the arts learned during his captivity. Caught in the conflict between the French and English forces at Louisburg and Halifax, he at first toys with treason by aligning with the French. Finally, however, he endangers his life to preserve his British countrymen, and after being saved by the Micmacs who earlier were his captors, he dies pursuing a white woman who has haunted his exploits in the new world. The Indians in this historical romance play roles that recapitulate many earlier identifications of the red man as the savage inhabitant of a savage land. Before Roger's capture, the Micmacs are human extensions of the dark wilderness that threatens the white immigrants. Immediately after Roger becomes their captive, they are seen as demonic warriors, and Raddall depicts scenes of torture and brutality reminiscent of Howe and Richardson. Complementing the sensational impact of the scenes of savage warfare in some of these earlier works are detailed descriptions of aspects of the Indi­ ans' material culture appealing to the lure of the exotic for the white reader. Thus, Howe describes Micmac culture at length in the trappings of conven­ tional pastoral; Richardson provides a detailed realistic description of the Indian furnishings in the apartments at Fort Michilimackinac. Writing a century later, Raddall draws upon extensive anthropological familiarity with Micmac culture and introduces the myths and mores of that culture. Despite the understanding of red culture demonstrated by Raddall's nar­ rator, the hero as the embodiment of British values rejects the Micmac world as part of a different order, that of savagery. In the conflict between the French and English, the Indians, like the Acadians, are simply 'doomed pawns in this game of nations.' But in the novel's final pages, Roger foresees the victory of the English over the French in their refusal to follow the French pattern of either garrisoned isolation or fusion with the red man: By Jove, yes! - the restless English who would have no walls about them who demanded to see and to move beyond, to march across a horizon that was always somewhere toward the past. The English who were not content to mate with savages but who took their women with them everywhere, resolved not merely to penetrate the wilderness but to people it. (pp 357-8)

Raddall speaks of Roger Sudden as 'an allegory showing why the French failed in their attempt at empire in North America and why the Anglo-

1 5 Indian Antagonists

Saxons won'; central to this allegory is the separation of savage and civilized orders. ' 8 The French coureurs de bois 'had mated with savage women and spilled their seed in the wilderness'; by refusing to follow their pattern, Roger Sudden becomes Raddall's hero of British civilization. SAVAGE SOULS

The link between possession of the Indian's land and of his soul dates from the earliest instructions issued to explorers of the new world. ' 9 J.B. Brebner argues that the early settlers of New France 'were children of, and actors in, the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Their very colony was almost as much a product of the missionary spirit of the seventeenth century as it was of com­ mercial or political enterprise.'20 Although not so obviously dominated by a prevailing orthodoxy, English Canada inherited various monotheistic Chris­ tian denominations whose rejection of the numinous in nature led inevitably to the belief that 'a natural religion like that of the Indians simply had to be extirpated if the Indians were to realize their human potential."' In English­ Canadian literature, the Indian who resists Christianity is damned as a sav­ age as decisively as the red man who opposes white territorial ambitions. Works by Catharine Parr Traill, Bishop George Mountain, and Egerton Ryerson Young illustrate the evangelical fervour and the separation of civi­ lized and savage worlds that characterize much nineteenth-century fiction and poetry. For clergyman-authors, the many sons of clergymen who took up the pen, or simply devout Christians, the red man's religion repeatedly emerges as pagan superstition and the shaman as a demonic antagonist. As the work of writers such as Ralph Connor and H.A. Cody reveals, this per­ spective does not disappear in the twentieth century, but overt evangelizing does diminish in the fiction and poetry of this century and the Indian as red savage emerges less frequently in a religious context. 22 This image survives, however, in works by twentieth-century authors set in the historical context of the Jesuit missions of the seventeenth century. Inextricably associated with the emergence of the Jesuits as national heroes is the concomitant pre­ sentation of the Indian opponents of the Jesuits as savages. Reflecting - and perhaps complying with prevailing social attitudes many nineteenth-century white writers cast the Indian as savage only in the context of religion. Catharine Parr Traill, a model of acceptance and adapt­ ability in other areas, becomes fervently dogmatic in dealing with red and white religions. Having distinguished her beliefs from 'the doubts and infidelity of modern sceptics' in The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Traill gives full vent to her evangelical fervour in The Canadian Crusoes (1852).'J

16 A Native Heritage

Lost in the backwoods near Rice Lake, Ontario, a brother and sister of Scottish descent and their cousin, a boy of French ancestry, both save and are saved by a Mohawk girl, Indiana. The four adolescents spend more than two years isolated from white culture and learn a great deal about Indian agriculture, forest lore, and hunting practices. Only in religion are their two cultures different. Traill refutes the dream of a peaceable kingdom in which both religions co-exist. Her hero explicitly distinguishes the two cultures: 'The wolf and the lamb do not lie down in the fold together,' observed Hector. 'The Indian is treacherous. The wild man and the civilized man do not live well together; their habits and dispositions are so contrary the one to the other. We are open and they are cunning and they suspect our openness to be only a greater degree of cunning than their own - they do not understand us. They are taught to be revenge­ ful and we are taught to forgive our enemies. So you see that what is a virtue with the savage is a crime with the Christian. If the Indian could be taught the Word of God he might be kind, and true, and gentle as well as brave."4

Inevitably, the resolution of the romantic complications of the novel depends on Indiana's conversion to Christianity. Traill lacks mueh of the intellectual hauteur that leads Susanna Moodie to doubt the Indian's ability to 'comprehend the spiritual character of Chris­ tianity,' but her evangelical Protestant beliefs consistently colour her view of Indian culture. '5 For her, the intertribal warfare of Mohawks and Chippewas is evidence that un-Christianized man is 'by nature the child of wrath and victim of sin ... in his unregenerated nature his whole mind is at enmity with God and his fellow man.' Only through conversion to Christianity can the Indian escape being a savage; the white reader cannot ignore the dangers inherent in backsliding. Noting that her story is set in the opening years of the nineteenth century, at least twenty years before her own arrival in the backwoods, Traill finds confirmation of the victory of the white man's reli­ gion in the widespread conversion of the red man. Among the many clergyman-authors who deal with the Indian in nine­ teenth-century literature, perhaps the most formidable is George Jehosha­ phat Mountain, Bishop of Montreal from 1836 until 1850 and Bishop of Quebec from 1850 until 1863. In 1844, Bishop Mountain travelled across the upper lakes of the Red River Settlement and during his trip composed a collection of poems published in 1846 as Songs of the Wilderness. Mountain describes his method of composition as one of 'having seized upon the poeti­ cal idea presented by some passing object, to follow it first in a merely

I 7 Indian Antagonists

poetical way, and follow it on to that religious application which must natur­ ally suggest itself to every mind impressed with the supreme importance of revealed truth. "6 Predictably, among the 'passing objects' that attracted Mountain's gaze were the Indians. The transition from observation to meditation outlined in Mountain's pre­ face is particularly suited to the sonnet form and Songs of the Wilderness includes sixteen sonnets, each of which follows the pattern of his most anthologized poem, 'The Indian's Grave': Bright are the heavens, the narrow bay serene; No sound is heard within the shelter'd place, Save some sweet whisper of the pines, - nor seen Of restless man or of his works a trace: I stray, through bushes low, a little space: Unlook'd for sight their parted leaves disclose: Restless no more, lo! one of the Indian race His bones beneath that roof of bark repose. Poor savage! in such bark through deepening snows, Once didst thou dwell - in this through rivers move; Frail house, frail skiff, frail man! Of him who knows His Master's will, not thine the doom shall prove: What will be yours, ye powerful, wealthy, wise, By whom the heathen unregarded dies? (pp 71-2) Despite the poem's contorted syntax, the transition from description to Christian moralizing is effected more smoothly here than in much of Moun­ t:iin's work as he plays on the associations of the bark, which serves both as a vehicle in life and a covering in death. The poem finally is a call for support from the 'powerful, wealthy, wise' to assist the conversion of the savage from the frailty of his birchbark faith to the presumably solid oak of Christianity. Elsewhere, Mountain identifies the Indian as a 'lost child of God,' and nowhere does he evince any interest in the Indian's faith; he has discovered Christian truth and his mission is to propagate his faith among the savage Indians. Egerton Ryerson Young's work illustrates the sectarian biases in much nineteenth-century literature about Christianizing the Indian. Young, another clergyman-author and a missionary to the Cree of northern Manitoba, boasts in Stories from Indian Wigwams and Northern Camp.fires (1893): 'Rome refuses the Bible. Our glorious evangelical Protestant Churches love to give

18 A Native Heritage

to all tribes and nationalities the blessed book. With the open volume in their hands our missionaries go forth and at many a camp-fire and in many a wigwam they read and expound its blessed truths.'27 In Oowikapun or How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians (1895), Young expands on this perspective in a novel. Although the hero of the book is ostensibly Oowikapun, a Cree who moves from 'life in a land dark with superstition and paganism' to the light of Protestant Christianity, the narrator, speaking in Young's voice, dominates the novel. 28 This narrator perceives in the Indian a 'naturally religious instinct,' but in the Cree's emphasis on the propitiation of Muche-Manito, the evil spirit, he finds the central flaw in the red man's faith. Like so many of his predecessors and successors in the Canadian west, Young finds evi­ dence in the sun dance of these propitiatory offerings to Muche-Manito, and he condemns it as a ceremony of torture and a manifestation of frenzied savagery. Only the Protestant missionary can rescue the red man from this savagery, and the plot of the book culminates in Oowikapun's guiding a Protestant missionary to the Crees on the Nelson River. If nineteenth-century writers such as Young regard the animistic poly­ theism of the red man as a world of 'devil dances and worship of idols,' the medicine man or shaman is often the human repository of these demonic powers. For George Longmore and Charles Mair the focus for this demonic identification is The Prophet, the brother of Tecumseh. In Longmore's 'Tecumthe' (1824), The Prophet is a skilled astrologer who chains 'his wild brethren by the charms/ Of Superstition's stern alarms."9 Mair intensifies these associations in Tecumseh (1886), where a fellow tribesman depicts The Prophet as a Satanic 'snake that creeps among our race;/ Whose venomed fangs would bite into our lives.') W.D. Lighthall's The Master of Life (1908), a romance honouring the founder of the League of the Five Nations, also contrasts the heroic protagonist with a villainous shaman, the Chief of the False Faces of the Onondaga, Hatiria. In The God of Gods, a play first produced in 1919, Carroll Aikins uses a corrupt villainous priestess, Waning Moon, as a central antagonist to the two Indian lovers, whose deaths result from her machinations. Bruce McKelvie's Huldowget (1926), set in an Anglican mission, introduces a young white nurse who falls victim to a halfbreed shaman's attempt to convince her that she is possessed by a huldowget, an evil spirit. The narrator of Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers suggests that 'some part of the Canadian Catholic mind is not certain of the Church's victory over the medicine man'; the images of this figure in English-Canadian literature repeatedly suggest that he easily assumes a 0

19 Indian Antagonists powerful and threatening role as savage antagonist among writers of all Christian faiths and in all literary eras. 3' If the red medicine man is a savage villain, the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century repeatedly are martyrs and heroes of white civilization. Interest in the conflict of white and red cultures in relation to the Jesuit missions culminates in the opening years of the Second World War. In 1939, Franklin McDowell received the Governor-General's award for fiction for The Champlain Road; the following year, E.J. Pratt received the award for poetry for Brebeuf and His Brethren, and in 1941 Alan Sullivan won the award for fiction for his historical romance, Three Came to Ville Marie. A review of McDowell's novel suggests why the old dichotomy of civilization versus savagery in these works was so generally accepted in a century of growing religious tolerance: 'It is as if the sainted missionaries would be witnesses now to remind us in our time that there is something no barbarian can ever destroy, nor armies of barbarians with whatever frightfulness or subtlety they use.'32 Published on Armistice Day in 1939, the review identifies the 'sainted missionaries' of the seventeenth century with all those values opposed to Naziism. The Indian easily assumes the role of savage enemy to all positive spiritual values associated with white civilization. The Champlain Road refers to the route which linked Montreal and Quebec with the Jesuit missions of Huronia, and the novel's background is the final destruction of the missions following the destruction of St Joseph in 1648. The romantic plot involves the captain of the garrison at Fort Ste Marie, who has the unlikely name of Godfrey Plantagenet Bethune, and two women warriors, Arakoua, daughter of the foremost Huron warrior, and Diana Stanley Woodville, a white Virginian, captured as a child by Iroquois and subsequently venerated by the five nations as the daughter of their war god. Inspired, perhaps, by a reference linking the Jesuits of the seventeenth century with the chevaliers of the first crusades in Francis Parkman's The Jesuits of North America, McDowell explicitly links his hero with his name­ sake, Godfrey, the leader of the first crusade. Just as the 'paynims' and 'infidels' are antagonists in Old World romance about the crusades, the Indian assumes this role in McDowell's New World variation. The book's main focus is on the Jesuits, whom McDowell presents as unqualified heroes and martyrs. Explicitly refuting what he sees as Park­ man's unsympathetically Protestant view of the Jesuits, McDowell shows them as men who, while recognizing their dual roles as agents of economic and religious imperialism, view all contradictions stemming from these roles as reconciled by the God they serve.

20 A Native Heritage

Having adopted this perspective, McDowell inevitably treats both Hurons and Iroquois as barbarians. He seems to avoid sensational possibilities deli­ berately in his accounts of Iroquois torture and Huron cannibalism, but underlying this restraint is the assumption that one must 'die spiritually' in moving between red and white worlds and that the Indian is essentially less human than the white. Throughout the novel, civilizatiori is explicitly white, savagery exclusively red. 'Brebeuf and Lalemant,' an early poem by McDowell's contemporary, Alan Sullivan, also honours the Jesuit missionaries as heroic defenders of their faith. Again, the Iroquois are savage furies 'in whose brown breasts ... devils breathed again.' 33 Sullivan's Three Came to Ville Marie treats the Jesuits more harshly; yet the un-Christianized Indian remains beyond the pale of white civilization. The central historical event commemorated in the novel is the 1689 massacre at Lachine, and the Iroquois are seen as savage barbarians in scenes of torture, scalping, disembowelment, and cannibalism. Similar images of torture involving boiling water, slashed muscles, and collars of red-hot hatchets dominate some of the most powerful scenes in Pratt's Brebeuf and His Brethren. In the poem, the Indians again are savage antagonists, and Pratt's use of graphic detail depicts them as formidable opponents of the Jesuits whom the poem commemorates. Without Christ, both Huron and Iroquois are demonic savages; only through their accept­ ance of the Jesuits' faith can they become 'brothers ransomed by the blood of Christ.' After watching the Hurons torture an Iroquois captive in a scene antici­ pating the suffering of his own martyrdom, Brebeuf perceives the Indian in images reminiscent of Archibald Lampman's 'At the Long Sault: May 1660': Brebeuf had seen the worst. He knew that when A winter pack of wolves brought down a stag There was no waste of time between the leap And the business click upon the jugular. Such was the forthright honesty in death Among the brutes. They had not learned the sport Of dallying around the nerves to halt A quick despatch. A human art was torture, When Reason crept into the veins, mixed tar With blood and brewed its own intoxicant. 34 Opposed to this animalistic savagery are the Christian principles embodied in Brebeuf and his fellow Jesuits.

21 Indian Antagonists

Beginning with a catalogue of the various religious and cultural impulses that gave rise to the Jesuit order in Europe, the poem never acknowledges equivalent Indian religious traditions. Having immersed himself in the Jesuit Relations, Pratt presents the red man as seen by Brebeuf and the other Jesuits. For them, of course, the beliefs of the red man are simply primitive superstitions. The opposition between white missionary and red savage is 'the rosary against the amulet,' and the poem repeatedly reflects Brebeufs interpretation of the relative significance of each symbol. Although Pratt identifies the political and economic motives underlying the religious mission of the Jesuits, he does not question the values of their faith; as they suffer as martyrs for it, the red man emerges as savage antagonist. Pratt acknowledges the 'torment of a Medici confession' and clearly recognizes the potential and actual savagery of supposedly Christian societies; however, he finds in Indian culture no religious principle or model comparable to that of Christ and his teachings. In its biblical imagery aligning the souls of the Indian with the land that they inhabit, Brebeuf and His Brethren unifies virtually all the works concern­ ing the red man in a religious context. Pratt writes of the priestly hope That on this central field seed would be sown, On which the yield would be the Huron nation Baptized and dedicated to the Faith; And that a richer harvest would be gleaned Of duskier grain from the same seed on more Forbidding ground when the arch-foes themselves Would be re-born under the sacred rites. (p 255) For the Jesuits, as for their secular counterparts throughout the period of exploration and settlement, civilization depended on radical conversion of both the land and the souls of its inhabitants. WHITE SAVAGES

If many authors cast the Indian as savage antagonist to religious and territo­ rial aims of whites, others use the images of savagery associated with the Indian to comment more directly on the white man. For writers ranging from John Richardson and William Kirby to F.R. Scott and Raymond Souster, savagery is no longer only a designation for negative qualities projected on the Indian; instead, the white man's potential and actual savagery becomes a

22

A Native Heritage

central concern, a savagery which is depicted in images drawn from the tradition of the savage Indian. The manifestation in a white man of the savagery traditionally associated with the Indian dominates John Richardson's Wacousta (1832). Like Gold­ smith, Howe, and his American model, James Fenimore Cooper, Richard­ son separates red and white worlds into savage and civilized orders. 35 He does not, however, simply cast the red man as savage antagonist but instead uses the disparity between the two worlds as the key to the character of his white protagonist. The novel initially establishes an opposition between the setting of Indian and white worlds by contrasting North America and Europe. Sir Everard Valletort asserts that he would prefer the life of a barber's apprentice in London to his role as lieutenant in the midst of Canadian 'savage scenes.' For Valletort, the civilized world of Europe and its extensions in the forts of North America are always preferable to a surrounding wilderness identified with Indians. Richardson's narrator, however, is more neutral in contrasting the Indian furnishings of Madeline DeHaldimar's apartment at Fort Michili­ mackinac with European decor and simply notes that 'nothing could be more unlike the embellishments of a modern European boudoir.'36 In Richardson's novel, positive and negative values are not simplistically assigned to white and red orders; what is important is the distance separating them. Richardson's separation of these orders helps to explain the transition of 'civilized' Sir Reginald Morton into 'savage' Wacousta. In the Scottish high­ lands, Morton meets and falls in love with Clara Beverley in a setting described in conventionally pastoral language. On a bank, 'formed of turf, covered with moss, and interspersed with roses and honey-suckles,' Clara sits as 'the divinity of the oasis,' To Morton, she is a true 'child of nature' in what he calls 'the Eden of my love.' Inevitably, when the innocent Clara is removed from this Edenic setting and exposed to the fallen world of the Scottish army camp, she falls prey (according to Wacousta) to the perfidy of DeHaldimar and the world he inhabits. When the conflict between Morton and DeHaldimar resumes in North America, DeHaldimar is still part of an extension of the garrison he inhabited in Scotland. Morton, however, has become Wacousta, an 'altered being' who resides in Pontiac's camp, a set­ ting which Richardson contrasts to the European retreat of Clara Beverley's father. The difficulty of access to both settings is heavily emphasized. Wacousta describes at length his difficulty and athletic feats in crossing the crags and fissures that separated him from Clara's home. Frederick DeHaldimar

23 Indian Antagonists

encounters similar difficulties when he is led to Pontiac's camp: 'At length they stood on the verge of a dark and precipitous ravine, the abrupt sides of which were studded with underwood so completely interwoven that all pas­ sage appeared impracticable.' Both settings are frequently identified as oases, a word that does not occur in the novel out of this context: Pontiac's camp is 'a sort of oasis of the forest, girt around with a rude belt of under­ wood,' and Clara Beverley's home is 'this garden - this paradise - this oasis of the rocks.' Clara's father creates a retreat from civilization which Richardson pre­ sents idyllically. Pontiac's camp, also opposed to the civilized world of army and fort, is not idealized. In this camp are not pastoral 'children of nature' but female inhabitants 'supporting in their laps the heavy heads of their unconscious helpmates, while they occupied themselves by the firelight in parting the long black matted hair and maintaining a destructive warfare against the pigmy inhabitants of that dark region.' Yet if Richardson does not idealize Pontiac's camp into pastoral, neither does he present the savage oasis as an inherently demonic world in simple contrast to that of the Scottish 'goddess.' The figure who transforms the savages into a 'legion of devils' and 'fiend­ like bands' is Wacousta. This man, so consumed by his desire for revenge that he crosses the barriers between the civilized and the savage, becomes a larger-than-life satanic figure, exploiting the worst instincts of the savage Indians. During the abortive battle following Pontiac's ruse of a lacrosse game as a means of entering the fort, Wacousta's face is 'painted black as death and as he stood under the arch of the gateway, with his white turbaned head towering far above those of his companions, this formidable and myste­ rious enemy might have been likened to the spirit of darkness presiding over his terrible legions.' In his maniacal hatred of the husband and family of the woman whom he loved, Reginald Morton rejects 'civilization' and becomes not just 'a savage both in garb and character,' but the chief of demonic savagism. Pontiac, the historical chief of the Indians, has only a secondary role in Wacousta. 37 Even the order in which Richardson presents the events of the Detroit attack weakens the dramatic impact of his role. The introduction to the novel tells us of the lacrosse ruse; we see its execution and failure; only then does Richardson flash back to the Indian encampment where Pontiac outlines the plan to his warriors. Such a sequence of events does little to focus attention on Pontiac, and even in this scene, Wacousta's response is the most significant element. Responding to Pontiac's plan,

24 A Native Heritage the warrior's swarthy countenance kindled into fierce and rapidly varying expres­ sions. A thousand dark and complicated passions evidently struggled at his heart, and as he dwelt leisurely and emphatically on the sacrifice of human life that must inevitably attend the adoption of the proposed measure his eye grew larger, his chest expanded, nay, his very nostrils appeared to dilate with unfathomably guileful exul­ tation. Captain DeHaldimar thought he had never gazed on anything wearing the human shape half so atrociously savage. (p 106)

Significantly, as soon as Wacousta is killed, Pontiac arranges for peace with the garrison. Wacousta's malevolent savagery gives way to the benevolent savagery of the young Indian who slays him. Even Richardson's 'good savages' remain separated from the civilized order. The young woman warrior, Oucanasta, is saved from drowning by Captain Frederick DeHaldimar, and although she falls in love with him, 'she knew she was very foolish and that an Indian girl could never be the wife of a handsome chief of the Saganaw.' Marriage between Oucanasta and Fred­ erick is impossible, since such a union would join two disparate orders. 38 William Kirby's The U.E.: A Tale of Upper Canada (1859) is less complex than Waco usta but illustrates red savagery in a more overtly political attack on white antagonists. Spanning the period from the American War oflndepen­ dence to the Rebellions of 1837, Kirby's poem honours both the immigrants and the Loyalists who preserved the British flag in North America. Unlike Cary or Goldsmith, however, Kirby does not invoke the extermination of the Indian as necessary to establishing a British presence in the new world. Instead, he condemns French 'intruders' for destruction of Indian culture and ignores a connection between displacement of the Indian and the British role as imperial successor to the French. Dismissing unflattering historical realities, Kirby stresses examples of British-Indian co-operation such as Joseph Brant's service with the Loyalists during the War of Independence. Having absolved the British of responsibility in destruction of the Indian, the poet simply observes: 'marvellous change/ along yon paved way/ The Indian war-path ran but yesterday.' 39 To replace the Indian as opponent of the British immigrant, Kirby intro­ duces the American as savage antagonist. Just as Quebec: A Poetical Essay (1760), condemns the French as brothers of the red man who made him more savage 'by Gallic perfidy, and gilded lies,' Kirby finds Americans a subject for similar poetic propaganda.• A British Loyalist 'Ranger' of the American War of Independence describes gruesome American savagery. After finding his family massacred by American revolutionaries, Kirby's 0

25 Indian Antagonists Ranger resolves to 'go Indian' as the only means to counter the savage fero­ city of his enemies: Revenge, revenge alone, my spirit craved. I donned the costume of the Indian race, And with the war-paint hideous stained my face, Then drew the hatchet and the scalping knife, And never, never, spared a rebel's life. (p 60) Obsessed by his desire for revenge, the Ranger pursues his American enemies, recognizing them by the Indian leggings that identify them as a 'scalping-band in search of human prey.' Having overtaken his enemies, the Ranger even performs an act of symbolic cannibalism - the ultimate indica­ tor of Indian savagery for many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers: Then on his face I turned the felon o'er, And found his knapsack filled with reeking gore, But mad with rage and hunger, took the bread Stained with his blood and spitefully I fed. (p 65) On the one hand, the Loyalist's adoption of the dress and methods oflndian warfare diminishes his humanity but can be seen as a temporary product of his overwhelming grief; the Americans, by contrast, are eternally and unre­ generately savage so long as they oppose the British. Yet pervading the poem is the implicit assumption that the massacre of American foes is the proper vocation of a loyal British subject, regardless of the methods used to carry out this program. This unsettling suggestion somewhat diminishes the impact of Kirby's fanatical attack on the Americans. Not content with condemning their War of Independence, Kirby also accuses the Americans of instigating the Rebellions of 1837 in Upper and Lower Canada. The savagery described by the Ranger in the earlier war surfaces in this later conflict in the American treatment of a suspected traitor in their midst: Thus shrieked the doomed wretch, while rent the air Derisive yells, that mocked his fruitless prayers, And every eye, red with infernal fire, Glared on the victim with impatient ire. They seized and dragged him headlong to the shore

26 A Native Heritage Like hungry wolves that lap the reeking gore, Each one more eager than the other still, To tear the prey, and his gaunt maw to fill. (p I 53) Once again, Kirby shifts the animalistic images associated with the red sav­ age to the white man - the American white man. Images of red savagery fit Kirby's polemical purposes by being the ulti­ mate condemnation of the American antagonists to whom they are assigned. His poem explores neither the concept of savagery nor the full implications of the Ranger's potential for savagery. Kirby's sole interest is to damn the Americans for opposing British rule just as Cary, Goldsmith, and Howe damn the Indian. By depicting white antagonists like red savages, Kirby mines a fertile source of sensational imagery already familiar to his readers and one which gains new power in being assigned to white men. In 'Brebeuf and His Brethren,' F.R. Scott offers an ironic commentary on the martyrdom of the Jesuits: When de Brebeuf and Lalemant, brave souls, Were dying by the slow and dreadful coals Their brother Jesuits in France and Spain Were burning heretics with equal pain, For both the human torture made a feast: Then is priest savage, or Red Indian priest? 4' For Scott, red and white societies reveal equal capacities for civilization and savagery. In recounting an anecdote of a friend who, when Pratt's Brebeuf and His Brethren first appeared, suggested 'that the thing to do now was to write the same story from the Iroquois point of view,' James Reaney also insists on the arbitrariness of terms such as 'savage' and 'civilized.'42 In 'La Crosse,' Raymond Souster watches a lacrosse game at Maple Leaf Gardens but recalls an earlier game at Richardson's Fort Michilimackinac when a lacrosse game was followed by 'a deadlier game,' the massacre of the British. As he watches one of 'two full-blooded Indians' (identified by a loudspeaker announcement) playing the red man's game before a white crowd, Souster sees a parallel with the eighteenth-century incident at Fort Michilimackinac as the poem concludes: but tonight shock-helmeted, shoulder-padded, he's back at the wars, running end to end in this giant arena with the roar following him

27 Indian Antagonists

that of the white man who sits with his chips his hot dog, watching the sticks flip that rubber ball so expertly, the savage sweep of the goal shot and now a player knocked down, lying motionless, the crowd on their feet to a man, smelling blood...° In this twentieth-century fortress, the lust for blood and violence associated with the red savage finds a new voice as the white man rises from 'his chips / his hot dog ... smelling blood.' The dichotomy separating red and white cultures is finally joined in the savage potential of all men.

3

Indian Alternatives From the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, English-Canadian writers counter the identification of the Indian as savage antagonist by asserting the superiority of the red man and his culture. A.O. Lovejoy defines such cul­ tural primitivism as 'the discontent of the civilized with civilization or with some conspicuous and characteristic feature of it. It is the belief of men living in a relatively highly evolved and complex cultural condition that a life far simpler and less sophisticated in some or all respects is a more desirable life.'' Comparing Theocritus' Greece and Tennyson's England, Marshall McLuhan suggests that 'in a world of universal suffrage, assured of order by the police, primitivism seems to be an inevitable reaction.' This link between the establishment of an ordered society and the rise of primitivism explains the increasing dominance of this perspective in Canadian literary history. Yet if this perspective is most pervasive in contemporary literature, its development simply represents the culmination of a movement extending back to Frances Brooke's The History of Emily Montague (1769). A participant in English literary circles which included Samuel Richard­ son, Fanny Burney, and Dr Johnson, Brooke carried to Canada in the early 1760s an awareness of the intellectual currents of European primitivism associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Her sojourn in Quebec made it pos­ sible for her to balance the assumptions of European primitivism with her own observations. Through the letters written by different characters in her epistolary novel, she presents both a primitivistic perspective on the Indian and an opposed view that acknowledges the common humanity of red man and white man but insists that red culture must adopt the mores of white society. In early letters of The History ofEmily Montague, Brooke's hero compares the Indians of Quebec and the society of white Europeans. In contrast to the 2

29 Indian Alternatives

insular world of the white garrison at Quebec, the aboriginal inhabitants have an easy harmony with their environment: 'in summer, stretch'd on the verdant turf, they sing, they laugh, they play, they relate stories of their ancient heroes to warm the youth to war; in winter, wrap'd in the furs which bounteous nature provides them, they dance, they feast, and despise the rigours of the season at which the more effeminate Europeans tremble.' 3 Similarly, the Huron society at Lorette is based on principles of true liberty enviable to Brooke's hero. Discussions of Huron political, economic, and social customs reinforce his primitivistic vision of red society. 4 Yet Brooke does not present her hero's primitivistic observations with­ out qualification. She ascribes to Rousseau the view that 'the most unculti­ vated nations are the most virtuous,' and her hero's observations on the Indian support this view.5 However, an older and wiser character, William Fermor, subsequently refutes what is identified as Rousseau's unqualified praise of 'natural man' by focusing on the Indian's susceptibility to cor­ ruption by alcohol. Fermor grants that the English and French intro­ duced alcohol to North America but refuses to credit the Indians on these grounds: 'he must be indeed fond of praising them, who makes a virtue of their having been sober, when water was the only liquor with which they were acquainted.' Rather than being seen as the representa­ tives of enviable alternative values, the Indians are now seen as 'brutal slaves to their appetites' who must be carefully educated in the values of white culture.6 As an epistolary novel, The History of Emily Moniague allows for no explicit authorial intervention in the evaluation of these opposing views. Indeed, one strength of this form is that it presents conflicting views directly, without narrative interpretation. If we judge by the strength of the arguments presented, Brooke's sympathies seem to be with William Fermor rather than with her primitivist hero, but she is apparently most interested in incorporat­ ing into her work comments on red culture as a significant component of Quebec society and in placing that culture within a context of European primitivist thought familiar to her readers. The view represented by Brooke's opponent of primitivism appears less frequently in Canadian belles-lettres than in non-fictional works of the nine­ teenth and twentieth centuries. Authors of immigrant's manuals and settler's journals in the nineteenth century record detailed descriptions of various aspects of Indian culture - even advocating adoption of certain techniques and practices - but the conviction that white culture is ultimately superior and must inevitably be dominant underlies each of these works. Until recently, twentieth-century non-fiction dealing with the Indian exhibited

30 A Native Heritage

similar biases, acknowledging a common humanity with the Indian but assuming the superiority and dominance of the white man's culture. In fiction, poetry, and drama, the point of view that sees the Indian destined to be educated out of his primitive culture gives way to expressions of cultural primitivism. Countering his image as a savage antagonist against white civilization's territorial and religious ambitions, the Indian now emerges as a figure in harmony with the landscape. The acolyte of gods residing in that landscape, the red man offers a theological alternative to the white man's Christianity. Finally, just as he is for some writers the human embodiment of the most savage and forbidding powers within the human personality, he now introduces the white man to values of natural spontaneity and vitality believed to have been repressed or lost by white civilization. CHILDREN OF NATURE

The unique harmony between the Indian and the landscape identified by the hero of The History of Emily Montague is a recurrent focus in English­ Canadian literature of the next two centuries. Indeed, the pervasiveness of this association underlies the irony in Henry Rumball's outline of his pro­ posed novel in Robertson Davies' Leaven of Malice (1954): 'I open with a tremendous description of the Prairie; vast, elemental, brooding, slumbrous; I reckon at least fifteen thousand words of that. Then Man comes. Not the Red Man; he understands the prairie; he croons to it. No, this is the White Man; he doesn't understand the prairie; he rips up its belly with a blade; he ravishes it.'7 In Rumball, Davies finds an ambitious representative of the dozens of Canadian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who have used red culture's harmony with the landscape to measure the white man's relationship to the same physical environment. Answering the identification of savage landscape and savage man in the narrative poems of immigration and settlement by Cary, Goldsmith, and Howe is Standish O'Grady's The Emigrant (1842). O'Grady's discovery of a model of natural goodness and harmony in the red man's relationship with the landscape is best expressed in pre-Confederation poetry and fiction in Adam Kidd's 'The Huron Chief (1830) and Douglas Huyghue's Argimou: A Legend of the Micmac (1847). By the end of the nineteenth century, identification of the Indian with the landscape leads to an outpouring of works dealing with Indian summer and the red man's naming of the natural world. Twentieth-century writers continue to find evidence of the white man's failure to acknowledge the red man's vision of the landscape. A work such as

31 Indian Alternatives Earle Birney's The Damnation of Vancouver stresses the inadequacy and col­ lapse of white civilization, and Tom Wayman's 'The Country of Everyday: A Vision of the New Life' insists on the redemptive power of Indian culture as a source of alternative values for a 'new life': 'The new life has to do with a red man/ ... The earth told him what he had to know.'8 Don Gutteridge finds models of those who discover an alternative language and vision in the red man's relationship to the land in figures from Canada's past such as Samuel Hearne and John Jewitt. Countering contemporary visions of demonic savages engaged in perpet­ ual warfare, O'Grady's The Emigrant offers a positive vision of the Indian as 'natural man' and lauds the virtues of 'natural law' as an alternative to the imperialistic despotic qualities of 'civilized law': Thou wonderous space where myriads rudely stray, Alike controlled by mandatory sway, Where nature's law by pristine precepts given, Points with the Indian's faith his way to heaven. Where none abandoned, none that tie forsakes, Which binds that link our modern virtue breaks, There tyrant man extends no despot rule, Nor seeks new worlds for conquest and control.9 O'Grady, a graduate of Dublin's Trinity College, is fully versed in the Euro­ pean philosophical tradition underlying his contrast of natural and civilized law; he finally asserts that the Indian, in obeying natural law, is, in fact, ruled by 'right reason,' uncorrupted by the systems and sophistry of Euro­ pean civilization. Predictably, O'Grady also presents the Indians' skills as evidence of their harmonious relationship to nature. In canoe-building, basket-weaving, and fur-trading, the Indian reveals skills that are the gift of nature, and he in turn serves the natural world. Although O'Grady does not minimize the rigorous demands of the Lower Canadian landscape that is the setting for his poem, his work is unique among early narrative poems of immigration and settle­ ment in suggesting that the white man should emulate the Indian's way of life if he intends to survive in this stringent environment. In sharp contrast to casting the Indian as malevolent extension of a savage landscape in his con­ temporaries' poetic narratives of immigrant life, O'Grady introduces into this subgenre the use of red culture as a measure of white civilization and a

32 A Native Heritage model of social responsibility and harmony between man and his natural environment. Kidd's 'The Huron Chief,' anticipates and extends O'Grady's perspec­ tive. For Kidd, civilization as practised by the white man has led to the destruction of an ideal culture. Skenandow, the Huron chieftain of the title, perceives the history of his people prior to the arrival of the white man as a golden age. As the poem opens, that world has already been marred by the white man's ravages, but the narrator continues to describe this environment in pastoral images: Oh! what a beauteous, charming scene, On that pure, downy, tufted green, To see the children of the grove, With hearts that felt no touch but pleasure, Thus linked in social tender love, Where flowing joys seemed without measure, Beneath a verdant maple shade, Which Nature's God alone had made. 10

In this world Huron girls become 'Eden's daughters,' and their environment is comparable to 'Milton's bower' and Calypso's paradisial retreat. Love songs fill the air, and Kidd's persona ultimately enters a magic world of beauty and perfection, an illusion shattered only when marauding white traders arrive. At no point does Kidd acknowledge that he is idealizing the Indian envi­ ronment in pastoral terms; instead he emphasizes his use of sources such as John Heckewelder and Alexander Henry in order to strengthen the impres­ sion of verisimilitude. Only twenty-eight years old when the poem was published, Kidd found in the red man's world a vision of release from the strictures of white society and from the conflict in white culture between man and landscape. n Beginning with an introductory passage emphasizing 'the indefinable air of majesty which breathes, as it were, from the lineaments of the forest­ born,' Huyghue's Argimou: A Legend of the Micmac identifies the Indian with the landscape and emphasizes his unique understanding of that land­ scape. The novel describes the successful mission of Argimou and his English companion to rescue their lovers from a Malecite camp. In the reac­ tions of this white companion, Huyghue finds an increasingly primitivistic response to Micmac culture: 12

33 Indian Alternatives As the Micmacs were finishing their frugal meal, he thought how little, after all, the luxury, the advantages of a civilized state of society, were capable of ameliorating the moral or physical condition of man. What benefit had art and intellectual cul­ ture, after the lapse of thousands of years, conferred upon his nation that these simple children of Nature did not receive from their mother's hand, unsolicited? His belief in the progressive improvement of the human race was shaken, as the lamentable truth forced itself upon his understanding, that mankind seemed to have journeyed further from the right, as they deviated from the plain habits and prin­ ciples of the primitive ages. (pp 92-3)

Like his primitivist predecessor in The History ofEmily Montague, Huyghue's white spokesman finds in red culture health, harmony, and freedom rarely evident in white civilization. Throughout the nineteenth century, growing interest in identification of the red man with the landscape led to increasing interest in the Indian's names for his land. As early as 1824 The Canadian Reader and Literary and Historical Journal carried an essay of 'Observations on the Rejection of Ancient Indian Names of Places in Canada' which argued for the retention of Indian names. Thomas Haliburton's Squire uses similar arguments in 'Canadian Politics,' a sketch published in the second series of The Clock­ maker in 1838: I must enter my protest against that American custom of changing the old and appropriate names of places for the new and inappropriate ones of Europe. Scissiboo is the Indian name of this long and beautiful river, and signifies the great deep, and should have been retained, not merely because it was its proper name, but on account of its antiquity, its legends, and, above all, because the river had a name, which the minor streams of the province have not. A country, in my opinion, is robbed of half its charms when its streams, like those of Nova Scotia, have no other names than those of the proprietors of the lands through which they pass, and change them as often as the soil changes owners. 13

Sailing through the Manitoulin Strait in Georgian Bay more than thirty years later, George Grant writes: 'the entrance to the Strait has been called Killar­ ney, according to our absurd custom of discarding the musical, expressive Indian names for ridiculously inappropriate European ones.'' 4 Poems by Duncan Campbell Scott and James De Mille illustrate the influence of Grant's concern in post-Confederation poetry. 'The Indian Names of Aca­ dia,' attributed in the Lighthall anthology of 1889 to De Mille, emphasizes

34 A Native Heritage

the musical qualities of the Indian names in a survey of sixteen place names of the Acadian region. Scott's 'Indian Place-Names' is a sound-catalogue of names extending from the St Lawrence to the Pacific that are a reminder of the country's original peoples and their identification with the land. Interest in the place names of the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario inspires several poems in Wilfred Campbell's second volume of verse, Lake Lyrics and Other Poems (1889). Manitoulin Island is 'Manitou's mist-walled temple,/ Floored with forest and roofed with blue.'' 5 Campbell finds seren­ ity here as well as escape from an outside world repeatedly depicted in the early poems in images of turbulent water. In 'Medwayosh,' an Ojibway word 'resembling the sound of the waves beating or washing on the shore,' these images take on a different meaning. '6 A Petrarchan sonnet, 'Medwayosh' begins with a description of the natural world, as the persona, 'lost in dreams,' rows along the shore of Georgian Bay; in the sestet the idyllic descriptions of the octave give way to more troubling reflections: I linger in dreams, and through my dreaming comes, Like sound of suffering heard through battle drums, An anguished call of sad, heart-broken speech; As if some wild lake-spirit long ago Soul-wronged, through hundred years its wounded woe Moans out in vain across each wasted beach. 11 For Campbell, as for many of his contemporaries, aboriginal place names are reminders of an original harmony that has been eroded or lost. In another group of works from the end of the nineteenth century, the North American phenomenon known as 'Indian summer' is often a focus for reflections on man's loss of harmony with the landscape. By mid-century, writers such as John Howison, William 'Tiger' Dunlop, and Catharine Parr Traill had discounted the old belief that this hazy season of unexpected warmth was a product of an annual burning of forests and grasslands in the west by the red man. Traill does, however, find it the Indian's 'own peculiar season': 'The term Indian-Summer, always sounds to me as so expressive of the wants, habits and circumstances of the race. Their summer is not our summer. Like the people it is peculiar to this continent. - They reap while we sow. While they collect, we scatter abroad the seed for the future harvest.' 18 The season becomes a focus for reflections on the Indian's rela­ tionship to the land, and, like her contemporaries, Traill recognizes basic antitheses between the worlds of red man and white man. When Susanna Moodie includes a poem called 'Indian Summer' in Life in the Clearings, her

35 Indian Alternatives

mood grows increasingly sombre, despite the beauty of the season, immedi­ ately after she depicts the Indian in traditional poses of hunter and fisher­ man; she ends the poem filled with a sense of the season as 'beauty sleeping on her bier' and implicitly associates the end of the season with the dis­ appearance of the red man's former way of life. Later in the century, poems entitled 'Indian Summer' by Alexander Mclachlan, Charles Sangster, Wilfred Campbell, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Archibald Lampman make no explicit connection between the Indian and the season named for him. Campbell and Sangster write tributes to the beauty of the landscape, and Mclachlan finds escape from grief and cares by aligning himself with the season: Here, in the woods, we'll talk with thee, Here, in thy forest sanctuary We'll learn thy simple lore; And neither poverty nor pain, The strife of tongues, the thirst for gain Shall ever vex us more. '9 Roberts also finds in Indian summer a vision of an ideal world 'to which our Real must attain." Lampman sees the season as 'a golden dream of youth, / A second childhood lovely and most calm' for the dying year who, for a moment, sits unaware of the approaching onslaught of winter." Whether implicitly or explicitly associated with the red man, Indian sum­ mer repeatedly focuses reflections on the loss of a once-held harmony and beauty in the land. In The Golden Dog (1877), William Kirby develops an extended simile in comparing the season to 'the splendor and gaiety of a maiden devoted to the cloister, who for a few weeks is allowed to flutter like a bird of paradise amid the pleasures and gaieties of the world, and then comes the end. Her locks of pride are shorn off; she veils her beauty, and kneels a nun on the cold stones of her passionless cell, out of which, even with repent­ ance, there comes no deliverance.' 22 Charles Mair's Tecumseh speaks of'our summers' as seasons when 0

The Spirit of the Woods has decked his home, And put his wonders like a garment on, To flash, and glow, and dull, and fade and die.2� Tecumseh prays that his people will not suffer the same swift death from the encroaching white man.

36 A Native Heritage

Twentieth-century writers examining the white man's relation to the land mourn the loss of the harmony once enjoyed by Tecumseh and his people. For Louis Dudek, white suburbanites, living in 'uniform rectangles with lids,' are the true 'stone-age dwellers' of North America. What is needed are 'half-breeds, mixtures/ - more Indians, where none remain."4 George Bowering shows Calgary as a world of 'steel haystacks' into which Indians from the west bring 'a gust of narrow/ mountain wind.' 25 Earle Birney's verse drama The Damnation of Vancouver (1977) 26 and James Bacque's novel A Man of Talent (1972) are representative of dozens of twentieth-century works in which the city created by white civilization desecrates the natural landscape still associated with the Indian. Written initially as a radio drama, Birney's play presents the 'trial of a city,' the city being Vancouver, the case at issue being the damnation of the city by the Office of the Future. Among those testifying at this fantasy trial is a Salish chief met by Captain George Vancouver in 1792. Anticipating the chiefs appearance before the court, Captain Vancouver recalls him as a bronzed Apollo who shared a feast of fish with the visiting white men. To this memory of an earlier harmony, the poem's Chamber of Commerce voice hastens to add that Indians still participate in the fishing industry - on the canneries' assembly lines. To the exponent of progress, this employment confirms that the red man has 'made the grade.' He sees no need for the chief to testify since Indians are 'a side issue' in modern Vancouver. Granted an appearance before the court despite objections, the chief is unable to offer any justification for the continued survival of the city since the white man has insisted on opposing his natural environment. In three lines, the chief succinctly describes the destruction of his own people by those Powers of lead and steel We had not known, unknowing had not lacked, Yet from the knowing needed. 27 The Indian not only finds no spiritual sustenance in the civilization of the white man, but also loses the skills and achievements of his own culture accomplishments that did not violate the earth on which Vancouver stands. Although the voice of progress forces an end to the chiefs testimony, he anticipates, before he concludes, the voice of Mrs Anyone, who alone among the witnesses can offer a justification for the continued existence of the city. Her argument insists on the ever-present potential for an act of wonder or love, and her faith overwhelms the crazy fantasy world of the courtroom. This faith echoes the chiefs memories of the fellowship inherent in the cele­ bration of the potlatch. In the play's original version, these memories are

37 Indian Alternatives

augmented by more personal reminiscences of harmony and love communi­ cated in natural images: Comfort was in the dogwool shirt of my youth, the tassels of flying squirrel Tailing like smoke from my shoulders not the trader's cast-offs in my aging. Comfort was the winter's bear-haunches safe in the rafters, when as a child I darted laughing under the reed hangings, with a little fist of hazelnuts clutched from the cedar chest. Comfort was waking beside my wife on our bed of musk-sweet rushes.28 Once again, the red man articulates values associated with a harmony between man and landscape and demonstrates the failure of the principles of progress and power associated with white civilization. Just as Birney argues for the acknowledgment and assimilation of Indian values in the contemporary urban environment, Bacque suggests that these values should form the base for a new national character. A Man of Ta/enc introduces Jack Ramsay as a thirty-year-old model of success in a world dominated by pragmatic and materialistic values; a young Ojibway woman plays a crucial role in his re-examination of these values. Anna, a freelance writer, is preparing a volume of photographs illustrating the creative inter­ action between red man and white man in Canada, and in her relationship with Ramsay she repeatedly challenges the white values he embodies. His cottage on Georgian Bay seems to her 'a retreat from the way one could live beside this water, a defiance of everything it set out to view and embrace,' and ultimately he sees her vision offering fulfilment not only for him but also for his country.'9 Bacque's Indians are not simply paragons of a primitivist vision. Yet they do possess a unique sense of their relation in time and place to past and present, and Bacque suggests that both his hero and Canada must work towards that understanding, rooted in the red man's relationship to the land. Twentieth-century poetry frequently returns to the focuses and preoccu­ pations of the nineteenth century in identifying the Indian with the land­ scape. Poems such as Helena Coleman's 'Indian Summer,' which appeared in John W. Garvin's Canadian Poets (1916), led A.J.M. Smith to despair of Canadian poetry in which 'the most popular experience is to be pained, hurt stabbed or seared by Beauty - preferably by the yellow flame of a crocus in the spring or the red flame of a maple leaf in autumn.' 30 The 'cosmopolitan' poets of the 1940s and 1950s reject banal repetitions of romantic preoccupa-

38 A Native Heritage

tions of the nineteenth century, but by the 1960s Bowering could once again frame reflections on the death of a culture in a poem titled 'Indian Summer.' In 'Onomatopoeic People,' Al Purdy echoes Duncan Campbell Scott and his contemporaries in his fascination with names such as 'Girl with Sandstone Hair' and 'Running Antelope on the Prairie' that suggest an elemental bond between the red man and the land.3' James Reaney asks the Avon River of Stratford, Ontario, 'What did the Indians call you?' 12 as he names his envi­ ronment, and Milton Acorn's 'On Speaking Ojibway' extends this emphasis on the link between the land and the red man's language by suggesting that the Ojibway words which describe the natural world are, in fact, words 'which you can speak in any language.'H Insistence on the white man's need for a new language that will enable him to meet the red man in the land recurs in Don Gutteridge's Coppermine (1973) and Borderlands (1975). In the earlier poem, Gutteridge's Samuel Hearne, overwhelmed by the 'annihilating space' of the Arctic, searches for linguistic and physical points of reference as he journeys across the Barren Lands to the mouth of the Coppermine River. Initially, he looks at his guide, Matonabbee, and the other Indians who accompany him as separate beings and wonders 'how long were the/ genes exposed to/ open wind/ before such cruelty/ was born?' 34 Yet in the final lines of the poem, as the legendary copper-woman, spirit of earth, reaches out to him, Hearne becomes one with Matonabbee as they 'share/ the mutual dark' of a land that both destroys and embraces. Living evidence that the land 'defines us/ as we define/ ourselves moving/ into it,' Hearne accepts and is accepted by the land and its inhabitants and is pre­ pared for the long walk back from the interior. In Borderlands, Gutteridge again focuses on the experience of a white man in a landscape hitherto inhabited only by the Indian. Just as Hearne finds a common identity with Matonabbee, John Jewitt, nineteenth-century captive of the Nootka on the Pacific coast, arrives at a new understanding of the land, the self, and the nature of language through his association with the Nootka chief, Maquina. Maquina's first speech in the poem establishes the thin coastal strip between mountain and ocean as the borderland that accom­ modates his people. Yet the title also refers to the metaphoric borderland where the language of the red man and of the white intersect. Language, the poem stresses, is the 'way we define/ a coastline/ for our skin,' and as the poem ends Jewitt finds a relationship with the land differing from that of the other whites in the narrative through his acceptance of a new language that will enable him to 'inhabit/ all borderlands.'35 Only through this new way of seeing can the white man move towards the alternative relationship to the landscape embodied in the red man and his culture.

39 Indian Alternatives NATURAL RELIGION

If nineteenth-century Canadian writers were prepared to investigate the Indian's harmony with the landscape, very few were prepared to examine the theological implications of his religion. Orthodox believers such as Silas Tertius Rand, a Baptist missionary among the Micmacs of Nova Scotia, could conscientiously collect and record red myths and beliefs, but were not prepared to examine application of these beliefs to their own faiths. Rand, one of the most important early students of Micmac culture, concludes a description of a Micmac myth with the casual remark: 'now what sense or meaning there may be at the bottom of all this nonsense, I leave to the speculations of others.' 36 Not until the twentieth century do a significant number of white writers who consider the red man's religion in primitivist terms present that faith as an alternative to the white man's beliefs. Instead, the red man's faith is most frequently a means by which to attack the failure of the white man's church. The Nova Scotia Minstrel (1817) by Thomas Cowdell addresses the 'white­ wash'd Christian tribe' and urges the churches of England and Rome to eliminate the sectarianism that has marred their history: 'Real Catholic! The term discharge/ The universal church at large.' 37 Douglas Huyghue sees evidence of the failure of the Christian church in the behaviour of the white men who violate 'every principle of justice, human or divine' in their con­ duct in the new world. For George Longmore in 'Tecumthe,' an Indian religious ceremony is only a vehicle for comparison with Roman Catholic ritual: Their's [sic] is no pompous pageantry, No gold, and incense to the sky: No sacerdotal, costly shrine. 38 Yet despite his criticism of a rival Christian church, Longmore presents the red man's religion only in terms of blood sacrifices and chants of 'uncouth sounds.' In John Hunter Duvar's De Roberval (1888), a closet drama based on De Roberval's failure to establish a permanent settlement in Canada, Duvar does not acknowledge the historical question of whether or not De Roberval was a Protestant, but he does present him as a less than messianic Roman Catholic. A missionary priest reminds De Roberval of their collective responsibility:

40 A Native Heritage

Our special mission in these savage lands Is to convert the heathen, but as yet No heathen have come in, and it beseems You, as the secular arm, to drag them in, So that they may with reverent thankfulness Embrace the faith en masse, and be baptized. l9 De Roberval, however, is attracted to the theology of an Iroquois girl who saves his life and who assures him that The Great Spirit, Master of Life, is good; he sends the rain And sun that makes the yellow corn to grow, And, when the ice breaks up, makes fish to swim, And game return at time of opening leaves. We are the creatures of His unseen hand. Our God has never died, but lives. (p 74) To the priest's fanatical reaction to this profession of faith in which he finds idolatry, blasphemy, heresy, and certain damnation, De Roberval replies: 'Be it. Adieu, in Christian charity.' Just as Adam Kidd presents the most strongly primitivistic vision of the red man's relationship to the land in nineteenth-century Canadian literature, he also launches the most extended attack on the agents of the Christian church. In describing his motives for composing 'The Huron Chief,' Kidd testifies to the kindness of the Indians whom he encountered while on a trip through the Great Lakes region and to his recognition 'of the deep wrong which they received from those calling themselves Christians.'•0 In Kidd's view, European civilization embodies crime, error, and restriction that con­ trast sharply with the freedom, innocence, and contentment of Skenandow's world, and he specifically attacks the missionaries who attempt to impose white religion and morality on the Indian: The Missionary evils brought, By those who first Religion taught Forgive the phrase - had more of hell And all the crimes with it connected Than ever yet were known to dwell

41 Indian Alternatives

With those oft called the lost - neglected The barb'rous Indian Savage race The outcasts of the human race. (pp 107-8) Kidd finds perfection in the natural religion of the Indian, for whom all nature is a sanctuary. He also emphasizes the freedom of the Indian's faith, 'by Nature's God alone directed,' and contrasts this freedom with the restric­ tion of the Christian church represented by Bishop Mountain of Quebec. Carl Klinck has pointed out that when Kidd speaks in his preface of his 'accidental fall from the cloud-capped brows of a dangerous Mountain,' he is not discussing geographical misfortunes.4' In 'The Huron Chief,' he attacks 'the Churchman's rant ... In all the posing of a M***t**n,/ Who nothing loves, but what's his own,/ Or some thing else that wears a gown.' Later, he meditates while travelling on Lake Huron: All looked so like the scenes and groves, Through which the dreaming spirit roves, That my wrecked heart forgot the pain A Mountain Demon flung before it. (p 98) In less blatant terms, Kidd attacks the ecclesiastic by contrasting him with the foremost Huron chief, Skenandow, 'the holy man.' Loved by his people, the embodiment of justice, love, and mercy, Skenandow is the antithesis of those qualities which Kidd hated in the bishop. Particularly irritating to Kidd is the sectarianism of the 'jarring creedsmen' within the Christian church 'who in their intolerance of other Christian faiths anticipate the bigotry that leads to the indiscriminate destruction of the red man's religious culture.' Twentieth-century literature intensifies the attack on the failure of Chris­ tianity, the confirmation of that failure emerging in the white man's desecra­ tion of the land. The red persona in W.W.E. Ross's sonnet, 'The Indian Speaks,' argues that the murdering white man, violating the land and 'afraid to meet its spirit face to face,' loses not only harmony with his natural envi­ ronment but also communion with his god.42 The strongest statement of this perspective in the first half of the century is in Ernest Thompson Seton's The Gospel of the Red�an (1937). For Seton, 'the civilization of the Whiteman is a failure; it is visibly crumbling around us. It has failed every crucial test. No one who measures things by results can question this fundamental state­ ment.'43 Introducing precepts of Indian theology, ethics, and morals in what

42 A Native Heritage he subtitles 'An Indian Bible,' Seton offers the alternative of a red religion based on a mystical communion with the land. The Indian is 'the apostle of outdoor life,' and in the book's final paragraphs Seton joins the idealized red man in a call to the white man: Men of the White Race! We speak now as representative of the most heroic race the world has ever seen, the most physically perfect race the world has ever seen, the most spiritual Civilization the world has ever seen. We offer you the Message of the Redman, the Creed of Manhood. We advocate his culture as an improvement on our own, if perchance by belated repentance, remorse, restitution, and justification, we may save ourselves from Divine ven­ geance and total destruction ... (pp 108-9) Published in the midst of international economic collapse and the threat of war, Seton's book offers an ecstatic dream of a primitivistic return to the religious values that prevailed on the North American continent before the arrival of the white man. Even the Jesuits honoured by Seton's contemporaries do not escape con­ demnation in this primitivistic century. Like Pratt, Eldon Garnet uses a narrative form for his Brebeuf- A Martyrdom ofJean de ( I 977), but from the opening page he explodes the traditional narrative form through his use of more than a dozen identified and unidentified speakers, multiple and over­ lapping time frames, and repeated analytical and explanatory digressions. Garnet's Brebeuf initially sees the Indians as children, demons, and ani­ mals; his role is 'to kill the devil / to bring the true word.'« The poem denies Brebeufs assumptions, however, by countering Christian myth with alter­ native myths from either Huron culture or fantastic sexual readings of the cosmic past. The sexual union of Etienne Brule and the Blessed Virgin Mary mirrors the union of Commerce and the church; Brebeuf, convinced that he is truly disseminating the Christian faith, fails to recognize Christ incarnated as a Huron; God, furious at the betrayal of his wishes by both Christ and Mary, vents his wrath in the death of Brebeuf and the Huron nation. Out of this phantasmagoric 'musical of pain,' Garnet suggests that Brebeuf emerges as a national saint, but 'the forgotten end' is that the Huron nation as a proud and vital culture disappears, 'people forgotten / spirits wandering lost.' Exploiting the sensational imagery associated with Indian warfare, James W. Nichol's Saint-Marie among the Hurons (1977) still does not cast the red man as savage antagonist. Instead, Nichol condemns the Jesuits as carriers of an epidemic to the Hurons that alters the balance of tribal power and leads to

43 Indian Alternatives

the destruction of the Jesuit missions and the Huron nation by the Iroquois. The play insists on the existence of a coherent cosmology and theology within Huron culture before the arrival of the Jesuits and traces the stripping away of the illusions of a Jesuit priest who cannot condone the practices of his church. In the conclusion of Saine-Marie among the Hurons, the presence of Christ becomes ambiguous, Huron culture has been destroyed, and the play explicitly condemns the missionaries. A more complex perspective on the Jesuits emerges in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966). The novel opens with a series of questions: 'Catherine Tekakwitha, who are you? Are you (1656-80)? 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?' 45 Cohen's narrator, an anthro­ pologist who has studied Catherine's history for years, is now beginning to understand the significance of her story for his own life. Catherine's history has been written by representatives of the Roman Catholic Church, and the interpretation of her significance in Beautiful Losers encompasses both an awareness of the traditional view of Catherine and an extreme reaction against this perspective. Initially, the narrator announces to Catherine Tekakwitha: 'I have come to rescue you from the Jesuits'; ten lines later he recalls his friend F.'s aphorism that 'a strong man cannot but love the Church.' The apparent conflict is resolved through clarification of the Jesuits' commitment to the miraculous. On the one hand the Jesuits can be loved because they 'saw miracles': 'Homage to Ignatius Loyola, struck down by a French Protestant bullet in the breach of Pampeluna, for in his sick room, in the cave of Manresa, this proud soldier saw the Mysteries of heaven, and these visions brought forth the mighty Society of Jesus.' 46 Yet Loyola's successors in the new world became 'old torturers who ... allowed the power of the Enemy to nourish the strength of the community.' Praised for choosing the miraculous possibility that Catherine Tekakwitha may be a true saint, the Jesuits are damned for their inability to accommodate their beliefs to those of the Indian, casting him as adversary instead and thus contributing to his destruction. The Jesuits err in allowing themselves to become indirect agents of terri­ torial imperialism, as if 'the marble face of Caesar' were also 'a mask of God.' Ignoring the red man's sense of the numinous in the landscape, the Jesuits contribute to the establishment of a culture built on principles of rationalism, technology, and materialism. As an antidote, Cohen's narrator calls for Fifth Avenue 'to remember its Indian trails' and complains that Catherine's successors have forgotten how to build birchbark canoes.

44 A Native Heritage

Even more crucially, the white men fail to acknowledge and imitate the Indian's sense of his place as part of an eternal cosmic order. Catherine's uncle reminds the Jesuit who is hurriedly trying to convert him before he dies: 'There is much time, Black-Robe. If you and I should talk until the weasel befriends the rabbit, we would not break the rope of days.' Victims of rationalism, whites cannot comprehend the Mohawks' communion with the eternal in their use of 'hiro-koue,' a device adding 'a new dimension to conversation.' Victims of sexual repression, whites find the Andacwandet cure a 'damnable et malheureuse ceremonie' rather than an expression of the paradoxical fusion of individual and community, change and perma­ nence, mortality and immortality. Trapped inside rationalized religious structures and a technological society, whites have lost 'magic,' and not until the final pages of the novel does the narrator achieve mystical release from the bonds of mind and body into union with 'the magic length of God.' Immediately following this scene of sublime beatitude, we are told that 'the end of this book has been rented to the Jesuits. The Jesuits demand the official beatification of Catherine Tekakwitha.' The Jesuits, through their accounts of Catherine, have given the narrator one guide to beatitude, but the perspective on the priests remains ironic as they 'demand' 'official' confirmation of the magical and the miraculous. The white man's desecration of the Indian's land and culture leads George Grant to argue that the white man can never assume the red man's gods as his own: 'That conquering relation to place has left its mark within us. When we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there. But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours. They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are and what we did.' 41 Howard O'Hagan's Tay John (1939) supports Grant's insistence on the distinct spiritual landscapes of red and white cultures in presenting the conflicts suffered by its half-red, half-white, half-human, and half-divine hero. In Margaret Atwood's Surfacing (1972), on the other hand, a white protagonist is reborn through her discovery of Indian gods residing in the landscape. Two secondary characters in Tay John, both blood relatives of the hero, point to the essentially religious nature of Tay John's conflicts. Red Rorty and his brother, Father Thomas Rorty, illustrate the failure of evangelical Protestantism and Roman Catholicism to mediate between human and divine worlds. Their failures are a correlative to the tragic dilemmas of O'Hagan's divided hero. The novel introduces Red Rorty to the frontier version of 1880 evangeli­ cal Protestantism in Edmonton. Rorty, impressed by the example of St Paul, moves into the interior Athabasca Valley in order to convert a Shuswap tribe.

45 Indian Alternatives

The absence of earlier missionaries adds special impact to Rorty's arrival, as does the parallel between the Christ whose advent he announces and the messiah who has been long established in Shuswap belief: By French and English-speaking travellers in the mountains, the Shuswaps were sometimes called the Tete Jaune, or Yellowhead people, and the place where they lived was known as Tete Jaune Cache, from their belief that one day a leader would come among them - a tall man (for they were of short stature) with yellow hair, and lead them back over the mountains to their cousins, the Salish tribes along the coast, from whom in the first place they stemmed. 48

Unfortunately Rorty's missionary zeal cannot withstand the demands of his human appetites, and after he sexually assaults the wife of a Shuswap man, he is burned alive by the tribe in a scene echoing elements of his saviour's crucifixion. If Red Rorty is a less than ideal exponent of Protestant Christianity, his brother Thomas, who arrives in the Athabasca country in the last section of the novel, initially seems to be a more flattering representative of the Roman Catholic church. He has been more successful than his brother in resisting the temptations of the flesh, but in withstanding the allurements of a woman in the Athabasca country, he retreats to a cabin high in the mountains. There he ties himself to a cross-like tree: 'I will lie upon the Cross. I will take this cross of doubt, so heavy on my shoulders, and place myself upon it. I will lift myself higher than any man before me, except Christ himself, has been lifted. I will know the secret of the Cross. I will gaze out upon the world secure in my suffering above it.' Tay John's narrator has a less exalted view of Father Rorty's accidental death on · his improvised cross; his crucifixion is presented as a result of the spiritual arrogance that leads him to set himself above the flesh. Submitting to the flesh, Red Rorty dies with a stone shoved between his jaws; resisting carnal temptation, his brother opens his mouth to shout and it is filled with snow. The narrative encompassing the bizarre experiences of these men deals with the putative son of Red Rorty and the Shuswap woman whom he assaulted, Kumkleseem, 'the yellow-haired one,' subsequently known as Tete Jaune and Tay John. In the spring following the woman's death, a child emerges from her grave and is quickly acknowledged as the Shuswap messiah and named Kumkleseem. Raised by the tribe, the child becomes the Shuswap leader on a journey, not to their Salish cousins, but to a new promised land which they find equally satisfactory. Yet Tay John suffers the same conflict as the Rorty brothers in attempting to reconcile the dichotomy between human and divine worlds. After being guided to their new home,

46 A Native Heritage

the members of the tribe still refuse their leader the woman whom he desires: 'Tay John is a leader. He has brought us to this land where we no longer hunger. Other men must marry. The woman of Tay John is the people. He is the leader of the people and is married to their sorrows.' Tay John rejects this interpretation of his role and abandons the tribe for the world of the white man. The presentation of Tay John's character in a constant state of oscillation between human and divine impulses runs throughout the novel. This bal­ ance is reflected in the narrative of his early years in its juxtaposition of vividly realistic details of everyday Shuswap life with rationally inexplicable elements such as the child's mysterious birth out of the bowels of the earth and the absence and subsequent acquiring of a shadow for him. The essential duality of Tay John's world is similar to that envisaged by the Indian in his distinction between the coyote whom he sees as a prairie wolf by day and as the trickster deity howling at night: 'The coyote men saw by day was not the same they heard by night, for the coyote they heard by night was the voice of a man whose hands had become claws and whose teeth had grown long and tusk-like, who sat on his haunches, lifted his head to the sky and lamented the human speech torn from him.' If the Shuswap find this kind of distinction easy to accept, Tay John does not find it easy to reconcile the double element within his own personality. Ultimately his choice leads him away from his divine qualities and to the base human world of the white. The disjunction between red and white cultures becomes clear in the hero's transition from Kumkleseem to Tay John. The functions and signifi­ cance of names are recurring themes throughout the novel, and the change in the hero's designation anticipates his subsequent actions. It is the whites whom the boy has guided through the valleys of the Athabasca in their pur­ suit of gold who first call him 'Tete Jaune.' Initially, the Shuswap regard this new name as an honour, but they are somewhat puzzled when their hero asks them 'to use the new name, which was the name the white men had given to him, and to forget he had been called Kumkleseem.' Their difficulty in pronouncing the new name changes it to Tay John, and although they accept it, this name-change marks a new stage in the isolation of the hero from his red heritage: 'Tay John now walked alone among them. His yellow hair marked his different birth. His rifle was his own, and no man could touch it. His red coat was a sign of the white man's favour. His name was no more the name come from his people but the name he had earned when he was far from them.' Not only do the whites assimilate their leader, but they make it increasingly difficult for the Shuswap to survive by means of their traditional hunting practices: 'Some said that the white man's god had

47 Indian Alternatives

come into the valley, that the game had fled, and that now they must leave the valley too.' Thus, Tay John leads them to their new home but by the same action abandons their world for the world of the white. Tay John's experiences in the white world are recounted by Jack Den­ ham, a trail guide who tells his story in 1904, when 'the white man's breath had blasted the Indian and the buffalo from the grass lands.' The most excit­ ing event of Denham's life has been witnessing an epic battle between Tay John and an enraged grizzly bear. Once again, Tay John's extra-human qualities are emphasized, with stress on the alignment between his body and the earth: Still, there was something, it is hard to say, something of the abstract about him - as though he were a symbol of some sort or other. He seemed to stand for something. He stood there with his feet planted apart upon the ground, as though he owned it, as though he grasped it with them. When he moved I would not have been surprised to have seen clumps of earth adhere to the soles of his moccasins .... (p 83)

After the fight, Tay John appears from under the bear's dead body in a manner reminiscent of his first appearance on earth: 'A man's head appeared beside it, bloody, muddied, as though he were just being born, as though he were climbing out of the ground.' Later we see him 'stretched out straight, face buried in the sand, as if he were taking suck from the earth.' Again, a duality surfaces. In one context, an extension of the deified earth, Tay John also represents man in a symbolic struggle against death: 'Man had won against the wilderness, the unknown, the strength that is not so much beyond our strength as it is capable of a fury and single passion beyond our understand­ ing.' Later, Denham suggests that this polarity between man and god as embodied in the wilderness may be reconciled into a fusion in Tay John, who possesses 'a wisdom the others searched for, a knowledge of the Dark Stranger ... one whose voice he knew, whose call he had heard, whose gaze he had met.' Yet Tay John's acceptance of the power of nature, god, and death cannot transform his social relationships. Just as the first section ends with his retreat from the Shuswaps as a result of a woman's influence, so the second part concludes wit� his retreat into the mountains after being falsely charged with abduction and rape by a young, frustrated, and frightened white woman. Only in the concluding section of the novel are some of the myriad duali­ ties of red and white, darkness and light, the ideal and the real, divinity and humanity, and love and death resolved. In the same woman who indirectly

48 A Native Heritage causes the death of Father Thomas Rorty, Tay John finds someone else who 'stalked the boundaries of society without ever fully entering.' Forsaking the world of the cabaret and her role as mistress to wealthy men, Ardith Aeriola retreats with Tay John from the materialistic world of white men into the sacred wilderness. She dies pregnant, like Tay John's Shuswap mother, but unlike Red Rorty and Hanni, Tay John and Ardith move into the earth together: 'Tay John hadn't gone over the pass at all. He had just walked down, the toboggan behind him, under the snow and into the ground.' Having discovered the fulfilment of love, Tay John submits to the cyclical pattern that leads all humans back to the darkness from which they emerged. But death comes to Tay John and Ardith only after they have retreated from the materialism and corruption of the white man's world, a world lacking both spiritual principles and, as the deaths of the Rorty brothers indicate, adequate spiritual guides. In returning to the landscape that provided a focus for the spiritual values and beliefs that sustained his mother's Shuswap cul­ ture, Tay John moves into an elemental and purer world. Margaret Atwood's Surfacing also describes a retreat from white civiliza­ tion into a purer natural world. As the protagonist drives through northern Quebec with two friends and a lover, she observes, in the first sentence of the novel, that 'the white birches are dying, the disease is spreading up from the south.' 49 The source of death for the natural world, 'the south' is also a world of emotional and spiritual sterility, crippled by the white man's progress ethic and destructive technology. Yet if the narrator can identify the south in these terms, she is also an inextricable part of it. Reflecting on her childhood on the northern island where the novel is set, the protagonist recalls the Indians who returned to this area each summer: There weren't many of them on the lake even then, the government had put them somewhere else, corralled them, but there was one family left. Every year they would appear on the lake in blueberry season and visit the good places the same way we did, condensing as though from the air, five or six of them in a weatherbeaten canoe: father in the stern, head wizened and corded like a dried root, mother with her gourd body and hair pared back to her nape, the rest children or grandchildren. They would check to see how many blueberries there were, faces neutral and dis­ tanced, but when they saw that we were picking they would move on .... It never occurred to me till now that they must have hated us. (pp 85-6) She realizes that to the Indians, her family embodied 'the south' as menac­ ingly as Bill Malmstrom, representative of the Detroit branch of the Wildlife

49 Indian Alternatives

Protection Association of America, does for her. As the Indians have been 'corralled' on reservations, by agents of 'the south,' she has become impri­ soned in a world of spiritual sterility. Accompanying Atwood's polarization of north and south, red man and white man, is a religious dichotomy identified in terms of the sacred and the profane. During the trip to the island, the protagonist sees a roadside cross but the 'wooden Christ, ribs sticking out,' is an 'alien god, mysterious to me as ever.' The graffiti covering the side of a blasted cliff combines 'The Salada, Blue Moon Cottages½ Mile, Quebec Libre, Fuck You, Buvez Coca Cola Glace, Jesus Saves.' Even as a child, the narrator found the mystery of Christ only as puzzling as the missing hand on the woman in the general store. Everywhere, she has been surrounded by a profane world, a 'wholly desacralized cosmos.'s° Finding the pictures of heavily made-up women that she saved as a child, the narrator recalls: 'when I was ten I believed in glamour, it was a kind of religion and these were my icons.' Her friend Anna has never advanced beyond lipstick as icon, and the protagonist herself has had little success in her quest for something beyond a profane reality. The discovery of her father's drawings of Indian rock paintings initiates the journey into a new understanding of the sacred world. A commentary accompanying the drawings suggests that 'the sites of the paintings are the abodes of powerful or protective spirits, which may explain the custom, per­ sisting in remote areas of leaving offerings of clothing and small bundles of "prayer sticks".' The childhood pictures delineating an Easter egg 'vision of Heaven' must be supplanted by these new-found paintings, 'reminiscent with their elongated limbs and extreme distortion of the drawings of chil­ dren' but evoking a sacred reality previously imperceptible to the narrator. 'The Americans, the human beings, men and women both. They'd had their chance but they had turned against the gods, and it was time for me to choose sides.' The protagonist finally perceives that her 'survival' is dependent upon the contact with the numinous world associated with the rock paintings. She must escape her suspension between the sacralized world and the desacra­ lized world in order to escape crippling alienation and isolation. In Chapter 17, the pivotal section of the book, the protagonist experiences what Mircea Eliade calls an hierophany, 'the act of manifestation of the sacred.' 5' As she dives in search of the rock paintings, the protagonist per­ ceives 'a dark oval trailing limbs.' Images of her dead father, her aborted child, and her drowning brother crowd into her mind, and she surfaces with the profound conviction that the place which she has discovered is sacred. In Eliade's terms, this kind of experience 'introduces an absolute element and

50 A Native Heritage puts an end to relativity and confusion. Something that does not belong to this world has manifested itself apodictically and in doing so has indicated an orientation or determined a course.'52 Like the Indians, the protagonist resolves to leave an offering and once again red religion is an alternative to white faiths: I had to go onto the shore and leave something: that was what you were supposed to do, leave a piece of your clothing as an offering. I regretted the nickels I'd taken dutifully for the collection plate, I got so little in return: no power remained in their bland oleotinted Jesus prints or in the statues of the other ones, rigid and stylized, holy triple name shrunken to swearwords. These gods, here on the shore or in the water, unacknowledged or forgotten were the only ones who had ever given me anything I needed; and freely . ... The Indians did not own salvation but they had known where it lived and their sign marked the sacred places, the places where you could learn the truth. (p 145) Ascending the cliff that represents the cosmic mountain connecting heaven and earth, the protagonist leaves her sweatshirt as an offering to the gods. Guided by the gods honoured in red culture, the narrator begins a process of expiation and rebirth. She acknowledges the abortion that has haunted her, and, simultaneously, acknowledges her own capacity for killing and her terror of death. A series of shamanistic rituals leads her to a mystical integra­ tion with nature and participation in a single, indivisible, sacred reality. For the protagonist, as for the red man's shaman, such integration is temporally limited; the gods inevitably recede as ecstatic presences. But as the protago­ nist re-enters her own time, she carries with her an understanding of the red man's relationship to the land and its gods. In the knowledge of both her human separateness from nature and her simultaneous participation in a sacred unity of all living things, the protagonist imitates the Indian who left the rock paintings. In his world she finds an alternative theology and release from both the chaos of rationalism and the accompanying terror of death. NATURAL HUMANITY

In Studies in Classic American Literature, D.H. Lawrence argues for a psy­ chic alteration in white consciousness stemming from contact with red cul­ ture: 'The white man's spirit can never become the red man's spirit. It doesn't want to. But it can cease to be the opposite and negative of the red man's spirit. It can open out a new great area of consciousness, in which there is room for the red spirit too.' 53 While many writers describe the focuses of this 'new great area of consciousness' in enhanced awareness of

5 I Indian Alternatives

red responses to the natural world and red religious concepts, most twentieth-century novelists identify this growth in more purely psychological terms. The primitivism of these writers manifests itself in an identification of principles of order, rationalism, and control in the white man's world in contrast to alternative values of freedom and emotional spontaneity in the Indian's culture. Many nineteenth-century works identify the passionate spontaneity of the Indian in less than ideal terms. For Gilbert Parker, the Indian is essentially a creature of animal instinct contrasting with the civilized 'lord of the world, the Caucasian, made so finely in the quarries of the gods.' 54 As the rather obtuse Scottish protagonist of The Chief Factor ( I 892) acknowledges the love of Summer Hair, an Indian girl, the narrator makes a special note that the girl's love is 'as deep as the soul itself - and even an Indian woman has a soul: or had one in an antique time.' As in Duncan Campbell Scott's 'At Gull Lake: August, 1810,' the white world rejects the Indian girl, who then finds that she cannot return to the red world of her past; unlike Scott, however, Parker demonstrates little interest in Summer Hair's plight, presenting her simply as a victim of her passions. Parker's The Translation of a Savage (1893) begins with the marriage of an Englishman to an Indian girl in Canada as misguided revenge against his family's interference in his earlier, failed romance in England. The novel describes the subsequent ordeal of the girl, shipped to England as an insult to her husband's family. Predictably, she overcomes all obstacles to take her place in English society, but, lest her 'translation' seem too sudden, Parker tempers her Indian heritage with 'good white blood, Scotch blood.' The girl's transformation is a victory for white principles of decorum and control over 'savage' freedom and spontaneity. The bizarre climax of this transformation occurs as the girl 'instinctively' buries her face in the mud after falling during a ride on horseback; the event marks the end of 'the last strong flicker of the desire for savage life in her.' 55 For Parker, the marriage of white and red must lead to alterations in red values and behaviour, but English-Canadian literature more frequently emphasizes alternative psychological values associated with red culture which must be acknowledged by whites in order to enter Lawrence's 'new great area of consciousness.' As early as 1791, 'Azakia: A Canadian Story,' by an anonymous author and printed in Nova Scotia Magazine, depicts red passion, fidelity, and generosity in a fictional account of the marriage of the Baron of St Castin to the Huron girl whose name begins the story's title. Huyghue's Argimou introduces the most explicit nineteenth-century vision of the Indian's physical and emotional spontaneity in the reunion of the red hero and his lover:

52 A Native Heritage In the silence, in the solitude - beneath the thick cedar shade, through which the prying stars pierced not, the children of the wild poured out their whole soul in the fervour of delicious commune. What to them were the 'pomp and circumstance' of that, which among those misnamed wise, is but a mockery of genuine impulse, a restriction of natural enjoyment? There were no cold formalities - no starched pet­ rifactions of humanity - with eyes of envy and hearts of ice, freezing the gushing current of delight in young bosoms, with the callous frigidity of conventional rule ... 56

The approval of Huyghue's narrator is obvious, but the white lovers of the novel restrict themselves to chaste and controlled demonstrations of their feelings. Huyghue contrasts red and white lovers by using one couple from each culture, but twentieth-century fiction repeatedly intensifies the antithe­ sis by focusing on the relationship of a single couple representing the diver­ gent cultures. At first, Mazo de la Roche's Possession (1923) simply juxtaposes the 'primitive' energy of a red woman with the 'civilized' restraint of a white man. By the end of the novel, however, simple categorization by colour gives way to a more profound examination of the central conflicting impulses residing in any personality. When Derek Vale arrives from Nova Scotia to inherit his southern Ontario fruit farm, he cannot anticipate the problems that he will encounter in 'possessing' his new land. Yet his difficulties in farming are overwhelmed by the complications in his personal life. Having fathered the child of Fawnie Sharroe, a young Indian girl originally hired as a fruit-picker, Derek is tricked into marrying her and both his social reputa­ tion and his self-image are subsequently transformed. Like so many of her successors in fiction using this perspective, de la Roche contrasts Fawnie with one of Derek's white neighbours, Grace Jer­ rold; the one embodies 'primitive' energy and vitality, the other, 'civilized' restraint and control. Derek first sees Fawnie swimming with other members of her family: 'She seemed to rise, a dark water-lily on its stem, a flower of unearthly beauty, springing from the water, fed by the flames, filling the night air with the perfume of her desire.' 57 Later, as he watches her using cherries as earrings, he experiences 'an intense consciousness of the earth mother of him and of all thriving, air-sucking things.' She is a 'half-civilized girl - creature in her element where there was darkness and storm,' and in the midst of a storm, Derek fathers the child, Buckskin. Grace Jerrold also emerges as a type of earth mother and Derek once tells her: 'With that golden apple at your lips, and the golden light on your hair, you are exactly

53 Indian Alternatives

like Eve.' The contrast betweeen light and dark heroines continues through­ out the book. Tragedy enters both women's lives as Fawnie's child dies and Grace is doomed to failure as a fruitful Eve-figure by her sense of duty to her father. While his contemporaries regard the Indians as at worst 'treacherous red­ skins' and at best 'naughty children,' Derek recognizes in Fawnie 'the com­ pletest human being he had ever known,' and with the cautious affirmation of this recognition of a unique psychological integrity in the red girl, the novel ends. W.O. Mitchell's 'The Alien' and The Vanishing Point also show a white male protagonist gaining a new sense of his own humanity through expe­ rience with the red man's culture. In the latter work, marriage again symbol­ izes not only the union of individuals but also of visions. In 'The Alien,' a novel published serially in Maclean's magazine from September 1953 to January 1954, Mitchell shows the psychological changes in a prairie school teacher who accepts an appointment on an Indian reserva­ tion after becoming involved in an incident concerning a local drunken Indian. The acknowledgement that he too has the Indian blood of his mater­ nal grandmother increases Carlyle's associations of guilt, sympathy, and shame: 'a charge read out in court, the old vexed charge that a man who has Indian blood has no right to drink. The charge was mistaken both in the eyes of the law and of the community. It had been withdrawn but not before Carlyle, full of uncertainty about life in which such a charge could have been laid in the first place, had resigned.' 58 Carlyle's efforts to improve the physi­ cal conditions of life on the Paradise Valley Reserve meet with mixed suc­ cess. Native traditions and habits resisting sudden change retard attempts to provide improved housing, education, and medical care. The reader's sym­ pathies shift constantly between the well-meaning and generally enlightened hero and the Indians, who are caught in a world of cultural shock. Finally, Mitchell insists that success lies not in external accomplishments but in the individual's confrontation with himself. Throughout the novel, Mitchell carefully balances the positive and nega­ tive elements found in both Indian and white cultures. Rather than avoid sociological cliches, he often simply balances stereotypes. A businessman's assertion that only money provides a 'sure way to get men to do things Indians included,' reveals the moral void in the white commercial world. An old Indian councillor promptly vindicates this cynicism by accepting a bribe. Yet early in the novel, Carlyle's wife perceives this same Indian in mystic communion with the infinite:

54 A Native Heritage Elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose, he stirred only with the most economical of movements. ... Otherwise he held himself quite motionless staring at the rock before him ... gazing down at the mesmeric drift of the water ... or drifting his tent­ lidded eyes to the hills, the mountains, the skies. Did he save himself from melan­ cholia she wondered, achieve some mystic and relaxed oneness with eternity, a smoothing erasure of all annoyance and irritations and fleshly pains. 59 Despite appearances, this visionary finds relief not in mystic meditation but in the cigarettes and raisin bread bought at the price of disloyalty to his tribe. This undercutting and balancing of opposed perspectives and possibilities mark Mitchell's handling of red and white worlds throughout the novel. Cultures collide for Mitchell's hero when he sees his fair-haired son learn­ ing the steps of the Prairie Chicken Dance, a symbol of the powerful vitality of native traditions. Carlyle feels ostracized from 'his son's country of alien customs' just as he is an alien in the red culture to which he is related by blood. His wife finally points out that his attitudes and frustrations are not the product of his Indian blood: Except as a whipping boy - a repository for blame! ... You've just never grown up to contain the world, that's all! Or the other people in it. Me - your children Carlyle Sinclair stops at the outer edges of Carlyle Sinclair. You contain no wife - no family - no friends - no other humans! White - red - black - yellow poor - rich. ... Now you deny the blood you claim every time you blame it for your shortcomings. 00 Mitchell's hero must escape the bonds of the self if he is to comprehend and finally contain the world around him. Carlyle enters Lawrence's 'new great area of consciousness' through a new understanding of the dance viewed earlier as a threat. 61 Now he sees that, while dancing, the Indians create a world that offers escape from the injustices that have deprived them of their freedom and spirit. Carlyle now understands that the roots of his own alienation were in his refusal to recog­ nize 'the ordinary, petty, distracting and demanding ... petty and pointless absurdities of human existence.' In his conviction that the Indians have failed him by being slow to accept his progressive ideas, he has indeed failed them, his family, and himself by not acknowledging his common affinity with all men. Many of the characters and situati ons introduced in 'The Alien' are more fully developed in Mitchell's The Vanishing Point. Again, the plot focuses on white-red relations on the ironically named Paradise Valley reservation, and

55 Indian Alternatives

Carlyle Sinclair returns as protagonist in the role of teacher and Indian agent on the reservation. Victoria Rider also assumes a role similar to that which she plays in the earlier novel although, since Carlyle is a widower without family in The Vanishing Point, Mitchell can marry white and red cultures in the marriage of Carlyle and Victoria at the end of the book. Many of the incidents developed successfully in the earlier novel recur in The Vanishing Point: the idiosyncratic sermons of the reservation spiritual leader, Carlyle's problems in enforcing school attendance, and his failure to ensure crop har­ vesting by halting the local stampede. In both novels, Carlyle's growth in personal self-awareness is the primary focus, but by making Carlyle a man of solely white ancestry in the later book, Mitchell eliminates the exploration of guilt caused by Indian blood. Aliena­ tion is shared by both white and red man in The Vanishing Point; it is not unique to the individual of mixed racial heritage. At the simplest level, this alienation is expressed in terms of environment: 'These Stonys are aliens, but what are they alienated from, huh? From the rest - from the real aliens - that concrete and asphalt doesn't sprout and turn green in spring for them - those high-rises don't bud and leaf and turn and drop - that is one rigid frantic, son-of-a bitching slough! '62 Yet if the city is presented in images of death, Mitchell does not blindly idealize the red man's environment. Paradise Valley is dirty, disease-ridden, and filled with despair as the Stonys try to find a way of life which links the red world of the past with the world of the white man who dominates their present and future. An early review of The Vanishing Point described it as 'a novel of social protest ... an indictment of the way we have degraded and corrupted the Indian, taking away his culture and leaving him in limbo where he is neither one thing nor the other.'63 Such a reading can be supported on almost every page of the novel as Mitchell confronts the disease, starvation, and pain of a red man's world that is victim of a technological civilization symbolized by the artificial carnival world of the white man's city. Yet to view the novel as fiction 'of social protest' is to undervalue its primary focus on the personal growth of the white protagonist and his confrontation with his past and pre­ sent worlds in a quest for values that will lend meaning to his existence. The terror Carlyle feels as a child in the face of the 'nothingness' of the vanishing point follows him into adulthood. Terrified of death, he smothers the emo­ tions that could release him from his prison of 'civilized rationalism.' When Victoria, bearing all his hopes and efforts on the reservation as well as his projected images of daughter, wife, and mother, fails to achieve the dream he has imposed on her, Carlyle despairs. Yet out of this despair he discovers a new capacity for love of both himself and others. Like his prototype in 'The

56 A Native Heritage

Alien,' Carlyle achieves this growth into a 'new great area of consciousness' in the midst of the Prairie Chicken dance. Just as the experiences of the protagonists of the two novels are closely related, the role of the Indian as source of alternative values is similarly handled in both works. In 'The Alien,' it is old John who sits on the rock in harmony with the landscape; in The Vanishing Point, Victoria's grandfather, Esau Rider, assumes the role in a scene with direct verbal echoes of the earlier novel: elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose. Possibly hours that way - stirring only to fill and light his pipe - staring down at the rock, where orange fungus scaled its minute foliage - or into the water where perhaps a bull trout hung. Esau-trout trout-Esau. God, how he envied him his primitive talent for self-erasure, if it saved him from melancholy, from flesh and spirit pain. Did he achieve oneness with eternity? - what an overblown way to explain sun-warmed stupor ....All the same he did envy him. (p 136)

Carlyle recognizes that in spite of physical and cultural stresses far more intense than his own, the Stonys of Paradise Valley have a capacity to affirm life and love in a way in which he cannot. Mitchell undercuts the suggestion that old Esau achieves a 'oneness with eternity,' but repeatedly suggests that the red man has achieved a peace undiscovered by the white protagonist. Mitchell's perspective on the unique capacities of the red man may be linked to the repeated allusions to the work of William Blake in The Vanish­ ing Point. Accompanying the identification of Victoria as 'little girl lost' and 'little lost lamb,' the naming of Beulah Creek and many other direct refer­ ences to Blake's poems in The Vanishing Point is an overriding preoccupa­ tion with the relationship between finite and infinite worlds common to both writers. In 'The Marriage of Heaven and Hell' the speaker questions the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel. Included in the dialogue is the following inter­ change: 'I then asked Ezekiel why he eat dung, and lay so long on his right and left side? he answer'd, "the desire of raising other man into a perception of the infinite": this the North American tribes practise.' 64 The significance of this passage to an understanding of Mitchell's novel becomes clear only when we recognize the 'curious scatological undercurrent' in The Vanishing Point. 6) The novel repeatedly identifies the physical conditions on the reser­ vation as 'shit' and the benevolence of the white man as 'bullshit,' but in this world of dung Mitchell suggests that the red man has preserved a contact between infinite and finite worlds, a link that must be discovered by the white protagonist. Archie Nicotine, perhaps the most fascinating character in

57 Indian Alternatives

the novel, explores all available religious institutions and theologies in a continuing search for a more powerful link between his world and an infinite one. His religious interests are a joke to the whites in the novel, but he ultimately acts positively while the white protagonist wallows in self-pity and despair. His example and that of his people ultimately lead Carlyle into a new state of self-knowledge and a new reconciliation of finite and infinite worlds. As the novel closes, Carlyle resolves to marry Victoria, but rather than being a contrived sentimental conclusion, the sacrament of marriage perhaps most fully embodies the binding of finite and infinite worlds which Mitchell suggests is a necessary goal of every individual. Significantly, Beulah Creek, after being threatened by the explosives of oil surveyors, flows with new power as the novel ends. 'Beulah,' translated as 'married,' is the name given by God to Palestine after the land and its people had been restored to God's favour. Carlyle's marriage confirms a new relationship with his past, his god, his fellow humans and his physical environment which stems from his understanding of the values associated with the Stonys. Exploration of the individual's search for a new sense of personal identity also dominates the novels and short stories of Margaret Laurence. In each Manawaka narrative, the Metis family ofJules Tonnerre becomes the focus of suffering and death, acceptance and endurance that are integrally related to the experience of each of Laurence's heroines. Established in The Stone Angel (1964) as 'French halfbreeds' opposing the values of white civilization associated with Hagar Shipley, the Tonnerres are victims of those values in The Fire-Dwellers (1969) and in A Bird in the House (1970). Unlike Hagar, or Rachel Cameron in A Jest of God (1966), the protagonists of these later works escape their own neuroses and fears to find a new perspective on their pain through contact with the poverty, dis­ crimination, and death pervading the world of the Tonnerres. These images recur in The Diviners ( 1974), but in this final novel in the series, Laurence also develops a member of the Tonnerre family as a central character for the first time. Jules Tonnerre emerges not only as a character whose suffering is a standard by which Morag Gunn can measure her own pain, but also an embodiment of the acceptance and freedom that are goals of each of Laurence's protagonists. As she recalls her childhood walks through the Manawaka cemetery, Hagar Shipley reflects on the wild flowers which marred the graveyard in the eyes of Manawaka's Presbyterians: They were tough-rooted, these wild and gaudy flowers, and although they were held back at the cemetery's edge, torn out by loving relatives determined to keep the

58 A Native Heritage plots clear and clearly civilized, for a second or two a person walking there could catch the faint, musky, dust-tinged smell of things that grew untended and had grown always, before the portly peonies and the angels with rigid wings, when the prairie bluffs were walked through only by Cree with enigmatic faces and greasy hair. 66

This opposition between the 'civilized' rigidity of Manawaka's white citizens and the essential vitality of nature, in a landscape associated with the Indian, parallels Hagar's antagonism towards the Tonnerre boys with whom John plays as a child: Once when I was out picking saskatoons near the trestle bridge, I saw him with the Tonnerre boys. They were French half-breeds, the sons of Jules, who'd once been Matt's friend, and I wouldn't have trusted any of them as far as I could spit. They lived all in a swarm in a shack somewhere - John always said their house was pass­ ably clean, but I gravely doubted it. They were tall boys with strange accents and hard laughter. (p 127)

The pride and intolerance revealed in this initial appraisal of the Tonnerres more subtly govern all Hagar's relationships throughout her life. Just as her father forbids his son Matt to go 'gallivanting around the coun­ try with a half-breed,' Hagar shames John into withdrawing from the child­ hood game on the bridge. Only later does she learn that he subsequently joined the Tonnerres in more dangerous games, rejecting the personal and social values that Hagar tried to instil in him. Most painfully, Hagar dis­ covers that John traded the plaid pin bearing her family's crest for Lazarus Tonnerre's knife. John's death on the bridge, after he takes up a dare from Lazarus, is the culmination of Hagar's failure to realize the dynastic dreams inherited from her father and to find the values of freedom and spontaneity associated with the Tonnerres. Before her death, Hagar finds some release from the pride, guilt, and fear that have imprisoned her, but she never fully understands the extent to which the dimly acknowledged Tonnerres have functioned as symbolic alternatives to the 'civilized' values that have guided her life. In A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, and A Bird in the House, Lazarus Tonnerre's children represent the whole Tonnerre family. Piquette and Val­ entine Tonnerre are contemporaries of the white protagonists in each of these books and are part of a recurring pattern in Laurence's work: 'One of her strongest and most constant effects, the pervasive sense of pathos and irony in man's uneasy balance in experience, comes from her setting together of

59 Indian Alternatives simple daylight reality with echoes from the bright world of romantic dream or from its other face, the dark world of Gothic nightmare.'67 In these terms both a romanticized past and the hideous present of the Tonnerres and their Metis heritage are expressed in the works following The Stone Angel. As Vanessa MacLeod surveys her childhood and adolescence in A Bird in the House, she recalls the summer when Piquette Tonnerre accompanied the MacLeod family to their cottage on Lake Diamond: I did not remember ever having seen a real Indian, and my new awareness that Piquette sprang from the people of Big Bear and Poundmaker, of Tecumseh, of the Iroquois who had eaten Father Brebeufs heart - all this gave her an instant attrac­ tion in my eyes. I was a devoted reader of Pauline Johnson at this age, and some­ times would orate aloud and in an exalted voice, West Wind, blow from your prairie nest; Blow from the mountains, blow from the west - and so on. It seemed to me that Piquette must be in some way a daughter of the forest, a kind of junior prophetess of the wilds, who might impart to me, if I took the right approach, some of the secrets which she undoubtedly knew - where the whippoorwill made her nest, how the coyote reared her young, or whatever it was that it said in 'Hiawatha.' 68 To the disappointment of the young Vanessa, Piquette fails to fulfil the romantic expectations fed by Longfellow and Johnson, and 'as an Indian' she is dismissed as 'a dead loss.' When Vanessa and her father listen to the loons on Lake Diamond, Piquette does not respond as a 'junior prophetess of the wilds' but rather dismisses the 'bunch of squawkin' birds.' An older Vanessa realizes, however, 'Piquette might have been the only one, after all, who had heard the crying of the loons' - the cries that come to symbolize an isolation both more painful and more profound than that experienced by Vanessa or by Rachel and Stacey Cameron. For Vanessa, the sounds of the loons emerge plaintively, 'and yet with a quality of chilling mockery; those voices belonged to a world separated by aeons from our neat world of summer cottages and the lighted lamps of home.' The world of the Tonnerres is equally removed from surrounding white civilization. When Piquette attempts to break out of the isolation imposed on her family by white society, she fails, and returns to alcoholism, poverty, and death in Manawaka. Just as white society will not accommodate Piquette, commercial developers around Lake Diamond give no thought to the loons. When Vanessa returns to the lake after learning of Piquette's death several years later, the loons have disappeared: 'I did not know what had happened to the birds. Perhaps they had gone away to some far place of belonging. Perhaps they had been unable to find such a place, and had simply died out,

60 A Native Heritage

having ceased to care any longer whether they lived or not.' (p 127) Dia­ mond Lake has now been renamed Lake Wapakata: 'it was felt that an Indian name would have a greater appeal to tourists.' The white world that displaces the loons and rejects Piquette acknowledges only a romantic image of the past rather than the grim reality of the present. When Rachel recalls the loons at Diamond Lake in A Jest of God she wishes to escape into the isolation that she associated with them: 'People say loon, meaning mad. Crazy as a loon. They were mad, those bird voices, perfectly alone, damning and laughing out there in the black reaches of the night water where no one could get them, no one could ever get at them.'69 Yet, just as Vanessa discovers that the isolation of the loons does not protect them from white civilization, Rachel ultimately realizes that she will be unable to retreat to a world where she will be 'perfectly alone.' Unlike the other protagonists in Laurence's Manawaka fiction, Rachel, locked within the limited world of her own fantasies and fears, finds no link between her world and the Tonnerres'. Yet, although her suffering is of a different order than the pain, poverty, and racial discrimination that characterize the Ton­ nerres' world, Rachel, like them, is forced to acknowledge that sheer endur­ ance may be the only affirmation available to any individual in a world where God can at best be viewed as a trickster. In The Fire-Dwellers, Stacey recalls her youth by Diamond Lake where 'the spruce trees held themselves intensely still, dark and immutable as old Indian gods, holding up the star-heavy sky.' 70 Later she sees the destruction of the tall spruces and stands listening at night on the beach alone, frightened, but having to stay, listening to the lunatic voices of the loons, witch birds out there in the night lake, or voices of dead shamans, mourning the departed Indian gods, she not thinking of it like that then, only wholly immersed in the unhuman voices, the begone voices that cared nothing for lights or shelter or the known quality of home. (p 172)

Like Vanessa, Stacey returns eight years later to find that the loons have disappeared. She initially thinks that perhaps they can go far enough north to escape 'civilizing' man but suddenly realizes that white civilization now extends too far north for the birds ever to escape. The Indian village described by Luke embodies the analogous plight of humans unable to escape: a bunch of run down huts and everything dusty, even the kids and the dogs covered with dust like they were all hundreds of years old which maybe they are and dying,

61 Indian Alternatives which they almost certainly are.... The attraction is the totem poles. And there they are - high, thin, beaked, bleached in the sun, crackling and splintering, the totems of the dead. And of the living dead. If I were one of them, the nominally living, I'd sure as hell hate people like me, coming in from the outside. (p 227) Later, the description of Kitwanga recurs in Stacey's mind, but her reverie includes Luke walking beside her in the old village and reassuring her. Yet Laurence insists that no romantic escape is available to the contemporary individual; the condition of Indian and Metis culture is a reminder of the precariousness of any assumed stability in a constantly changing world. Luke, who always wears an Indian sweater, has found no easy escape route. Like the loons, he can keep going farther north, but civilization will continue to encroach on his dream of a return to the natural harmony of the country's original peoples. Just as Piquette Tonnerre reminds Vanessa in A Bird in the House of the ravages of white civilization, Valentine Tonnerre, barely recognizable in her thick make-up, confronts Stacey in The Fire-Dwellers. In Valentine's degen­ eration into drug addiction and prostitution, Stacey sees a painful parallel to her own alienation and suffering: 'Even her presence is a reproach to me, for all I've got now and have been given and still manage to bitch on and on about it. And a reproach for the sins of my fathers maybe. The debts are inherited and how could the damage ever be undone or forgiven?' The destruction of the Tonnerres and the degeneration of Metis culture result from the same insularity and ignorance that Stacey feels threatening her own life. She acknowledges, however, that the reality of the Tonnerres and of the Kitwanga Indians involves a horror that she knows only from television and fantasy. As Stacey considers the past and present condition of Valentine Tonnerre, she traces the decline of the family from the time when Valentine's grand­ father, Jules, fought with Riel in the Rebellion of 1885: the last and failed attempt to save themselves and their land, the last of their hope­ less hope which was finished the year that Riel was hanged in Regina. After that, the Bois Brzilis, the French-Indians, the Mecis, those who sang Falcon 's Song, once the prairie horse lords, would be known as half-breeds and would live the way the Tonnerres lived, in ramshackledom, belonging nowhere. (pp 263-4) In The Diviners, Laurence returns to a consideration of Riel :}nd the Metis past in her treatment of the relationship between her white protagonist, Morag Gunn, and Valentine Tonnerre's brother, Jules. Morag and Jules bear

62 A Native Heritage

the names of ancestors who fought on opposite sides during,'the Riel Rebel­ lion, but although they conceive a child, there is no easy fusion of races and cultures three generations after the Rebellion. Unlike Hagar, Rachel, Stacey, or Vanessa, Morag Gunn shares the Ton­ nerres' sense of social alienation from childhood. Yet Morag and Jules are separated throughout the novel. Jules identifies Morag as part of the white society that has dispossessed his people despite her hatred of the social atti­ tudes of Manawaka. Thus, as Morag tells of his sister Piquette's death by fire in one of the Tonnerre shacks, Jules turns and shouts: 'By Jesus, I hate you ... I hate all of you. Every goddam one.''' The cultural gap separating these two individuals is again emphasized as Jules tells Morag of his father's death and the refusal of the citizens of Manawaka to allow him to be buried in the town cemetery: 'The Metis, once lords of the prairies. Now refused burial space in their own land. Morag cannot say anything. She has no right.' Jules will not allow Morag to forget that she is white and, as such, can be identified only as the enemy in some part of his mind. As he lies on his deathbed, Morag speaks of their daughter: 'Jules reached out to the floor for his drink. When he faced her again, it was with some residue of the ancient anger, the ancient grief. "You let her be, see? You just let her be." Even now, he felt he had to speak like that, did he? And perhaps he did, perhaps he did.' The conflict mythologized in the stories of Piper Gunn and Rider Tonnerre finds no sentimental resolution in the daughter born to Jules and Morag, a daughter named Piquette in memory of Jules's dead sister. If Laurence rejects a romantic union of red and white worlds in her handling of the relationship between Morag and Jules, she does grant Morag a better understanding of both herself and her world than is gained by the earlier protagonists in the Manawaka series, an understanding which is directly linked to her relationship with Jules. Before she leaves Manawaka for university in Winnipe g, Morag meets Jules, who has returned from com­ bat in World War Two. When she enquires about his future plans, Jules replies: 'I don't have to do anything at all that much. I'm not like you.' In an effort to escape Manawaka, Morag is driven to 'do,' and when she next meets Jules, she has begun to recognize the failure of her marriage and the futility of her attempts to deny her past. When Morag leaves her husband and joins Jules in his dingy flat, her lover observes, 'I'm the shaman, eh?''' Jules does indeed function as the shaman of freedom and release in a novel much con­ cerned with the 'magic' of sex, water divination, and the creative process in the arts of music, painting, and literature. The identification of Jules with a unique kind of freedom is suggested by references to horses in the novel. These allusions stem from Jules' stories of

63 Indian Alternatives

Rider Tonnerre and from Morag's view of the Metis of the past as 'prairie horselords.' She tries to determine the significance of the association late in the novel: 'What was so essential about it? Nothing, except that it was the mythical beast. Signifying what? Many would say potency, male ego, but it seemed that a kind of freedom might be a better guess.' Despite repeated evidence of Jules' sexual power over Morag, his significance extends beyond his physical energy into his embodiment of 'a kind of freedom.' He may hate the white man who stood by and watched his family and his people die, but in the midst of discrimination and despair he has discovered a personal freedom which Morag is still struggling to hold onto at the end of the novel. If Piquette and Valentine succumb to despair in trying to function in white society, Jules survives. As a folksinger, he must pander to his white audi­ ence's preconceptions of the Indian in order to earn enough money to exist; yet he can accept this masquerade as a necessary condition for having the freedom to sing for his living rather than having to work in a factory: 'I don't dress like this when I'm singing,' he says. 'I wish to christ I could, but no go. You should see me. One-man circus. Satin shirt with a lotta beadwork, and some­ times a phoney doeskin jacket with fringes and a lotta plastic porcupine quills in patterns. That's what they like. ... 'Oh, it's not so bad. It's a load of shit, but I don't worry much as long as they let me do the singing.' (p 266)

Unlike Morag, Jules has expected no 'Halls of Sion' in this world and thus has gained both a personal freedom and an awareness of his own mortality. Perceived by Morag at one point as 'moving through the world like a dande­ lion seed carried by the wind,' Jules is, nevertheless, no romanticized drifter. His self-respect and freedom result from acceptance of his fate and recogni­ tion of how little he can do to alter that fate. His suicide near the end of an inevitably fatal illness is not an act of despair but a final, limited gesture of defiance. As The Diviners concludes, the plaid pin and the knife traded by John Shipley and Lazarus Tonnerre in The Stone Angel are returned to their pro­ per spiritual owners. Jules has inherited the pin from his father and Morag has received the Tonnerre knife from her stepfather. When her father dies, Piquette inherits the knife, just as she will receive the pin representa­ tive of her Scottish inheritance when Morag is 'gathered to her ancestors.' Thus, in this final work in the Manawaka series, Laurence collects the sym­ bols of cultural disparity introduced in The Stone Angel. Yet if Morag's rela­ tionship with Jules at first seems like the antithesis of the gulf separating

64 A Native Heritage

Hagar and Lazarus, Piquette's mixed racial inheritance is finally less an image of cultural fusion than a physical correlative for the dichotomies that will force her, like each of Laurence's protagonists, to divine freedom out of suffering. The exploration of the tensions between red and white psychological landscapes through the pairing of red and white lovers recurs in works from every era of modern Canadian fiction. The pattern perhaps most subtly explored in the fiction of Laurence and Mitchell is also a primary or secon­ dary focus in works ranging from Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese (1925) and Frederick Niven's Mine Inheritance (1940) through Fred Bodsworth's The Strange One (1959) and Rudy Wiebe's Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962) to David Williams's The Burning Wood (1975), Joanna Glass's Canadian Gothic (1977), and James Houston's Ghost Fox (1977). The most contro­ versial extension of this vein of primitivism occurs in Marian Engel's Bear (1976), where Lou, the protagonist, discovers a new relationship with the natural world and a new capacity for love through the bear who has been cared for by a Cree woman, Lucy Leroy. Just as Laurence rejects amalgama­ tion of red and white cultures in her treatment of Morag's and Jules's rela­ tionship, Engel insists on the impossibility of Lou's dream to join fully the world of the animal whom she loves. Yet as she leaves the lush summer world identified with the Indians and the bear for the winter world of white civilization, Lou carries a new strength and sense of personal integrity that links her to the white heroes and heroines throughout English-Canadian literature who discover new perspectives through exposure to alternative values identified in Indian cultures.

4 Death of the Indian Whether the white English-Canadian writer has viewed the red man as sav­ age antagonist or primitive alternative, he has been forced to acknowledge the erosion and decline that have destroyed or threatened red culture since the arrival of the white man. In his introduction to Songs of the Great Domin­ ion ( r 889), William Douw Lighthall reflects a preoccupation of most of his literary contemporaries and predecessors when he speaks of 'the lament of vanishing races singing their death-song as they are swept on to the cataract of oblivion.'' Six of the nine poems treating an aspect of red culture in Light­ hall's anthology doom the Indian to extinction, an emphasis which reflects a perspective that prevailed until a continuous line of white settlement had been forged across the country. Twentieth-century writers, faced with the survival of the Indian despite the dire predictions of their predecessors, continue to find in Indian culture images of disintegration, assimilation, and death. From these images come works characterized by attitudes ranging from self-righteous rage against white destruction of the red man to a nostal­ gic sense of loss and 'a vaguely divided guilt' defined by Andrew Suknaski: 'guilt for what happened to the Indian (his land taken) imprisoned on his reserve; and guilt because to feel this guilt is a betrayal of what you ethni­ cally are.' 2 Few white writers rejoice at the genocidal victory of white civilization over the red man, but as late as I 894, John Campbell could assert in The Cana­ dian Magazine that 'blood stains the whole of Indian history.... As races they had sold themselves to do the Devil's work and when the white man came they received the devil's pay.' 3 Nine years earlier, during the North-West Rebellion, The Week reprinted an article from The Pall Mall Budget, arguing that if 'the red men have many just grievances against the white men, the converse is equally true, for the Indians have had many chances given them.

66 A Native Heritage The only conclusion to be drawn is, that their dying out would prove an unmixed benefit to both races.' 4 Similar assumptions underlie works such as Goldsmith's The Rising Village, but few writers have been so strident. Charles Sangster's 'Sillery' is uncharacteristically harsh and explicit in its conclusion that the destruction of the Iroquois people was divine retribution for an Iroquois massacre of whites and Christianized Hurons at Sillery in 1648. 5 More common in nineteenth-century literature is the assumption that destruction of the red man's culture was historically inevitable. In his travel book, Ocean to Ocean (1873), George Grant observes Ojibways west of Lake Superior: Poor creatures! not much use have they ever made of the land; but yet, in admitting the settler, they sign their own death warrants. Who, but they, have a right to the country; and if 'a man may do what he likes with his own,' would they not be justified in refusing to admit one of us to their lakes and woods, fighting us to the death on that issue? But it is too late to argue the question; the red man, with his virtues and his vices, - lauded by some as so dignified, abused by others as so dirty - is being civilised off the ground.6 Many of Grant's literary contemporaries and predecessors share his assump­ tion that 'these vast regions were surely meant to maintain more than a few thousand Ojibways.' The landscape repeatedly reminds white writers of its aboriginal inhabitants, but until the late nineteenth century white authors most frequently presented the red victims of the white man's civilization as casualties of history. Rosanna Leprohon's 'The River Saguenay,' Adam Hood Burwell's 'Ontario,' Susanna Moodie's 'The Maple Tree,' and Charles Mair's 'Kanata' illustrate a repeated pattern in which poems move from a meditation on the beauty of the landscape, through reminiscences on the red men who once inhabited it, to a final reverent tribute to the constancy of the landscape in a world of change. The vanished red man is a casualty of human transience and history. This benign neutrality surfaces in post-Confederation fiction in An Algon­ quin Maiden (1887). Despite her identification in the title, the improbably­ named Wanda plays only a peripheral role in the novel's plot of love affairs among four members of the political and social elite of Upper Canada dur­ ing the years preceding the Rebellion of 1837. The complication in one of these love matches is the conflict in political sympathies of Reformer and Tory, and in the second relationship the male's attraction to Wanda has the same function. Compromise solves the first conflict, but the novel suggests

67 Death of the Indian that the second can be resolved only by Wanda's lovesick suicide. After a proper period of polite mourning, she is calmly forgotten, and the novel ends with a double honeymoon up the St Lawrence for the white lovers. Wanda's father warns her of the influence of a white race that 'like the poison vines of the forest ... touches all who come near it with fatal effect,' but the authors of An Algonquin Maiden never confront the implications of his prophecy.7 Instead, they consistently subordinate the tragedy of the red man to the demands of sentimental romance. Similar assumptions of historical inevitability dominate non-fictional works of the nineteenth century, but by far the greatest number of poets, novelists, and playwrights in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries confront the white man's role in this decline more directly. Three distinct patterns emerge from this acknowledgement of the white man's responsibi­ lity. Many nineteenth-century works, culminating in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott, contrast the contemporary Indian with his ancestors and locate a vision of a heroic world in the red man's past. Searching for conti­ nuity with that world, other writers of the past two centuries elegize lost red cultures - the Beothuks of Newfoundland serving as a recurrent focus in this context. A larger number of twentieth-century writers respond to the white man's involvement in the destruction of red culture with explicit attacks on the failure of white society. In the poems and novels of a final group of poets and novelists, the decline of red culture becomes a memento mori for the white man, reminding him of the tenuous continuity of all cultures and civi­ lizations. VANISHED PEOPLES

Analysing the impact of Cartesian rationalism on Canadian culture, Nor­ throp Frye suggests that nineteenth-century Canadian writers, under the influence of this rationalism in 'a country without a mythology,' repeatedly expressed themselves in nostalgic and elegiac modes. Man's definition of his humanity in terms of his capacity to reason leads to literature 'talking about emotional attitudes instead of presenting them' and to the separation of man from the natural world. 'Death is the one point at which man and nature really become identified; it is also, in a sense, the only event in which the genuinely heroic aspect of human life emerges. ' 8 Frye notes the aptness of the Indian as a subject for nostalgic recollections of heroic endurance in the face of death and takes Duncan Campbell Scott's 'The Forsaken' as an example. Nostalgic reminiscence about the heroic fortitude of the disappearing red man first surfaces in a subgenre identified by F.E. Farley in late eighteenth-

68 A Native Heritage

century English poetry. 9 Farley notes a pervasive focus on the figure of 'the dying Indian' defiantly delivering a death song recalling the glory of his people; the genre survives in nineteenth-century poetry in England and the United States and emerges in Canadian poetry in the work of Peter John Allan, Charles Mair, and others. The first poem written by Allan was entitled 'The Indian Warrior' and portrays the red man addressing his foes as he dies at the stake: Now torture; for thy greatest skill Those red-hot irons ply, Your coward hearts are nerv'd to kill And mine is nerv'd to die. '0 Charles Mair's 'The Iroquois at the Stake (Ancien Regime, circa 1680)' presents a similar figure embodying the heroic virtues of bravery and stoical endurance. A note appended to Mair's poem suggests the appeal of such works: 'In these verses an attempt is made to represent the ruling spirit, strong in death, of an Iroquois warrior of the highest rank, when his nation was at the culmination of its power and keenly alive to the import of white encroachment and aggression.'" In a vision of the Indian in the period before he was overwhelmed by the white man, the white writer discovers a model of heroic fortitude who can be idealized and admired since he is clearly a figure of the past. Any threat such a figure might have for white civilization has been eradicated by the collapse of red culture in the years separating the temporal setting of the poem and the date of its composition. More common in Canadian literature than the use of a red persona as a focus for nostalgic reminiscence of a heroic Indian past is the presence of a white speaker recalling the last days of red glory. As early as 1801, an unidentified poet writing in the Upper Canada Gazette insistently places the heroic days of the red man in the lost past: Poor ghost, no more the Indian race Shall here the pipe of peace relume, No more their counsel [sic) fire shall blaze, Nor that of east disperse the gloom Deep in the dust is laid each bow unstrung, And mute, for ever flopp'd each warrior tongue." Thirty years later Adam Kidd incorporates less graphic imagery in quoting from 'Ossian' in the epigraph to 'The Huron Chief: 'Where are our Chiefs

69 Death of the Indian of old? Where our Heroes of mighty name? / The fields of their battles are silent - scarce their mossy tomb remains!'' 3 At mid-century, William Kirby sees the contemporary Indian as 'the last poor remnant of a race gone by,' recalling 'once mighty nations, shrunk to feeble bands.'' 4 Images of darkness convey separation of the heroic world of the red man's past from the degenerate reality of his present in the sixteenth of Charles Sangster's 'Sonnets, Written in the Orillia Woods, August, 1859': My footsteps press where, centuries ago, The Red Men fought and conquered; lost and won. Whole tribes and races, gone like last year's snow, Have found the Eternal Hunting-Grounds, and run The fiery gauntlet of their active days, Till few are left to tell the mournful tale: And these inspire us with such wild amaze They seem like spectres passing down a vale Steeped in uncertain moonlight, on their way Towards some bourn where darkness blinds the day, And night is wrapped in mystery profound. We cannot lift the mantle of the past: We seem to wander over hallowed ground: We scan the-trail of Thought, but all is overcast. 15 The heroic age of the red man has passed with the deceptive speed of melting snow; the poet comments neither on the agents of the red man's destruction nor on the poverty and despair of his successors. Instead, Indian survivors are ghost-like presences reminding the poet both of their lost heroic ances­ tors and of the mystery of death itself. The next sonnet in Sangster's sequence remarks on the absence of evi­ dence relating to this age of Indian glory, 'a few stray skulls; a heap of human bones!' Yet the speaker finds in this world vitality and violent energy: The fierce Ojibways, with tornado force, Striking white terror to the hearts of braves! The mighty Hurons, rolling on their course, Compact and steady as the ocean waves! The stately Chippewas, a warrior host! 16 In this list of warring tribes, more at home in the epic than in the sonnet, Sangster finds images of a heroic past separated from both red heirs and

70 A Native Heritage white invaders. 'Sillery' confirms this perspective, as Sangster speaks of con­ temporary red men in images of 'lees,' 'remnants,' and 'echoes' in compari­ son with their heroic predecessors. Novelists also were attracted to the idea of a lost but heroic Indian past. Hampden Burnham casts the Indian as savage antagonist in Jack Ralston or The Outbreak of the Nauscopees (1902), but presents the Indians of his novel as degenerate successors of a heroic conquered order of the past: What must these denizens of the wilderness have been in their heyday, before the white man, under Cartier and Champlain, had invaded the northern half of this continent, to fan into a conflagration, wide in its range and destructiveness, the fitful flame of Indian savagery and lust of war....Records, and they are many and reli­ able, show them to have possessed qualities of both the Greek and Roman, and to have far excelled any of the native tribes of Europe, Asia, or Africa.17 Burnham repeatedly associates the heroic with the savage impulses which find free rein only in the frontier environment eradicated by the white man. In The Blood Lilies (1903), Burnham's contemporary W.A. Fraser intro­ duces a Presbyterian minister who argues that the meeting of white man and red man on the western frontier was 'in rebellion to God's law.' Stressing the impact of alcohol on red culture more extensively than any other work in English-Canadian fiction, Fraser's novel insists on the rapid deterioration of red culture after exposure to the white man: The red men had been like Noah in their ignorance.God had favoured them beyond all races, for liquor was not of their glorious heritage of birthright. When, to their eternal shame, the white men had brought the fire-water, the Indian had taken it as did Noah; it warmed their hearts and made them joyous, and then it mastered them, and they lay like the Patriarch, naked in their misery.18 Like Burnham, Fraser can acknowledge a 'glorious heritage' in the red man's past, but both writers pointedly withdraw from pursuing the full implications of their recognition that the white man has been directly involved in the erosion of red culture. The white writer of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who is most closely identified with the culture of the Indian is Duncan Campbell Scott. Scott, like most of his contemporaries, accepted the eventual dis­ appearance of the red man as inevitable. In the conclusion to his account of 'Indian Affairs' in Canada and Its Provinces, he suggests that

71 Death of the Indian the happiest future for the Indian race is absorption into the general population, and this is the object of the policy of our government. In the Indian communities now under discussion we see the natives advanced more than half-way towards the goal, and the final result will be this complete absorption. The great forces of inter­ marriage and education will finally overcome the lingering traces of native custom and tradition. 19 From a distance of more than sixty years it is easy to disparage the paternal­ istic policy of assimilation which Scott, in his role as civil servant, accepted and for a time directed. But he accepted the prevailing view of his contem­ poraries that the age of the Indian had passed and believed that the most beneficent role for the white man was to ease the slow but inevitable process of extinction. Thus, he justified his department's opposition to traditions such as the potlatch and the sun dance by asserting that the original spirit underlying these traditions was long dead and that their continued observ­ ance simply slowed the process of assimilation. ' This distinction between Indian cultures of the past and present also underlies Scott's imaginative response to the world of the red man. In an essay first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1906, he muses: 'the Indian nature now seems like a fire that is waning, that is smouldering and dying away in ashes; then it was full of force and heat.' 21 Examining contemporary red culture, Scott repeatedly depicts individuals painfully caught between the worlds of red man and white man in a process of decline and disintegra­ tion; only in the past of the red man in poems such as 'Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris' and 'The Forsaken' can he discover pride and affirmation. As Scott recalls his friendship with the painter Edmund Morris, his elegy catalogues their travels to Blackfoot Crossing, where Morris marked the grave of Crowfoot with a circle of stones, and through Cree territory, where they listened to an old man tell of heroic conflicts between Cree and Black­ foot. Finally Scott turns to the death of Akoose, an Algonquin chieftain who displays a serenity and dignity in death which comforts the poet as he grieves for his friend. An incomparable hunter as a young man, Akoose, in old age, becomes blind, guided by a rope stretched from his teepee. Yet in one final burst of energy, he seizes a pony in order to return to the hunting grounds of his youth; there, he briefly recaptures some of the intense vitality of his younger days and is then ready to die in peace: 0

There Akoose lay, silent amid the bracken, Gathered at last with the Algonquin Chieftains. Then the tenebrous sunset was blown out,

72 A Native Heritage

And all the smoky gold turned into cloud wrack. Akoose slept forever amid the poplars, Swathed by the wind from the far-off Red Deer Where dinosaurs sleep, clamped in their rocky tombs. 22 Temporal boundaries fade as Akoose rejoins land which holds prehistoric bones. Scott resolves his grief at Morris's death in the image of Akoose's heroic vitality in life leading to a death that evokes not 'tears, but joy.' 'The Forsaken' employs a similar pattern of heroic intensity juxtaposed with calm serenity. In the first part of the poem, a Chippewa woman baits a fishhook with her flesh in order to ensure the survival of her child. In the second part, now an old woman, she again accepts the dictates of communal rather than personal survival and waits alone for her death as the snow prepares her shroud. There is no echo of the resistance that Wordsworth attributes to the protagonist of 'The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman'; instead, Scott finds in the Chippewa woman an image of heroic acceptance that ultimately brings 'rest' in the face of death. •J The sonnets 'Watkwenies' and 'The Onondaga Madonna' both introduce images of the loss of the red man's past vitality. Each poem presents the past in images of violence, but the violence has an energy more attractive than the defeated passivity of the contemporary Indian. As a young girl, the Iroquois woman of 'Watkwenies' (she who conquers) knifed a sentry in accord with a code of vengeance presented by Scott as 'her nation's lore and law.' Now the conquering woman is vanquished and faces the agent helplessly as he pays her 'the interest money' on the land that white civilization took away from her. The mother in 'The Onondaga Madonna' still carries the 'savage' and 'pagan passion' of the past in her face but she is now part of 'a weird and waning race.' whose demise is anticipated in the child of mixed blood at her breast.24 If the Christ-child of traditional Western representations of madonna and child promises new life, the baby in Scott's poem marks only doom for his mother's people. Scott consistently associates the Indian of the past with heroic, if savage, energy, speaking of one native who arrives at a James Bay settlement for his treaty payment as 'still wild as a lynx, with all the lore and instinct of his race undimmed.''$ Although attracted to this image of past vitality, Scott nevertheless views control of this energy as the essence of the civilizing process. In 'Charcoal,' the tension between 'the white man's ways' and 'the old way' focuses the dilemma of Scott's Blood hero. Influenced by his grand­ father's accounts of the glories of earlier days, Charcoal kills his wife's lover

73 Death of the Indian

and after weeks of eluding police is finally betrayed by his brother-in-law. Scott presents his protagonist as confused and torn by the conflict between instinctual needs rooted in tradition and white dictates of reason and order: 'He was to be killed in the white man's manner; to his mind it was only vengeance, death for deaths, which the warriors of his own race dealt to their foes in the old days, and in a braver fashion. They had driven away the buffalo, and made the Indian sad with flour and beef, and had put his muscles into harness.... It was all involved in mystery.''6 Although the story presents Charcoal as a pathetic casualty of cultural transition, Scott pointedly withdraws from any primitivist stance. The omniscient narrator describes the protagonist's lapse into 'the old way' as a 'lapse into paganism,' and the story evokes the same sense of inevitability as Scott's official despatches; the principles of progress and social Darwinism which underlie white policy are accepted rather than attacked. In a manner reminiscent of 'Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris,' Charcoal finds comfort just before his execution, in the tribal medicine bag, not in the incantations of the Christian priest. Yet if the persistent, old tradition can provide solace in death, Scott firmly rejects its efficacy in a world where the red man must live within the white man's law. In poems and stories of individuals of mixed blood, Scott repeatedly acknowledges the residual power of this heroic energy of the past while simultaneously anticipating its inevitable submission to the forces repre­ sented by white civilization. In 'The Half-Breed Girl' the individual of mixed blood is almost paralyzed in her frustration at being caught between two cultures.Scott emphasizes vitality embodied in violence stemming from both her inherited traditions, but the heroic Indian past is irreconcilable at the most elemental level with the white man's world, and mere existence becomes a living death for the girl. The search for a resolution to this tension is the centre of the narrative of Keejigo in 'At Gull Lake: August, 1810.' Of French and Saulteaux parent­ age, Keejigo is 'troubled by fugitive visions' like those of the halfbreed girl in the earlier poem. Attempting to leave the world of the Saulteaux by joining the white trader, Nairne, Keejigo is rejected by both red and white worlds, blinded, and thrown over a riverbank 'like a dead dog.' She finds resolution only in death as she is apotheosized as the morning star, which with the sun and the moon completes 'the holy triad' of the Saulteaux. '' The poem has been read as an attack on the principle of assimilation, but it seems equally plausible and consistent with the symbolic structure - and more plausible in light of Scott's other work - to view the poem as a com­ ment on the impossibility of pacific assimilation.'8 Fascinated throughout his career by the heroic energy he perceived in past red culture, Scott presents

74 A Native Heritage

in Keejigo the irreconcilability of this world with that of the white man; in the conflict, the individual is destroyed, finding peace only in death. Scott finally seems to have been caught between adherence to a progressive view of history that justified his work as an official in the Department of Indian Affairs and an attraction to the heroic values of a culture radically trans­ formed by the white man's arrival. Perceiving only pain in the contact of red and white cultures, he becomes a political advocate of a policy of assimilation that would obliterate red culture but would, in his view, ultimately lessen the pain of a people whose culture had irrevocably deteriorated and declined. The combination of fascination for the heroic past of the Indian with a belief that the red man would inevitably disappear becomes less prominent in twentieth-century English-Canadian literature as the red man's cultural sur­ vival becomes obvious. The white writer still focuses on the past glories of red culture but, rather than emphasize the temporal remoteness of these heroic days, stresses the continuum linking ancient and modern man - both red and white. Thus, the Beothuks of Newfoundland, extinct since 1829, become the subject of elegies that link the past and the present. An early review of Peter Such's Riverrun (1973) suggested that Such's novel was perhaps 'the first work of fiction, or popular book of any kind ever written about the Beothuks,' but in fact, from 1827 when Shawnadithit, 'the last of the Beothuks,' died, writers have commemorated her people in fiction and verse. 29 In 'The Huron Chief,' published in 1830, Adam Kidd appends a long note on the Beothuks as examples of the victimizing of red men by white imperialists, although he apparently did not realize that the tribe had become extinct before publication of his poem. Like many of his successors, Kidd gets his facts wrong, although the absence of detailed anthropological data has done nothing to discourage writers from focusing on the Beothuks. With the exception of a long, anonymous documentary sketch of Shawna­ dithit published as part of a series of journal articles in 1836, the first Cana­ dian literary work to focus directly on the destruction of the Beothuks is George Webber's 'The Last of the Aborigines: A Poem Founded on Facts' (1851). 30 Despite its subtitle, the poem is not a documentary narrative; instead, Webber creates a fictional Beothuk family and incorporates docu­ mentary anecdotes into his sentimental account of their destruction. Initially concerned with the amours of the heroine, Soloa, the poem quickly shifts to catalogue the final days of Soloa's family and the tribe's one remaining war­ rior, her unrequited lover, Bravora. Whites, ironically identified as Chris­ tians on every occasion, are fear-ridden immigrants who mercilessly kill the Beothuks in apprehension and ignorance. In his death song, Bravora recalls the story ofDemasduit, Nonosabasut, and the last group of Beothuks as part

75 Death of the Indian of his own family history, but Webber makes no use of actual names nor of extensive historical detail. Documentary accuracy is less a concern than elegizing a lost people, and the poem ends with Soloa disappearing into dark­ ness 'passing for aye from mortal view.' 3' In The Vanished Race (1927), Arthur English acknowledges the problem of reconciling fact and fiction. He imposes on his account of the last Beothuks a romantic plot of a shipwrecked Irish girl who spends her youth with the 'Red Indians' before fleeing to the mainland with the last two survivors of the tribe. The presence of a white girl among the Beothuks was extensively debated by anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,3' a possibility which is the basis for English's romantic plot: From Harvey's Hand Book of Newfoundland the accompanying brief outline of the history of the Beothuks has been taken in the hope that the reader of this romance may find an account of the Indian race with whose last days this story is concerned of some interest. In the story I have endeavoured to relate, I have woven a fabric, the woof and warp of which is as true to the material facts provided by history as the exigencies of the romance will permit. 33 The priority given by English to the demands of romance significantly detracts from his ostensible focus on the Beothuks. The novel includes refer­ ences to Nonosabasut, Demasduit, and Shawnadithit, but their fates are passed over quickly as the author describes the fortunes of his fictional white heroine. In contrast to The Vanished Race, Peter Such's Riverrun (1973) focuses on the culture of the last Beothuks, and gives in documentary detail the final years in the lives ofNonosabasut, the last surviving leader of a small group of Beothuks, his wife, Demasduit, captured by whites in 1819 in a struggle in which Nonosabasut was killed and finally Shawnadithit, niece of Nonosaba­ sut and the last Beothuk. Beginning in September 1818, the book ends with an authorial note acknowledging the death of Shawnadithit in June 1829: 'Her grave, originally in the Church of England cemetery on the Southside, St John's, was lost when the cemetery made way for a city street.'H For Such, the Beothuks are part of a past that has too often been forgotten or ignored: 'we all need a sense of our past, of how our present and indeed our future grow out of it. ' 35 In recreating the lost culture of the Beothuks, Such leads us through an elegiac recreation of its last days. In a preface to the novel, Such acknowledges the importance of James P. Rowley's The Beothuks or Red Indians (1915), and an examination of the novel in relation to Rowley's anthropological and historical study reveals the

76 A Native Heritage

novelist's debt to the earlier volume not only for the documents quoted directly in the text but for virtually all the incidents developed in the novel and for the details used in the delineation of Beothuk culture. Despite Such's use of extensive documentary detail, the novel is related in a lyrical prose that prevents the book from lapsing into historical precis. It has been criti­ cized as having 'the gauze-like quality of a dream,' but the inexorableness of the process by which the Beothuks became extinct does indeed lead the reader to stand in dream-like amazement at the utter disappearance of a people who once possessed the integrated and vital culture recreated by Such. 16 The title of the novel reinforces Such's emphasis on the tragic inevitability of the Beothuk's death. Taken from the initial word of Finnegans Wake, the title reappears in the phrases linking the beginning and ending of that work that are quoted by Such as an epigraph: A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay. In Joyce's work, the phrases suggest the cyclical flow of continuing exis­ tence, but Such's novel presents not continuation but extinction. The last Beothuks, whose life has cyclically run along the river linking their inland lake to the sea, confront the catastrophic breaking of the cycle, and the novel concludes: Listen. This is where the riverrun ends. Doodebewshet, Doodebewshet widun widun Doodebewshet odemet Doodebewshet widun widun. (p 144) Shawnadithit mourns the death of her mother, Doodebewshet, and of her people, 'odemet,' the ochre-coloured ones, who will now move into a world of 'widun,' sleep and death. Earlier in the book Shawnadithit's husband recognizes that 'if all the People die with no children there will be no one to remember our spirits. We will disappear in the ages like birchbark in the fire.' It is to preserve the memory of these people that Such writes his book: 'a kind of debt I owe,' and Riverrun becomes an extended elegy for a people who exist now only in memory.

77 Death of the Indian

The early identification of the Beothuks as 'red' Indians because of their practice of painting themselves with red ochre is the focus of the first poem in Sid Stephen's Beothuck Poems (1976). For Stephen, the Beothuks, following the Dorsets and the Norsemen to Newfoundland, are men who find within the earth the ancient veins of ochre to protect red veins within themselves, who see the sun and stay to hold the land as it becomes a part of them as they become 'the people' Beothuk 31 Initially establishing the harmony, vitality, and reverence that characterize the Beothuks' relationship with their natural environment, Stephen turns in the second and third parts of his volume to the breakdown of that culture under the influence of the white man. Never at home in this land, the white settlers conjure visions of demonic savages threatening them as the landscape itself threatens; this 'paranoia of I civilization / becomes rooted in the land / like a myth,' and the Beothuks starve and die as all their traditional sources of strength collapse. After honouring the deaths of Nonosabasut and Demasduit, Stephen devotes the seven poems comprising the third part of his collection to Shawnadithit. Her capture, drawings, and death are sources for poems of 'true history,' 'what lives / within the mind.' Earlier associations of vitality with images of sun, sea, blood, fire, and the colour red now are reversed as Shawnadithit's death is chronicled. Yet Stephen refuses to sentimentalize her death by playing on the guilt of his white readers. Instead, he looks to Shawnadithit as a spirit of the land itself; through her and her people, in the final section, he himself finds meaning in a world of change and isolation. Other writers also focus on the lost culture of the Beothuks. The sense of sorrowful amazement evoked by Such's novel recurs in Al Purdy's 'Beothuk Indian Skeleton in Glass Case.' Rather than sadness, Purdy's speaker feels astonishment that the camera-toting tourists who surround him have sur­ vived, while the skeleton of the Beothuk man, six feet three inches tall, is one of the few relics of an entire vanished people. Paul O'Neill's Legends ofa Lost Tribe (1976) is a strange collection of twelve tales 'based on the archetypes of fables and traditional tales,' which the author 'has carefully interwoven ... with what is known of Beothuck life and beliefs.' 38 Al Pittman elegizes the

78 A Native Heritage last of the Beothuks in 'Shanadithit' but acknowledges that his vision of her is born out of a 'grade seven history book ... mixed up / with technicolor movies / and my own boyish musing.'19 In 'The Rim of the Curve,' Michael Cook presents a three-act dramatic indictment of the white man as destroyer of the Beothuks and victim of haunting memories and dreams. Frederick W. Rowe's Extinction: The Beothuks of Newfoundland (1977) argues against many of the generalizations, cliches, and distortions that have gained acceptance in historical and anthropological accounts of the Beothuks. Many of these historical misrepresentations have also surfaced in related poetry, fiction, and drama. Yet none of these works attempts to pre­ sent a documentary narrative of the Beothuks. Each writer is a myth-maker and like those writers who discover a heroic past in the culture of the vanish­ ing red man, their success is measured by their capacity to create a vital link between the world of their subject and that of their reader. PROTESTS AND POLEMICS

Recognition of the contemporaneous rather than historical destruction of the red man was widespread by 1825 when the author of a catalogue of tribes loyal to the British cause during the War of 1812 observed that 'these unfortunate beings, some of them the remnants of once powerful and numer­ ous tribes, are fast declining in numbers and importance.'40 'The Indian's Lament,' a short lyric which appears in the same volume of The Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository as that article, asks for compassion for a people who are 'outcasts on earth.' Acknowledging the condition of the Indian of their own time, these authors anticipate an increasing number of works that confront the white man with the reality of the contemporary red man's world and condemn white society for its condition. Nineteenth-century poets repeatedly use a lament voiced by a red persona to articulate their concern about destruction of the red man's culture. 4' Per­ haps the most interesting of these poems is Frederick George Scott's 'Wahonomin: The Indian's Jubilee Hymn to the Queen.' Printed in Light­ hall's Songs of the Great Dominion with a footnote explaining the first word of the title as 'an Indian cry of lamentation,' the poem contrasts the 'universal joy' in the celebration of fifty years of Queen Victoria's reign with the desperation and despair felt by her Indian subjects. Stressing the alignment of the red man with the natural world, the red speaker cries: The wheels of thy great empire, as it moves From east to west, from south to icy north, Crush us to earth. We perish with the woods.42

79 Death of the Indian In the face of the white man's industrial terror symbolized by the railway, the Indian can only delay his disappearance by retreating: Back, Westward, Northward, ay, Up to eternal winter 'neath the stars Our path must be in silence, till the snows And sun and wind have bleached our children's bones. The red must go; the axe and plough and plane Are not for him. We perish with the pine, We vanish in the silence of the woods. (p 186) Published thirty years before Scott's poem was written, Charles Sangster's 'Lament of Shingwakonce' ends with the hope that the Indian, by moving west, can reach a place where he can escape oppression by the white man. By 1887, however, Scott can only anticipate the red man of Charles Mair's 'The Last Bison,' a poem written in 1890: All vanished! perished in the swelling sea And stayless tide of an encroaching power Whose civil fiat, man-devouring still, Will leave, at last, no wilding on the earth To wonder at or love!H Edward William Thomson's 'Thunderchild's Lament,' 'The Mandan Priest,' and 'Chief Nepoquan's Lament,' all published in The Many­ Mansioned House and Other Poems (1909), reflect the survival of the lament and its perspective into the early twentieth century.•• The assumption that the Indian would inevitably disappear grows less pervasive in twentieth-century literature as his continued physical presence demonstrates his obvious survival. Thus, many writers shift the focus on the red man from his extinction to images of death and destruction associated with his survival in an eroded and degraded culture. Sara Jeannette Dun­ can's The Imperialist (1904) captures the annoyed surprise of whites forced to acknowledge that the Indian has not disappeared; later writers insist on an acknowledgement of the contemporary red man and his culture and on the white man's responsibility for the condition of that culture. Whether focusing on the contemporary reservation or on the Indian in an urban ghetto, these works are frequently dominated by images of imprisonment and the figure of a dying child; they chronicle not the extinction of the red man but the living death he endures.

80 A Native Heritage

The crisis in Duncan's Imperialist is a product of the interrelationship of white man and red man in the small town setting of Elgin, Ontario. Lorne Murchison's election to parliament is disallowed after charges are made that the superintendent of the Moneida Reservation, a Murchison supporter, has exerted undue influence on the Indian vote. Duncan's narrator comments on the Indian: 'Civilization had given him a vote, not with his coat and trousers, but shortly after; and he had not yet learned to keep it anywhere but in his pocket, whence the transfer was easy, and could be made in different ways.'45 The reactions of the Murchison family, elsewhere in the novel an idealized study in Presbyterian virtue, are less than charitable: 'You can never trust an Indian,' said Mrs Murchison at the anxious family council. 'Well do I remember them when you were a little thing, Advena, hanging round the town on a market-day; and the squaws coming to the back door with their tin pails of raspberries to sell and just knowing English enough to ask a big price for them. But it was on the squaws we depended in those days, or go without raspberry preserves for the winter. Slovenly-looking things they were with their three or four coloured petticoats and their papooses on their backs. And for dirt - ! But I thought they were all gone long ago.' 'There are enough of them left to make trouble all right,' said Alec. 'They don't dress up like they used to, and I guess they send the papooses to kindergarten now; but you'll find plenty of them lying around any time there's nothing to do but vote and get drunk.' (p 428)

In the years since Elgin was a frontier settlement, the people of this now prospering town have virtually ignored the continuing presence of its native peoples. Duncan emphasizes, however, that the Indian has survived as something more than a cigar store stereotype: 'a nobly featured squaw in chocolate effigy, who held her draperies under her chin with one hand and outstretched a packet of cigars with the other.' Only because the Indian has passed out of the consciousness of the Elgin citizens can such astonishment and shock be occasioned by the realization that the votes from the Moneida reservation are crucial to the election results. A.M. Klein's 'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga,' published in 1948, anticipates the large number of post-war works concerning destruction of red culture in the context of the Indian reservation. In a manner reminiscent of his poem 'Bestiary,' Klein begins with memories of a white child examining a book of pictures of Indian chiefs and dreaming of escape into an idealized red world. The poem turns, however, from childhood dream to adult reality - a world where along with original names, war paint, and fur robes, the 'nobility' of the red man has been 'expunged.' The men now work in

81 Death of the Indian

overalls while their wives and children beg by the church at Caughnawaga. Although Klein does not explicitly say the church is responsible for the Indian's degradation, he echoes the language of frontier fiction in describing the children's movements: 'for the tourist's/ brown pennies scattered at the old church door,/ the ragged papooses jump and bite the dust.' These chil­ dren are being destroyed as effectively as their frontier forbears. In the heritage of the contemporary red man, the speaker sees nothing but degeneration and degradation. Now the white man has become the 'savage' who collects trophies in the curio shops of Caughnawaga and the red man suffers the cheap commercialization of a once heroic culture. Dances are now held for bribes, and the once erect headdress has become a bedraggled feather. In the concluding stanza, Klein's persona sees the Caughnawaga reserva­ tion as a 'grassy ghetto and no home' and returns to the animal imagery of the poem's opening stanza now associated not with heroic vitality but with decay and death: And these are fauna in a museum kept. The better hunters have prevailed. The game, losing its blood, now makes these grounds its crypt. The animals pale, the shine of the fur is lost, bleached are their living bones. About them watch as through a mist, the pious prosperous ghosts.46 Assimilation, a threat to any minority people, has diluted the blood of the red man, and the fur which in the opening stanza links the Indian with the natural world has now lost its shine. The reservation, rather than preserving the red man and his culture, becomes a crypt for the dying inhabitants, and just as the child at the beginning of the poem gets an inaccurate image of the Indian from his picture books, white adults, 'pious prosperous ghosts,' also have a distorted view, looking at the Indian 'as through a mist.' Chronicling the destruction of Canada's last frontier and its people in 'Letters from the Mackenzie River,' F.R. Scott describes the residential school for boys at Fort Providence as a 'firetrap mental gaol' which mirrors the spiritual imprisonment of an entire people. This image of the contempo­ rary Indian as captive, whether within the physical boundaries of a reserva­ tion or inside the invisible walls of an urban slum, is also a unifying symbol in Gwendolyn MacEwen's story, 'House of the Whale' and in the plays of George Ryga. In MacEwen's story, the twenty-three-year old Haida narrator attempts to order the events that have led him to a trial for murder and a Toronto jail.

82 A Native Heritage

Born into the Eagle phratry of the Haidas, Lucas George spiritually drowns when he leaves the west coast for the world of Toronto. His white friend recalls a Haida myth that identifies the city as the 'house of the whale,' and the story catalogues the destructive agents and influences that dominate this world. With gods replaced by the golden calves of Bay Street, the city breeds only frustration, despair, and violence in Lucas. He now writes from a cell that seems, as he recalls his Eagle heritage, 'a cage for the biggest bird of all.'41 Ryga's plays insistently develop images of the Indian existing within a prison created by white society. In 'Indian,' a white farmer locks a young boy in a granary in an attempt to ensure that the boy's uncle, the unnamed Indian protagonist, will continue to build the fences that reflect white pre­ occupations with boundaries and separation. In The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, scenes are repeatedly set in courtrooms and jails and the backdrop of the stage set suggests Ryga's concern with the city as a maze-like prison from which the heroine cannot escape: 'Backstage, a mountain cyclorama is lowered into place. In front of the cyclorama, a darker maze curtain to sug­ gest gloom and confusion, and a cityscape.'48 For Ryga, the life of the con­ temporary Indian begins in imprisonment and ends in death, and the white man must assume responsibility for the red man's terrible despair. 'Indian,' a play written for television in 1963, focuses on the interaction of only three characters, a transient Indian farm worker, his employer, Watson, and a field worker for the Department of Indian Affairs. The play opens with a confrontation between Watson and his employee on the morning after a drunken spree from which the Indian is still suffering. The frustration felt by the Indian in this encounter boils into overt antagonism towards the 'com­ fortable civil servant' who comes to perform a routine investigation, and the play ends with the white man fleeing in terror after being subjected to the red man's furious despair. The white men of the play are not fully developed and function primarily as representatives of a society which has little concern for the red man. Yet the play is more than a polemical exercise. The reader or audience becomes involved in an attempt to comprehend the character of the Indian of the title, whose anonymity strengthens identification of his personal tragedy with that of his people. The white men in the play are concerned solely with immediate mat­ ters - the farmer with getting his fence built, the Indian agent with complet­ ing a routine inspection. However, the Indian insists on recounting events of both the recent past and of a more remote period in his life. The night before the play opens, the Indian has played poker and drunk bad whiskey with a polio victim whose shoes he now wears. He recalls another polio victim, his

83 Death of the Indian brother, a man he killed in an act of euthanasia. He himself now wears clothing which identifies him with both victims, and, in response to the agent's insistence that he must give him his name, he insists that he has died, like his brother: 'I got nothing ... nothing ... no wallet, no money, no name. I got no past ... no future ... nothing, sementos! I nobody. I not even Jive in this world ... I dead! You get it? ... I dead! (shrugs in one great gesture of grie0 I never been anybody. I not just dead ... I never live at all.' The white 'semen­ tos,' the 'man who has lost his soul,' stares at the Indian after this outburst like 'a medieval peasant meeting a leper,' reflecting, according to Ryga's stage directions, mingled 'fear, pity, hatred.' His earlier reliance on white conceptions of justice, charity, and religious faith gives way to desperation as the Indian physically attacks him with the violence of a man who, consider­ ing himself dead, need not fear killing. After the agent's flight, the Indian returns to hammering posts into the ground, having purged some of his frustration but gaining no release from his bondage. The desperation of the Indian's search for a sense of personal and cultural identity also dominates The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, first produced in 1967. Rita Joe and Jaimie Paul, the lovers and central characters of the play, leave their reservation for the city but find only failure, despair, and finally death. Yet Ryga does not present their tragedy solely as a product of urban dislocation, for Rita's father recognizes that death can also come on the reservation: 'If we only fish an' hunt an' cut pulpwood ... pick strawberries in the bush ... for a hundred years more, we are dead,' and the play offers no promise of a reconciliation of red and white cultures in any context. During the courtroom scene which opens the play, the magistrate insists that 'no one is a prisoner here,' a view dramatically undercut by Rita's recurring appearances in his courtroom on charges of vagrancy, theft, and prostitution. She repeatedly insists: 'I can't leave town. Every time I try, they put me in jail,' and marvels at her sister's ability to escape the city by hitchhiking home after two weeks. Her priest insists that Rita is guilty of pride, a possibility that she acknowledges in giving as her reason for leaving the reservation, 'I never wanted to cut cordwood for a living.' Yet Ryga suggests an inevitability in Rita's inability to leave the city that is more complex and profound than the priest's analysis. Rita insists that she was at first prevented from returning home by lack of money and repeated arrests. Yet despite acknowledging herself to be 'lost like hell' in the maze of city streets, Rita also refuses to leave the city when her father offers to take her home. Obvious reasons include her love for Jaimie Paul and her knowledge of reservation life, but Ryga also suggests that Rita has no real choice. Her movement from country to city has the

84 A Native Heritage

same finality as the transition from childhood to adulthood. Rita's happiest memories are of berry-picking with her sister, but just as a storm ruined one of these childhood interludes, Ryga suggests that adulthood has decisively separated Rita from her childhood environment. A pathetic young girl, she is thrust into an urban adulthood that culminates in her terrifyingly inevitable death. The characterization of Jaimie Paul is less complex. After working in the northern woods, he is elated to arrive in the city, where he obtains a janitorial job with the provincial civil service. After being fired, he becomes militant in his hatred of whites and in his insistence on native rights. Having exposed the prejudices of a white social worker by repeatedly taunting him, Jaimie faces the audience and 'screaming defiance' shouts: 'Not jus' a box of cornflakes! When I go in, I want the whole store! That's right - the whole goddamned store!' Yet Ryga presents this militancy less as political action than as a reflection of despair as Jaimie pathetically continues: 'Teach me who I really am! You've taken that away! Give me back the real me so I can live like a man.' Again, Ryga suggests the individual must carry an identity from childhood to adulthood in order to survive and that Jaimie, like Rita, has been subjected to pressures as an Indian that break that continuum. If their fate reflects Ryga's pessimistic view of the potential of the young Indian to overcome the barriers set before him by white society, the play­ wright also offers linle hope for those who remain on the reservation. Rita's elderly father searches in vain for a chief qualified to replace him and sees no hope for his people: 'I've lived longer, but I know nothing ... nothing at all. Only the old stories.' Presumably even those stories will be lost, as Rita dies in the city and the sister who returned to the reservation is deserted by her lover. The play ends with the balancing of opposed interpretations of Rita's plight. The singer, who has 'all the reactions of a white liberal folklorist' while simultaneously acting as Rita's alter ego, sings of a bird finding its wings and soaring into 'the cold fresh wind of morning.' From one point of view, these lyrics may celebrate Rita's 'ecstatic' release into death, but the wind is cold, whereas Rita craves physical warmth throughout the play. The bird's independence does not answer her need for love and communion. The romanticized perspective of the song is appropriately undercut in the play's final speech by Rita's sister: 'When Rita Joe first came to the city - she told me ... the cement made her feet hurt.' This world of banal realism is the setting for Rita's tragedy, and Ryga offers no vision of escape for either his heroine or her people.

85 Death of the Indian

In'The Children,' Al Purdy writes of Indian boys in Churchill, Manitoba, enduring lives filled with desperation and death; the poem concludes: it isn't true somebody's bound to say b,esides it doesn't make a very good poem and isn't pleasant either I guess but to hell with poems to hell with poems. 49 Other writers may less explicitly set aside purely aesthetic criteria in depict­ ing the contemporary Indian's world, but as they address the white man's conscious or unconscious ignorance of the Indian's plight, they insist on acknowledgement and education. In the figure of a dying child, Canadian poets, novelists, and dramatists have repeatedly found an image with the potential to shock the reader into awareness.Gwen Pharis Ringwood's play Lament/or Harmonica (Maya) (1958) introduces a young girl of mixed blood driven to alcoholism and prostitution after the death of her infant son. Tom Wayman's'Song: I Wish I was an Eagle,' the second part of'The Kumsheen Trilogy,' finds in the accidental death of a young Indian boy a microcosm of the cultural death of his people. Fiction by HughGarner, Alan Fry, Hubert Evans, and Mort Forer employs the same focus in shaping a vision of the death of the contemporary red man. Set in a northern Ontario trailer camp, the climax ofGarner's 'One-Two­ Three Little Indians' is the death of the Algonquin protagonist's infant son. Forced to give up working in the mines because of incipient tuberculosis, Tom now sells woven baskets to tourists while his wife scrubs their trailers. When his son contracts pneumonia, Tom's efforts to convince his wife and the whites that the child needs medical attention are futile, and the boy dies in his father's arms as Tom desperately walks towards the nearest town. Just as he has been forced to fulfil the tourist's expectations of'a real Indian with a feather'n everything,' his headstrong wife has 'learned to live in gaudy imitation of the boomtown life' of the local white society, and the death of their child simply confirms the story's insistence that their lives are subject to forces beyond their control. 5 They have no more significance in the white world in which they must try to survive than do the Indians referred to in the children's rhyme from which the title is taken. A documentary novel, Alan Fry's How a People Die (1970) also uses the death of an Indian child to depict poverty and despair on a Pacific coast 0

86 A Native Heritage

reservation. A representative of the provincial Department of Welfare asserts: 'Tell us in fact how a people die and we can tell you how a people live,' and a baby's death from neglect by enervated parents lost in a haze of alcohol and poverty serves Fry as a point of departure for his grim analysis of life on a contemporary reservationY His difficulties in giving fictional life to his documentary are noted by _Robert Weaver: And how do we respond to characters, Indians and white, whose author cannot reach them where they are really alive inside. I kept remembering a story that Hugh Garner wrote I 8 years ago, One, Two, Three Little Indians. 1 doubt if Garner knows much of anything of a documentary nature about Indians and Alan Fry obviously knows a great deal. But Garner made that imaginative leap inside, and reached his characters where they in their turn could reach back to the reader of his story.52

From his own experience as a supervisor with the Department of Indian Affairs, Fry brings familiarity with his subject matter to his work, but for Weaver How a People Die fails to achieve the dynamic impact of a work of fiction. 53 In contrast to Fry's presentation of unrelieved poverty, degradation, and despair Hubert Evans' Mist on the River (1954) emphasizes the strength of Gitkshan tradition in its portrayal of the tensions in a contemporary Skeena River community in frequent contact with the white world. Again, the death of a child is a focus for the novel. The protagonist, Cy Pitt, is caught between the world of Prince Rupert and the salmon canneries at the mouth of the Skeena, and the traditional world defended by his wife's grandfather. The title suggests his difficulties in penetrating the mist of contradictory impulses which assail him: Out there, beyond the misty darkness of the harbour, were the strong old villages and the good clean sea, and in between were the native people he wanted to forget - the human drift, the rootless ones cast up on this sordid tide flat of the in-between, unable as now he was unable to return to the proven old they had deserted, yet failing to strike roots in that other world which only the most gifted and resolute of his race could make their own. 54

Confronted by the illness of his young cousin, Cy recognizes that only pro­ longed medical treatment in a sanatorium can cure the child's tuberculosis, but he can ignore neither the fears of his mother and uncle nor the evidence of past survival in the absence of white medical techniques. In his attempt to

87 Death of the Indian mediate between worlds, Cy insists only that the boy be taken to the local hospital, and when the child dies, he condemns himself for his vacillation. Although Evans does not minimize death in the red man's world, he ulti­ mately offers a vision of red survival. Cy's uncle reflects that 'his people were like the run of salmon. They were strong because they stayed together; they did not scatter and die out.' Like the salmon, Cy returns to the village and assumes a role as leader of the community in an attempt to counter the continuing threat of cultural death. Mort Forer's The Humback (1969) presents a similar affirmation in the face of death in a story set in a Metis settlement in northeastern Manitoba. 'Toinette, the central character, makes lists in order to keep the fates of her seventeen children fresh in her mind: 'That makes me feel kind of ashamed, that I got to write them down so I don't forget them. But it's the truth, if I don't write them down, I forget.' 55 The disappearance or death of these chil­ dren mirrors the fate of all the Humback inhabitants; poised between the city and the bush, the Metis of the settlement constantly risk disappearance into either world, leaving scant trace of their existence. Yet if the children's death suggests the overriding threat to the whole settlement, 'Toinette also insists on the child as a symbol of endurance and hope. In the face of deser­ tion by her common law husband and the death of her daughter and grand­ child, she joins the old man who has been a husband to her daughter in planning another child of her own. The old man voices the novel's final affirmation: 'Every time something dies ... there should be something new to take its place. There's nothing better than people. Nothing. People are everything.' Against this affirmation is the constant reminder of death pervading the world into which the child will grow. Patrick Lane's 'Treaty-Trip from Shulus Reservation' captures both this dichotomy and the inevitable isola­ tion of the white man from it. The white speaker introduces a drunken Indian leaning against a dusty wall as he struggles to find the zipper of his trousers. The Indian's 'raven woman' crouches below him, and after she vomits on his feet, the man strikes her with his knee. Into this scene of drunken degradation and violence comes a child: Beneath the dull lamp-yellow outlined in counter-play an Indian child bounced her ball against the flat red wall; her fluttering shadow

88 A Native Heritage

in wild macabre dance a part of the tableau. 56 Witnessing both real and imagined participants in this dance of death, the speaker stands helpless and yet mesmerized by the rhythmic beat of the child's bouncing ball. His breathing synchronizes with the rhythm of the ball. The poem evokes a powerful sense of the vitality embodied in the speaker and the child in contrast to the sickness and death associated with the Indian man and his wife. Through its juxtaposition of the scenes within the tableau, the poem suggests that the child's innocence will give way to an adulthood like that of the drunken couple, a couple who may in fact be her parents. The speaker is left, 'like a hooded / jesse-bound hawk,' blindly separated from the world that the poem's Indian characters inhabit. MEMENTOS MORI

Haunted by images of the Indian's decline and death, white writers also relate the destruction of the red man's world to their own culture. With the exception of Duncan Campbell Scott's 'Powassan's Drum,' a terrifying evo­ cation of the hatred of a vanquished people for their vanquishers, only a few recent works envisage a resurgence of red militancy that threatens the white man's complacency. Instead, images and incidents of death within red cul­ ture warn the white man of the inexorable process by which any society and culture may decline and disappear. Scott articulates a vision of serenity and harmony with nature in his treat­ ment of the deaths of individuals such as the Chippewa woman in 'The Forsaken' and Akoose in 'Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris,' but when he evokes an apocalyptic symbol of the death of a race in 'Powassan's Drum' no such harmony emerges. The relentless, pulsating beat of the medicine man's drum initiates a terrifying vision in the mind of the white speaker of a headless Indian moving silently across the water in a canoe: The Indian fixed like bronze Trails his severed head Through the dead water Holding it by the hair, By the plaits of hair Wound with sweet grass and tags of silver.57 Confronted by the threat of eyes burning through the water, the speaker asks if 'the meaning of the magic' is 'the translation into sight / Of the viewless

89 Death of the Indian

hate.' This question repeats earlier questions relating directly to the sound of Powassan's drum: Is it a memory of hated things dead That he beats - famishedOr a menace of hated things to come That he beats- parched with anger And famished with hatred-? (p 61) The poem is the only one of Scott's works in which the frustration and hatred of the Indian are released. No answers to the speaker's questions are offered, but even as the storm which ends the poem obliterates the headless canoeist, it complements the terrifying 'throb-throb-throb/ Throbbing of Powassan's drum' in a final vision of power and violence. The hatred of Scott's Powassan is echoed in Milton Acorn's 'Ojibway Louis Cameron Speaks in Toronto.' The speaker addresses those 'whose ears are clogged unless skewered' and insists that 'the fighting Indian must drive on/ the timid just.' 5 The speaker of Acorn's 'Dig Up My Heart' shares Cameron's militancy and while acknowledging that 'there may not be much Indian in me' asks to be resurrected as 'Heartman' and anticipates 'the day of the People's Judgement' against the white man. 59 More common in Canadian literature than a vision of the destruction of the white man's world by the Indian is the recognition that this world is subject to the same laws of chance, change, and death that have contributed to the red man's destruction. The laments delivered by Indian personae repeatedly end with a reminder: 8

Yes! Time's eagle will prey On the Pale Face at last, And his doom, like our own Is to pass and be past.6o In 'The Last Bison,' Charles Mair not only anticipates the destruction of white civilization but also the return of the red man to the landscape with which he is so closely identified; Robert Stead's 'The Seer' offers a similar prophecy as the Indian chief addresses the white man: Behold, the things your hands have done, the power your arts have won Behold, these things shall vanish as the snow before the sun;

90 A Native Heritage

The snow that smothered out the red - ah, hear it if you can Shall leave the earth as suddenly, and leave it brown and tan.6' (author's italics) Later twentieth-century writers rarely envisage the return of the red man's glory, but meditations on Indian remains and artifacts, in a pattern antici­ pated in nineteenth-century poems such as Alexander McLachlan's 'To an Indian Skull,' repeatedly forecast the white man's decline. The narrator of Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) even introduces such sobering reflections into his recreation of Mari­ posa. The resident intellectuals of Mariposa, Dr Gallagher and Dean Drone, repeatedly debate the merits of the former's historical interpretation of human experience against the latter's insistence on a perspective based on the classics and theology. The essentially comic values of these interchanges are accompanied in one sequence by a confrontation between the ideal world of Theocritus' pastorals and a graphic reminder of the vanished red man: I remember that on the day when Dr Gallagher brought over the Indian skull that they had dug out of the railway embankment, and placed it on the rustic table, the Dean read to him so long from Theocritus that the doctor, I truly believe, dozed off in his chair. The Dean had to wait and fold his hands with the book across his knee, and close his eyes till the doctor should wake up again. And the skull was on the table between them, and from above the plum blossoms fluttered down, till they made flakes on it as white as Dr Gallagher's hair.6' Et in Arcadia ego - the Indian skull intrudes not only into the pastoral world

of Theocritus but also into the 'sunshine' world of a Mariposa composed of memory and dream.63 In a landscape dotted with place names such as 'Wis­ sanotti,' 'Tecumseh,' and 'Indian Island,' Leacock reminds us of the grim reality of the Indian's death in the history of this landscape. The skull, accompanied by falling blossoms and the Dean's white hair, becomes a powerful symbol of the forces of mutability and death that threaten both white and red worlds. In The Village ofSouls (1933), Philip Child finds a focus for the death that all men must acknowledge and accept in a plague-ridden Huron village in seventeenth-century New France: Scarcely a fortnight had passed since human beings had lived in the village and already it was drifting into decay like the fallen trees of the forest. Burial huts hastily

91 Death of the Indian erected and never used had become filled with withered leaves blown before the bitter wind, the huts in which people had lived were foul with the odour of corrup­ tion, the abandoned altars of sticks on which had hung bearskins and ghoul-eyed masks had begun to sag to earth, and rain beat through the gaps in bark walls through which the dead had gone to the land of souls. The tawdry settlement, ephemeral and insecure as the lives it had sheltered was beginning to fade back into the forest.6'

Initially the embodiment of death-in-life and subsequently a reminder of the mutability and isolation of all human existence, the village forces the novel's three central characters into both an acceptance of death and a recognition of the ultimate mystery of the soul, a mystery which must be confronted and acknowledged but which can never be explained rationally. For Child, love offers the strength that allows the individual to endure in a world of change and death; more recent novels by Matt Cohen and Wayland Drew present a less confident vision of the redemptive power of human love in the face of a confrontation with death in the red man's world. In Cohen's Wooden Hunters (1975), set on an island on the British Columbia coast, the world of both red man and white man is filled with sickness and death. The white man has destroyed the foundations of the original red culture on the island, and now the few totem poles that are left glare 'east across the cove and towards the mainland in permanent dis­ approval of all that had come from that direction.'6s The latest incursion of the white man with a timber contract will eradicate even the mortuary poles of the original Indian burial places, threatening the contemporary red man with a variant of the temporal rootlessness of white society. If the red char­ acters in the novel are crippled by cancer, lung disease, and blindness, Cohen insists that white society has a more profound sickness that stems from its inability to discover a usable past, its failure to accept its own mor­ tality, and its refusal to acknowledge its own capacity to kill. The novel's conclusion suggests the possibility of a 'good future' for the young white woman who is the book's central character; yet the prophecy is followed by harsh laughter and the novel offers no positive vision of the future for any of its characters. The action of Wayland Drew's The Wabeno Feast (1973), a futuristic novel envisaging the destruction of white civilization, shifts back and forth through three time periods. In the earliest, the book recounts the experiences of a Hudson's Bay Company factor at a post north of Lake Superior in 1785 and 1786. On his way to establish the post, Duncan Mackay witnesses a ritual feast of a wabeno and his followers, members of an Ojibway medicine

92 A Native Heritage society who, in an orgy of destruction, burn virtually an entire island and mutilate themselves in the destructive fires. One of Mackay's guides describes the techniques of the wabenos as 'an overturn of nature,' and this idea links the two parts of the novel set in the twentieth century, one in the 1940s and one in the present and near future. Drew suggests that the eco­ logical collapse of the environment, which appears to be inevitable, is a product of the same kind of collective madness as underlies the destructive­ ness of the wabeno. This collapse is anticipated and explicitly linked to the feast of the wabenos by an Indian chief, Miskobenasa, who tells Mackay: I fear what you have brought among us, Mackay. For although you are my guest I see that you are mad, and will try to escape your death even for a little time, and that you will cause the death of others, and of the birds of the air and the creatures of the earth, and even of the earth itself, which you will lay waste to keep at bay your fear of death. You are all wabenos, you whites, maddened by fires. You flee the enemy within, and fleeing, burn the plains and woodlands. 66 Drew traces Mackay's failure to reconcile his beliefs in reason and progress with establishment of a harmonious relationship with his environment; he also examines the collective failure of the white man in North America, from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, to function harmoniously either within himself or within his environment. Journeying up the St Lawrence in 1785, Mackay carries preconceptions of the Indian as 'an inferior breed and corrupt beyond redemption.' When his voyageurs tell stories of the wendigo, the factor dismisses the accounts as the lore of children and turns to Marcus Aurelius, who counsels 'the suppression of fancy.' Later Mackay acknowledges that all reports indicate that contact with Europeans has had no positive effect on the culture of the Indian, but explains this failure by insisting that the Indians are irredeem­ able. Witnessing the wabeno feast confirms his view of the Indian as a dissolute savage. Not until he encounters Miskobenasa does Mackay confront a living alter­ native to the progressive values of the white civilization that he affirms. Not only do the chief and his people demonstrate the existence of a red society that functions with a vitality not evident among the Indians exposed to the white man, Mackay also discovers an Indian girl who liberates him from his repressive rationalism and leads him to acknowledge: 'I was a man, and there was nature in me as in others also.' Yet he cannot forsake the culture which has conditioned him throughout his life, and he searches for a recon­ ciliation of red and white worlds.

93 Death of the Indian

The work of Marcus Aurelius formulates the dilemma in terms of the potential conflict between nature and reason. Mackay cannot understand the profound bond that Miskobenasa perceives among all living things and pursues the problem 'by quoting Aurelius to the effect that if a man were sane his every action would be in accord both with Nature and with reason.' Miskobenasa curtly replies: 'If a man were sane ... he would have no need to reconcile these two.' For Mackay such sanity is inaccessible. Only a progressive theory of his­ tory can provide 'the sense of order' that he finds essential. He can never come to terms with the cyclical view of the universe held by Miskobenasa and his people. Mackay dies within months of building the cabin that sym­ bolizes his inability to harmonize his belief in reason and progress with the natural philosophy affirmed by Miskobenasa. Mackay's cabin links this eighteenth-century trader with the twentieth­ century protagonists of the novel, specifically with Paul Henry, who dis­ covers the remains of the building as a teenager and later by an intricate sequence of events gains access to Mackay's journal. The part of the novel set in the twentieth century describes, through an account of four teenage boys, the rise of industrial development in a pulp mill town north of Lake Superior. The novel then explores the early adulthood of each boy in Toronto, the ecological collapse of the environment, and the breakdown of a twentieth-century version of the society represented two centuries earlier by Mackay. The Indian has become a town whore or a crazed hermit in the deserted settlement established by Mackay, a fate which Drew suggests is about to be shared by the white man. Paul Henry and his wife, after the death of their son in an air pollution disaster, leave on a one-way journey into 'le pays d'en haut.' They have little assurance that they will survive in the wilderness that destroyed Mackay, but any action is preferable to remaining in the environment of destruction, madness, and death that killed their son. Early in the novel, Mackay views Indian society as the embodiment of ultimate depravity; as the book ends, Drew increasingly emphasizes the depraved quality of the white society which destroyed the Indian culture. References to the frog as an Ojibwa totem pervade the novel and establish a contrast with the white man's inability to function harmoniously within his natural environment: 'Consider, for example, the beauty of the frog. Con­ sider the ease and grace with which he moves in the stuff of life. Consider his gelatin eggs spreading among the reeds. Consider his strength, his perfec­ tion. Consider this saying of the Ojibwa: "The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives".' The analogies to red and white culture are obvious;

94 A Native Heritage

the amphibious frog embodies the adaptability to an environment that the Indians of Miskobenasa's camp possess but which the white man is unable to achieve. Instead, an entire culture imitates the mad cult of the wabeno and initiates its own death. Irving Layton also finds in the dying Indian a focus for reflections on the future of the white man. 'Iroquois in Nice' introduces an Iroquois chieftain in the midst of the white decadence of the French Riviera. An historical victim of the French, as his 'beaverskin holed by French bullets' indicates, the chief is unnoticed by the French and other Europeans who throng the beach at Nice. 67 Only the Canadian speaker and an American who shares his North American 'affection/ ancestral as our gloomy forests and lakes / for this misplaced Iro­ quois chief see the spectral red man as he moves among the sun bathers: The Iroquois condemns the world of the gaudy apartment buildings - a 'plastic' and 'tinsel' world born out of the same European 'Enlightenment' that declared the North American red man a savage. Layton's speaker joins the chief in disdaining 'the French provincials browning their pots' on the beach and wonders if the Iroquois has been led to spend 'his wampum money/ getting to know other cultures than his own': his irony gives me a charge but since chromatic scars are overawing I don't ask him where he's picked it up and he takes my silence as a sign that my enlightenment is now complete. (p 37) Aligning himself with the North American native in shared contempt for this corrupt, 'civilized' European world, the speaker remains separated from the Iroquois by the awe-inspiring scars that mark the red man's defeat in an earlier age. Only North Americans see the Iroquois throw himself under the wheels of a Peugot, 'but there's no explosion, no sound of brakes;/ the Peugot drives on as if it had hit a shadow.' Although Canadian and American share a recognition of the red man's destruction that contrasts with the oblivion to which Europeans have consigned him, the North Americans rush to escape to the nearest bar to gulp one pony of firewater after another and tell the young dazzling ash blonde harlots admiring their Cote d'Azur suntans and the fatbellies pricing them that nothing happened. (p 37)

95 Death of the Indian

Prepared to share his ironic attacks on white civilization, the North Ameri­ cans are not willing to confront the chiefs symbolic re-enactment of his destruction by a culture that now breeds its own decadent death. Memories of the red man fade in the alcoholic haze that played such a significant role in the white man's initial destruction of the Indian in the seventeenth century, and twentieth-century man becomes a victim of his own 'enlightened' civi­ lization.

5

Indian Heroes Robert Rogers' Ponteach, or The Savages of America (1766), one of the earl­ iest plays in English written by a North American, also marks the emergence of the red man of history as literary hero. Sixty years later, Adam Kidd aligns himself with 'Ossian' in his search for indigenous heroes and celebrates Tecumseh and others in 'The Huron Chief (1830). Later in the nineteenth century, Charles Sangster notes that if Canada lacks 'feudal castles old, / like eyries perched on high,' the country does have an indigenous history of 'mighty chiefs' and 'sachems gray.' Sangster honoured Tecumseh in a lyric poem, and by the end of the nineteenth century, his exploits had been mined as a literary source by more than half a dozen other writers. Along with Pontiac, Joseph Brant, Sitting Bull, Big Bear, and others, Tecumseh has also served as an indigenous hero for twentieth-century English-Canadian writers. The eagerness to locate red heroes partially explains the enduring appeal of two of Canada's best-known 'Indians,' Grey Owl and Pauline Johnson.' That 'Grey Owl' was Archie Belaney is now familiar, but identification of the Englishman as an authentic 'native' voice of the wilderness nevertheless continues. Less well known, perhaps, is Pauline Johnson's family history. Johnson's mother was English, her great-grandmother, German, yet she in­ sisted that she was 'wholly Indian' and like Grey Owl chose to be identified with Canada's native peoples. Between the beginning of the twentieth century and the outbreak of World War Two, Johnson and Grey Owl gained greater popularity and recognition as exponents of 'authentic' Indian views than any writers before or after them, white or red. Johnson's writing career began with the publication of her first poem in 1885, and her popularity lasted long after her death in 1913. Grey Owl's publications in the 1930s, coupled with speaking tours reminis­ cent of Johnson's popular poetry readings, led to his being considered a true

97 Indian Heroes

Indian in the public imagination. Recent reprints of works by both authors testify to their continuing appeal. Johnson gave her first dramatic reading in 1892 and quickly became one of the country's most popular concert entertainers. Norman Shrive stresses the importance of her Indian identity to Johnson's success: 'Let us accept Pauline Johnson as she herself wished to be accepted - as a Canadian Indian. And in her own time this role was the very one in which her audience wished - almost desperately, one feels at times - to see her. Psychologists might even say that her enthusiastic followers would have projected this role upon her, whether she wished it or not.' Johnson's theatrical presence and dramatic sense lent impact to much of her work that was unrelated to Indian culture, but it was as an exponent of red culture that she wished to be known. Poems with titles such as 'Canada' and 'Canada Born' explicitly indicate her proclivity for patriotic themes, but more important to her acceptance as 'national poet' was her success in reconciling the values and fate of Canadian native cultures with prevailing white attitudes. Thus Charles Mair writes after Johnson's death that 'she saw our national life from its most salient angles, and, in a current phrase, she saw it whole.'3 Sir Gilbert Parker sees little of the 'undoubted genius' asserted by Mair but argues that 'her native land and the Empire should be glad of her for what she was and for what she stood.' 4 Johnson's work repeatedly reveals her reverence for the imperial ties link­ ing Canada to the British crown, and the fate of the red man is often buried in imperialist sentiment. In an early poem, commissioned to be read 'On the Dedication of a Memorial to Joseph Brant' in 1886, Johnson speaks of the Indian graves created by the domination of the white man in Canada, but then asserts 'one common brotherhood' in honouring Brant as a hero of both white and red races: What tho' that home no longer ours? Today The Six Red Nations have their Canada. And rest we here, no cause for us to rise To seek protection under other skies. Encircling us an arm both true and brave An arm on which all British subjects lean The loving hand of England's noble Queen. 5 These royalist sympathies recur in the concluding essay of Legends of Van­ couver (1911), in which Johnson recalls the initiation of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, as a chief of the Six Nations Indians in 1869.

98 A Native Heritage

Coupled with her nationalist and imperialist sympathies is Johnson's resigned acceptance of the fate of her people. Even poems such as 'A Cry from an Indian Wife' - perhaps her strongest poetic protest against the wrongs suffered by the Indian - consistently end on a resigned, fatalistic note.6 Wrapped in the conventions of minor Victorian verse, these 'protest' poems found easy acceptance by white readers and audiences. Like contem­ poraries such as D.C. Scott and Hampden Burnham, Johnson accompanies this fatalistic acceptance of the decline of the red man with visions of the heroic Indian of the comfortably remote past. In her foreword to Flint and Feather ( I 912), she emphasizes the warring associations of both the arrow­ head and the warbonnet referred to in her title, and poems such as 'Ojistoh' and 'As Red Men Die' recreate for her white audience narratives of wild violence and heroic adventure from the Indian's past. These narratives hold the appeal of romance for the white reader while not threatening the compla­ cency with which he accepts the destruction of the red man and his culture. Although she was evidently able to make tribal distinctions, Johnson often speaks indiscriminately of the 'Indian.' Her generalized images of the red man fed the romantic dreams of readers such as Charles Mair: In our history the Indians hold an honored place .... They had to yield but before quitting the stage, they left behind them an abiding memory, and an undying tradi­ tion. And, thus, 'Romanticism,' which will hold its own despite its hostile critics, is their debtor. Their closeness to nature, their picturesque life in the past, their mythical religion, social system and fateful history have begot one of the wide world's 'legends,' an ideal not wholly imaginary, which, as a counterpoise to Real­ ism, our literature needs, and probably never shall outgrow. 7

When Dunstan Ramsay, the hero of Robertson Davies' Fifth Business (1970), returns from World War One as a Victoria Cross hero, he is lodged in a hotel named the Tecumseh House to await a program honouring him along with Deptford's lesser war heroes. Included in the program is the recitation of Johnson's 'Canada Born' by a young girl 'wearing Indian dress.' During this recitation Dunstan realizes 'that one of our brave boys, namely George Muskrat, the Indian sniper, who had picked off Germans just as he used to pick off squirrels, was not present. George was not a very respectable fellow (he drank vanilla extract, which was mostly alcohol, to excess and shouted in the streets when on a toot), and he had not been given any medals.'8 Johnson's poetry, recited in 'Indian dress' is socially acceptable, but George Muskrat is not.

99 Indian Heroes Widely anthologized in textbooks and surveys of Canadian poetry, John­ son's work was honoured after her death by the literary boosters of the 'Maple Leaf School,' and the public of the nineteen-thirties discovered a living successor to Johnson as 'Indian' litterateur in Grey Owl. Before he died in 1938, Archie Belaney, having arrived from England at the age of seventeen, had become one of Canada's best-known public figures and the country's most influential conservationist. He had also become 'Wa-Sha­ Quon Asin, Grey Owl, North American Indian' and his public lectures repeatedly began with a statement about this assumed identity. Grey Owl's mother was not, as he claimed, an Apache, and yet, in the minds of thou­ sands of white Canadians, this Englishman became the authentic spokesman for the Indian's point of view. He never claimed full Indian ancestry, but, like Pauline Johnson, he insisted that he spoke as an Indian. As mediator between red and white cultures, Grey Owl seems to have been acutely aware of the impact of his assumption of an Indian name, fringed buckskin suits, and Ojibway phrases; in this role he could address his audiences and readers as an individual with the special relationship to the wilderness attributed to the red man, and his views as ecologist and conservationist thus had added impact. The wilderness had long since disappeared in Europe and was badly eroded in parts of Canada and the United States, but, regardless of how little they might actually know of it, Canadians of the thirties knew that the wilderness still existed. In Grey Owl, they found a potential guide who could also tell them how to save it; in his books they found 'a land of Romance, gripping the imagination with its immensity, its boundless possibilities and its magic of untried adventure.''0 By basing his narratives on his own experi­ ences, Grey Owl became a questing knight in this romantic landscape and offered his readers and audiences the vicarious thrill of sharing his adven­ tures. In the midst of the Great Depression, white readers had little difficulty in sharing his despair at 'the utter futility of civilization' and his attraction to the lure of the unspoiled wilderness. In The Men of the Last Frontier (1931), Grey Owl tells of the adventures of trappers living in a world 'shorn of all the multitudinous complexities of modern life.' Isolated and alone, the trapper becomes a Crusoe figure rather than a victim of _his forbidding environment. In describing the sense of wonder overwhelming a trapper who discovers the snowshoe tracks of another man, Grey Owl explicitly invokes Defoe's hero: 'You undergo all the sensations experienced by Robinson Crusoe on his discovery of the well­ known footprint. A man, one of your kind, and not long gone by.' Yet if Grey

100 A Native Heritage

Owl can identify with the ingenuity and resourcefulness of Crusoe, he neither anticipates nor desires the domination of environment that Crusoe achieved: 'This is the last stronghold of the Red Gods, the heritage of the born adventurer. In this austere and savage region men are sometimes broken, or aged beyond their years; yet to those who are able to tune in on their surroundings, and care to learn the lessons that it teaches, it can become a land of wild, romantic beauty and adventure.' Grey Owl the con­ servationist speaks for harmony rather than control and manages to add to ecological theory the promise of 'wild romantic beauty and adventure.' The Indian's animism is the basis of Grey Owl's argument for him as first conser­ vationist. What the white man can achieve through time and effort, the In­ dian possesses naturally, for red men, in a recurring phrase, are 'in tune with their surroundings.' Grey Owl often acknowledged and apologized for his weakness as a writer, and part of his autobiographical fiction dealt with his supposed lack of formal education. Yet he discovered the appeal that stories of the wilderness and its inhabitants held, and strengthened it by warning white Canadians of the wilderness's imminent disappearance. He became for at least a decade the red 'wilderness man' by whom Canadians were enchanted. In 'Bald Eagle,' a short story with an ironic view of Grey Owl's career, Thomas Raddall suggests that his protagonist Selby Higgins, clearly modelled on Archie Belaney, was taken for an Indian because whites were so quick to accept facile conclusions regarding the red man: 'Selby never fooled an Indian for a minute, though some considered him a half-breed. But he fooled white people without effort, because they wanted to be fooled, because in his person he dramatized for them the Indian of storybooks."' With Pauline Johnson, Grey Owl became a twentieth-century embodiment of the 'Indian of storybooks.' Between them, the two writers offered nationalist visions and values, harmony with the landscape, and a romantic aboriginal past that also dominate the work of other writers who seek in Indian heroes of the past subjects for poems, plays, and novels. Describing the unveiling of the statue of Joseph Brant at which Johnson's dedication was read, Sara Jeannette Duncan observes that 'the sachem in art as in literature is bound to make a sensation. His figure lends itself so well to noble lines, his character to striking conceptions.'' 3 Few subjects in Cana­ dian literature, however, provide better confirmation than the Indian hero that no correlation necessarily exists between the aptness of subject matter and success in treating that subject. Paul Hiebert satirizes the elegiac impulse that draws many white writers to red heroes of the past as his 'sweet songstress of Saskatchewan,' Sarah Binks, honours Eagle Feather:

101 Indian Heroes An age was passing. A culture was going down. Slowly the page of history was being turned upon the Red Brother and all he stood for. The long paths - 'the uncharted paths' - were the way of his feet, and although he might yet stand for a passing day, even as stood Eagle Feather, in the end Sarah must needs salute that heroic figure with a tear. EAGLE FEATHER

Salute with a tear the great departed, Give solemn thoughts and a sigh for them And for Eagle Feather, on paths uncharted, Sing the noon where he had his hour, Sing the Eagle, his best and worst Here's where he stood like the leaning tower, Lost in his thoughts - and his cosmic thirst; Sing that impassive face of leather Silent, inscrutable, Eagle Feather! ' 4 Sarah's mention of Eagle Feather's thirst for alcohol is not uncharacteristic of many early works examined in this chapter where the heroism of the subject is qualified by a significant flaw. Similarly, her verse is little worse than much written about Indian heroes; often the concern and sincerity of the white writer does not enable him to avoid lines such as 'Deep in his heart, of a deepness outdeeping the forest in which they trysted, Tecumtha had a Fair One.'' 5 Rudy Wiebe's 'Where Is the Voice Coming From?' explores some of the problems confronted by a writer presenting the red man as hero. The narra­ tive focuses on the death of Almighty Voice, the Cree born in 1874 who, after shooting a stray cow in 1895, was arrested, escaped from jail, and shot a Mounted Policeman who was attempting to recapture him. Yet the story is less concerned with Almighty Voice's eluding of the police for eighteen months than with the dilemma of the writer who weaves a fiction out of past events and characters. The narrator begins by asserting that 'the problem is to make the story' and insists on the complete involvement of the writer in the events that are the basis of his story. The story-teller can study records of names, the bones of Almighty Voice in a museum, the cannon that killed him, the settings where the crucial events occurred, and pictures of Almighty Voice and his antagonists. However, the story-teller must not only confront the discrimina­ tion inherent in a dominant white culture's choice of what is worth preserv­ ing; he must also acknowledge his own role not just as 'spectator' but as

102 A Native Heritage

'elemenc in what is happening at this very moment.' 16 Only after resolving the

relationship between creator and creation can the story-teller exploit the literary skills at his command to recreate the final climactic events of Almighty Voice's life. Out of the many conflicting images of Almighty Voice, Wiebe's narrator identifies him as a heroic symbol of his people's plight. For white writers throughout Canadian literary history, the introduction of the red man as hero has involved such acts of historical revisionism. Countering the image of the red man as demonic savage, Robert Rogers so idealizes Pontiac that his portrait is less an introduction to his character than a conventional standard by which the evils of white civilization can be measured. Later writers such as George Longmore and John Richardson diminish their heroic portraits of Tecumseh by insisting on his lack of 'civi­ lized' education and inherent savagery. Thus, they risk no offense to white readers as they honour an Indian who opposed whites, since they qualify Tecumseh's heroism by calling him 'uncivilized.' Late nineteenth-century writers avoid similar potential conflicts by aligning the red man's cause to the aims of British or Canadian governments. The red hero thereby becomes a vehicle for propagandistic attacks against the American enemies of both red man and white man. Twentieth-century writers move away from such explicitly political align­ ments to focus on the red hero as the embodiment of ideals and principles defeated or disregarded by the white man that must be re-examined and acknowledged. For these writers, an answer to the question 'where is here?' (posited by Northrop Frye as the Canadian 'who am I?') partly lies in a re-evaluation of the past that acknowledges the beliefs and attitudes de­ fended by Indian leaders. The figure who emerges most prominently in this context is not an Indian, but 'Canada's most noted opponent of the estab­ lished order,' Louis Riel. '7 Riel was linked genealogically to the Indian only through his paternal grandmother, a Metisse, but in English-Canadian lit­ erature he is repeatedly seen as the potential mediator between red and white cultures who was tragically destroyed in the collision of those cultures. COMPARATIVE MODELS

Pre-confederation literary portraits of the Indian as hero addressed an audi­ ence for whom the use of the Indian as a measure of white civilization was already a well-established convention. Yet neither Robert Rogers nor his early nineteenth-century successors are entirely successful in creating a red hero who bears comparison with the white man in common human terms. Rogers idealizes the hero of his play, while Longmore and Richardson dras-

103 Indian Heroes tically qualify Tecumseh's humanity. Kidd avoids these problems by creat­ ing in 'The Huron Chief' an idealized fictional hero who gains credibility through association with familiar historical figures such as Chief Logan and Tecumseh. Rogers first met Pontiac while leading his corps of rangers to Fort Detroit in 1760; three years later, he returned to relieve the fort from attacks by Pontiac's force of more than two thousand men. Following that engagement, Rogers went to London to convince authorities there that he deserved a prestigious appointment in British North America and, as part of his appeal, in 1765 published both his Journals and A Concise Account of North America. 18 Ponteach, or The Savages of America, published four months after Rogers's Concise Account, presents Pontiac as an idealized model of frontier nobility and uses him as a means to expose and excoriate white frontier morality. The first act of Ponteach examines four levels of society in order to show that the 'fundamental Maxim ... that it's no Crime to cheat and gull an Indian' prevails among traders, hunters, soldiers, and politicians. The cor­ ruption evident in each secular level of white society later surfaces in a priest who tries to rape the girl whom Ponteach's son loves. The priest assures the girl: I have a dispensation from St Pete, To quench the Fire of love when it grows painful, This makes it innocent like Marriage Vows; And all our holy Priests, and she herself Commits no Sin in this relief of Nature; For, being holy, there is no Pollution Communicated from us as from others. 19 Just as the secular authorities pervert the scriptures in order to argue that 'he's an Infidel/ Who does not for himself and Friends provide,' this agent of the church brings unique theological precepts to the North American frontier. When the focus of the play shifts to the conflict between red and white from the Indian point of view, we learn that Ponteach is planning to form a confederacy in order to drive the British from the western frontier. A subplot involving love and jealousy between Ponteach's sons also develops, however, and this highly implausible conflict dominates much of the remainder of the play and leads Rogers' drama into doggerel, declamation, and episodic melodrama. Fratricide, combined with defeat of the Indian forces, results in

104

A Native Heritage

a proliferation of dead bodies at the play's conclusion, but Ponteach remains proud and resolute: I will not fear - but must obey my Stars: Ye fertile Fields and glad'ning Streams adieu; Ye Fountains that have quench'd my scorching Thirst, Ye Shades that hid the Sun-beams from my Head, Ye Groves and Hills that yielded me the Chace, Ye flow'ry Meads, and Banks, and bending Trees, And thou proud Earth, made drunk with Royal Blood, I am no more your Owner and your King. But witness for me to your new base Lords, That my unconquer'd Mind defies them still ... (p 257) For Rogers' Pontiac, the landscape is an idealized pastoral world of foun­ tains, groves, and 'flow'ry meads,' a perspective in direct opposition to that of the white men who ravage his country and culture.20 The full title of Rogers' play, Ponteach, or The Savages of America, indi­ cates the play's separation of the proud, dignified, and restrained Ottawa chief not only from the white man but also from the bloodthirsty Indians whom he leads. This isolation of the red hero from his fellow Indians also characterizes the work of many of Rogers' successors. In George Long­ more's 'Tecumthe' (1824), the red warriors shout like 'wild tygers,' 'stern and uncouth' while their leader is a model of restraint, in full control of the energies of his warriors. In Tecumseh, or The Warrior of the West ( I 828), John Richardson presents Tecumseh as a 'Redeemer' of people depicted as cougars, wolves, vultures, and bears. At the end of the nineteenth century J.B. Mackenzie's Thayendanegea, Qoseph Brant) denounces the religion of his own people as 'wild, abhorrent, gross' with rites that are deformed, inane, and soul-stunting. As he himself emerges as an exemplar of virtue, the Mohawk leader praises an Anglican priest for bringing spiritual relief to the 'starved, darkened, blemished, ailing empty breasts' of his fellow Mohawks. Longmore's 'Tecumthe' (the spelling is an attempt to reproduce Shaw­ nee pronunciation) marks the introduction of Tecumseh to Canadian litera­ ture. The 'introductory stanzas' of the poem address Canada as the nation of the poet's birth. After recording his overwhelming sense of the Canadian environment as unexplored landscape and his boyhood recollections of Quebec City, Longmore concludes by asserting that his 'loftiest aim / Was to conjoin at last' his work with his native land." Nothing in the poem explicitly links the subject matter with this professed aim to honour Canada; however,

105 Indian Heroes the implicit assumption that Tecumseh is a worthy Canadian hero apparently underlies the poem's conception. Its three cantos develop progressively more violent themes: canto I describes Tecumseh's warning of the imminent approach of the white man; 2 focuses on the defeat of Tecumseh's forces by the Americans on the Wabash River; 3 surveys the major events of the War of 1812 with particular empha­ sis on the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Tecumseh and General Brock. The poem is increasingly pacifist in tone as Longmore focuses on the destructiveness of war. The object of his attack, however, is war treated as an abstraction rather than the white atrocities committed against the Indians. He carefully withdraws from an extended attack on the white man's treat­ ment of the Indian; instead he resolves that both savage and civilized men are vulnerable to the temptations of war, and he cautions white men against assuming that they are more 'civilized' in this regard. Longmore questions whether 'civilized reason' has introduced new levels of justice, contentment, or moral integrity to human society but calls the Indian 'savage' because of his lack of 'civilized' education. In the 'argument' to the poem, the poet notes Tecumseh's early addiction to alcohol and mar­ vels at his subsequent abstinence: 'That an uneducated being could deny himself an indulgence of which he was passionately fond, and to which no disgrace was attached in the opinion of his associates, proves, we think, that he had views and feelings to raise him above the level of an unenlightened savage.' Tecumseh can rise above the level of 'unenlightened savage,' but even in the concluding lines of the poem, the poet insists that he lacked the 'learning' and 'polished mind' that 'civilization's wand supplies.' Thus, in a poem ostensibly honouring Tecumseh, he is ultimately denied his place in 'the immortal page of Fame' because of his lack of what the white man calls education. Nevertheless, Longmore perceives in the Indian's culture more content­ ment and 'virtue' than in that of his white counterpart. To pursue such a line of thought, however, would involve the poet in primitivism more radical than he is prepared to pursue. He avoids the inherent conflicts in his paradoxical view of Tecumseh and his culture by asserting, 'Heaven acts for wisest ends alone, - / And all man knows - that nothing's known.' Less explicitly, the problem is resolved in the poem through presentation of the Indian's vir­ tues as the attributes of an uneducated, savage child of nature. In contrast, the white man, enjoying the benefits and suffering the abuses of education, is the experienced adult. The civilized white man cannot return to the world of the red roan any more than the adult can return to the world of the child.

106 A Native Heritage

Like Longmore, Richardson clearly admired Tecumseh, but, like his predecessor, he qualifies his vision of him. In The Canadian Brothers (1840) and Eight Years in Canada (1847), he recalls fighting by his side in the Battle of Moraviantown and Tecumseh shaking him by the hand before the battle. 'One of those daring spirits that appear like meteors, few and far between, in the horizon of glory and intelligence ... possessed of a genius as splendid in conception, as it was bold in execution.'22 Tecumseh is the only successor to Pontiac capable of uniting diverse Indian tribes. To Richardson, he is also Pontiac's superior. 23 Yet despite Richardson's obvious admiration for him, Tecumseh is never anything other than the best of savages. Thus The Canadian Brothers assigns to him 'a power of analysing motives which has never been surpassed in savage life.''4 Richardson's War of 1812 presents his death as 'the destruction of all that was noble and generous in savage life.' 25 If he possesses some 'civilized' virtues, these are immediately associated with the 'savage quali­ ties' of Tamburlaine or Genghis Khan. 26 Even in Tecumseh, or The Warrior of the West, a narrative poem written 'to rescue the name of a hero from oblivion,' Tecumseh is ultimately a savage hero rather than simply a hero.'' In the opening cantos, after a description of the victory of the Americans over the British in a navy battle at Amherstburg during the War of 1812, Richardson introduces Tecumseh with all the epi­ thets of the heroic leader: 'towering warrior,' 'godlike form,' 'monument of strength.' Yet as Richardson sets the scene for the land battle at Amherst­ burg in the final canto, Tecumseh's Indians paint themselves 'half white, half black,' looking 'like wild fiends, raging to devour,' and Tecumseh embodies satanic savagery: Amid that scene, like some dark towering fiend, With death-black eyes, and hands all spotted o'er, The fierce Tecumseh on his tall lance lean'd, Fir'd with much spoil, and drunk with human gore. (p 104) Despite Richardson's view that Tecumseh represented the hope of his people to maintain independent sovereignty and that his death marked the end of hope for aboriginal survival in North America, his admiration for the Indian leader was consistently qualified by his separation of the 'savage' and 'civilized' worlds. Adam Kidd has no hesitation in favouring nature over art when he con­ siders the dichotomy that troubles Longmore and Richardson:

107

Indian Heroes And I would tell the polished man, Brought up in Europe's fashioned plan, That never could his formal art, Or all that school-taught lore has given, Such graceful happiness impart, As cheers the Indian's forest heaven Who gives, or asks, with greatest ease, Whate'er his heart or soul can please.28

The benefits of education so revered in Longmore's poem are dismissed by Kidd as vastly inferior to the natural virtues of the Indian's culture. Euro­ pean civilization embodies crime, error, religious repression, and unceasing restrictions; the world of Skenandow, the idealized hero of 'The Huron Chief,' offers freedom, innocence, contentment, and peace. As the white narrator of 'The Huron Chief' is rowed along the shores of Lake Huron after his initial idyllic encounter with Skenandow and his people, his Indian guide recounts an oral history of his nation. As part of this recital, Kidd presents a versified version of a famous speech given by Chief Logan of the Iroquois in 177 4 and recorded by Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1784). The best-known piece of Indian oratory of the nineteenth century after its appearance in American school texts, the speech, in Kidd's version, ends: Such was the love I bore the whites, I stood the advocate of peace, And yielded more than half my rights, While striving others to release: Till every Indian, as he passed, His home and country to defend, On me his eyes indignant cast Said, 'Logan is the white man's friend!' (pp 58-9) Despite a record of pacifism and generosity, Logan's family is massacred by whites, and Kidd's description of these murders anticipates the unmotivated slaughter of his fictional protagonist and his companions at the end of the poem. Kidd similarly incorporates Tecumseh as a historical correlative to his fictional hero. Tecumseh, with a band of warriors, initially saves Skenandow and the Hurons from defeat and helps them to take several captives. A

108 A Native Heritage council follows at which the treatment of the captives is debated. Both Tecumseh and Skenandow argue for mercy, as Logan had done in the earlier sequence, and Tecumseh is honoured as a 'Napoleon of the West.' Although Skenandow is the fictional hero of the poem, his portrait gains authenticity through his association with the historical Tecumseh; conversely, Kidd avoids problems in credibility that arise from attempts such as Rogers' to idealize a figure from history in extreme terms by simply linking Tecumseh with his idealized fictional hero. EXPERIMENT AND INTEGRATION

In an article entitled 'National Literature' published in The Week of 21 August 1884, J.E. Logan, writing under the pseudonym Barry Dane, issued a manifesto to his contemporaries which argues that the primary source for a distinctive national literature is a country's aboriginal traditions. After examining the literatures of several other countries, Logan asserts: We have had no barbarous infancy moulded by the natural features of our land. No divinities have sanctified to us our mountains and streams. No fabled heroes have left us immortal memories. We have not amalgamated with the native and woven the woof of our refinement in the strong sinuous web of an aboriginal tradition and religion. In our civilized arrogance we swept away that coarser fabric, knowing not that we destroyed that which we would now, as a garment, be proud to wear.29 Several articles printed in The Week during 1885 indicate that within months of Logan's pronouncement, there was more concern being directed to the arrest of Big Bear than to discovering a national identity in the Indian's history and heritage. Yet Logan's article suggests a pattern of linking the Indian with explicitly national concerns that repeatedly characterizes liter­ ary representations of the red man as hero in this era. Nineteenth-century writers concerned with presenting the red man of his­ tory as an explicitly Canadian hero encounter difficulties in reconciling a leader's role as hero of his own people with his status as a hero of the white man. Just as writers such as Longmore and Richardson qualify the red man's role as a standard for primitivistic comparisons by insisting on his lack of education or on his essential savagery, writers adopting leaders such as Brant and Tecumseh stress their role as allies of the white man rather than as heroic Indians fighting solely for their people's rights. With his role as hero of his own people systematically subordinated to his status as confederate of the white man, writers such as Kirby, Mair, and J.B. Mackenzie use the

109 Indian Heroes

Indian in propagandistic attacks on the common enemies of red and white allies. As early as 1830, Kidd condemns white civilization in general in compari­ sons with the world of the red man, but in a note recounting the death of Tecumseh, he stresses the particular culpability of Americans. Emphasizing the responsibility of 'Long Knives' for Tecumseh's destruction, Kidd damns American civilization since its assumption of independence in 1776: 'From the days of the American Revolution until this very hour, the poor Indians have been so cruelly treated, and driven from their homes and hunting grounds, by the boasted freemen of the United States, that the MOHICANs, the NARAGANSETTS, the DELAWAREs, and others, once powerful Tribes, have now become totally extinct - while the remaining Nations are daily dwindling away.' If the Americans are villains, the British are benevolent protectors: 'Many of the Indian Tribes have emigrated into Canada - and are now pro­ spering, and happily enjoying the manly protection of the British govern­ ment.' Despite his praise of the British government, Kidd is no imperialist; Wil­ liam Kirby, on the other hand, not only damns the American by casting him as savage warrior in The U.E.: A Tale of Upper Canada, but also honours Great Britain by attacking American treatment of the red man in Canadian Idylls: Pontiac and Bushy Run (1887). In the preamble to an Algonquin chiefs narrative of Pontiac's career, Canada is a shining alternative to American greed and teaching: ... their treaties - never one Was kept by them unbroken: nor will be So long as we have lands, or place to dwell, Or graves where lie our kindred - which these men Covet the more, the more we wish to keep. In this Dominion only - God be praised! Old English law and justice, and the rights Of every man are sacredly maintained Here conscience lives, and the bright covenant chains Were never broken with the Indian tribes.) 0

The old chieftain finds among the Canadian Indians a vision of peace and harmony: 'casting off the skins and mantles rude / Of our old life, we don the seemly garb / Of Christian men and women.' In the 'Bushy Run' section of Canadian Idylls, Kirby again contrasts American treatment of the red man ('Broken treaties, exile, hunger, death')

I 10

A Native Heritage

with that accorded him in 'happier Canada.' To his red compatriot, Kirby's white spokesman then offers the hope that a day Will come of recognition, gratitude And pride in the achievements of your race. Your noble chiefs, Brant and Tecumseth, both Will stand in bronze in our great cities, with The honours of our annals, as of men Who helped to keep this land, nor feared to die For Britain's Empire in the Western World. (p 97) For Kirby and his contemporaries in the latter part of the nineteenth cen­ tury, honouring the red man as national hero not only strengthens the sense of a national past but also enables writers to attack the United States as the common enemy of both the red hero and his Canadian or British ally. In a headnote to the 'Lament of Shingwakonce,' Charles Sangster explains the ostensible background of the poem: 'In the year 1849 some difficulty occurred between the Provincial Government and the Indians on Lake Superior, in consequence of the sale of the lands in that region, to a certain Mining Company, by which the Indians were most unfairly dealt with. ... The chiefs of the Chippewas, headed by Shingwakonce, despatched a very strong remonstrance to the Government....'3' In spite of the occasion which gave rise to the poem, Sangster's 'Lament' makes no reference to the histori­ cal events noted. Instead the poem catalogues the injustices suffered by the Indians at the hands of whites and ends with Shingwakonce calling for a retreat westward to escape further persecution. Americans are the special villains of his account as the 'Bands of Long Knives' who destroyed his people. In contrast, the British are benevolent protectors and brothers. Dis­ playing similar attitudes, Sangster's 'Tecumseth' in the first stanza lauds 'the greatest of the Shawanese' and ends by stressing that the red leader was 'the brother and the friend of BROCK. ' 32 In The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism 1867-1914, Carl Berger points out that during the period covered by his study, 'Canadian imperialism rested upon an intense awareness of Canadian nationality combined with an equally decided desire to unify and transform the British Empire so that this nationality could attain a position of equality within it.' 33 As a member of the Canada First movement, Mair shared this sense of the common identity of British imperialism and Canadian national­ ism. Berger suggests that Tecumseh was being written while Mair's political

11I

Indian Heroes

associates were celebrating the anniversary of the arrival of the first Loyalists in Canada; in Tecumseh Mair found a dramatic focus for the British patriot­ ism, anti-American sentiment, and Canadian nationalism that preoccupied his contemporaries. Mair states that his purpose was 'to depict dramatically the time and scenes in which the great Indian so nobly played his part - at first indepen­ dently and in his own country, and afterwards in alliance and leadership with General Brock in the War of 1812. That war was the turning point in Canada's destiny.' 34 The first three acts concern the conflict between Tecum­ seh and the Americans; General Brock first appears in Act IV. Mair unifies his play, however, by pairing Tecumseh's desire to regain the lands and former glory of the red man with the imperial and national dreams of Brock and his compatriots. Opposing each goal, of course, is the materialistic rationalism and aggressive chauvinism of the Americans. Tecumseh emotionally recalls the Indian's former days of glory, but the Americans who destroy his dream to reunite the Indians characterize their red opponents as irrational, and themselves as rational. Governor Harrison asks Tecumseh to 'be reasonable, and let wisdom's words/ Displace your Passions, and give judgement vent.' Tecumseh takes violent exception to Harrison's glorification of reason as 'our strong dependence still' and attacks this 'snare/ Which tripped our ancestors in days of yore.' To Tecumseh's assertion that no single chief or tribe can sell the land owned communally by all Indians, Harrison exclaims: Dreams he of closing up our empty plains? Our mighty forest waiting for the axe? Our mountain steeps engrailed with iron and gold? There's no asylumed madness like to this. (p 51) For the Indiana governor, reason demands the values of white civilization, and the exploitation of the land and displacement of its native peoples are both necessary steps towards achievement of that goal. He regards resistance only as the product of an irrational or deranged mind. Throughout the play, Mair juxtaposes American insistence on exploitation and conquest of the land with expressions of the Indians' unique sense of place. The romanticized visions of Iena and of Lefroy, the ultimate white primitivist, emphasize the bond between the Indian and his environment. Lefroy muses on 'the prairie realm' before the arrival of that 'civilized bar­ barian,' the white man:

112

A Native Heritage There lived a soul more wild than barbarous; A tameless soul - the sunburnt savage free Free and untainted by the greed of gain: Great Nature's man content with Nature's food. (p 22)

To Lefroy, this 'greed of gain,' fostered by the love of that 'impious fiend/ Whose name is gold,' is the greatest threat to the primitivist ideal. Harrison reaches the same conclusion regarding his own people: 'Gold is the king who overrides the right/ And turns our people from the simple ways, / And fair ideal of our father's lives.' Despite this realization, Harrison remains an apostle of American progress and, at best, considers assertions of primitivist ideals naive and emotional. Opposing American service to materialism is the red man's service to nature, and Mair skilfully links Great Britain and the red man's vision. In a conversation with General Brock, Tecumseh's white counterpart of enlight­ ened political conservatism, Lefroy suggests that Great Britain's 'crippled throne ... outworn sceptres and imperial crowns' will fail to stem the advanc­ ing threat of 'gold- our earliest, latest foe!' Brock, however, defends the monarchy as 'the soul of state' and asks Lefroy to 'drop this bootless argument/ And tell me more of those unrivalled wastes/ You and Tecum­ seh visited.' He marvels at Lefroy's account of the unspoiled landscape west of the Great Lakes and, as he departs, combines a statement of his admira­ tion for Tecumseh as hero with an expression of his own sense of peace with the natural world: This warrior's fabric is of perfect parts! A worthy champion of his race - he heaps Such giant obligations on our heads As will outweigh repayment. It is late, And rest must preface war's hot work tomorrow, Else would I talk till morn. How still the night! Here Peace has let her silvery tresses down, And falls asleep beside the lapping wave. (p 93) Reluctant to confront Lefroy's insistence on the threat of materialism, Brock finds spirituality and harmony in Tecumseh's world to complement the best elements of his own inherited tradition. Regardless of Tecumseh's importance to the British during the War of 1812, Mair never assumes that his aims are identical to those of the British. Only after his failure to reclaim the lands of the west for his people does

113 Indian Heroes

Tecumseh ally himself with Brock. Mair aligns Tecumseh's red nationalism with the Canadian nationalism and British imperialism that he venerated through insisting that Britain and Canada embodied in their political systems the freedom and justice crucial to the preservation of Tecumseh's people. General Brock articulates the underlying political credo: For I believe in Britain's Empire, and In Canada, its true and loyal son, Who yet shall rise to greatness, and shall stand At England's shoulder helping her to guard True liberty throughout a faithless world. (p 73) T he United States represents the values of the 'faithless world,' and the alignment between British-Canadian and Indian is strengthened by the mutual sense of threat felt by both parties. Against the 'peerless arch' of freedom represented by the British Empire, Brock juxtaposes the 'false liberty' of the United States, which now Threats our poor Province to annihilate, And should he find the red men by our side Poor injured souls, who but defend their own Calls black Extermination from its hell To stalk abroad, and stench your land with slaughter. (p 8 I) Thus, the Upper Canadians march off with a sense of the current danger to their own land which is identified with that felt by Tecumseh's dispossessed Indians. One other red hero of history was to be honoured by a play before the end of the nineteenth century. Twelve years after Mair's Tecumseh first appeared, J.B. .Mackenzie published Thayendanegea: An Historico-Military Drama (1898) in an attempt to eliminate the situation of the singular - not to say affronting - anomaly to be traced through the circumstances of the character and actions of Tecumseh having enlisted the machinery of the drama for their attractive exposition, whilst those of the earlier companion upholder of British supremacy on the continent ... remain unchapleted by any memorial tribute tendered him of the kind. 3s

.Mackenzie's drama launches an attack on the Americans of the Revolution­ ary War just as Mair attacks those of the War of 1812. In each case, the

114

A Native Heritage

stature of the Indian hero emphasizes the failed humanity embodied by the Americans. In his preface, Mackenzie states that he wishes through his characteriza­ tion of Brant to refute 'the charges of barbarity freely fabricated by American historians' and to present his protagonist 'as a fairly consistent, rationally behaved character.' The emphasis on Brant's rational abilities runs through­ out the play, and reason, for Mackenzie, is synonymous with the British interest. The historical Brant is an enigma in his ·bridging of white and red cultures, and Mackenzie's contemporary, Sara Jeannette Duncan, found the dedication of a statue in his honour much more disturbing than did Pauline Johnson: There was an element of pathos in it all, in this pomp and ceremony of rendering tribute unto the warrior of his race who did most to dispossess it of its great inheri­ tance. One felt in a vaguely sentimental way the pang of the usurper at the sight of these early Indian freeholders of the soil, joining to honour him who had given allegiance to a power that robbed them of their right of tenantry, and all their wild ancestral life. 36

No such ironies disturb Mackenzie, who lauds Brant's identification with British interests and distinguishes the Mohawk chief from his followers. Bliss Carman's 'Tecumseh and the Eagles,' a poem first published in 1918, links Tecumseh's struggle for the freedom of his people to the Allied cause in World War One, but twentieth-century writers generally do not explicitly join the red hero's cause to the white man's politics.37 Reviewing 'The Red Revolutionary,' a 1971 play based on Mair's Tecumseh, Don Rubin reflects the prevailing shift in attitudes: 'Taking dramatic swipes at American imperialist war-mongers is nothing terribly new today, but to use the eighteenth-century Indian chief Tecumseh to take these swipes seems to be stretching things a bit much.' 38 MEDIA TING MESSIAHS

Contemporary English-Canadian writers treating past red heroes more fre­ quently locate in them a source of visions and values denied by white culture in North America. The red hero becomes the mediator between red and white worlds whom the white man tragically failed to acknowledge and to understand in the past but who now is a guide to potential new harmonies between man and man and man and nature. The potential and limitations of language as a vehicle for reconciliation and understanding recurs throughout

II5

Indian Heroes

these works as contemporary writers reconsider the careers of Indians such as Tecumseh, Big Bear, and the self-identified 'prophet of the new world,' Louis Riel. Throughout his tetralogy, 'Dreams and Visions: The Land,' Don Gut­ teridge juxtaposes aboriginal and white perceptions of the Canadian land­ scape. The final volume, Tecumseh (1976), distinguishes these visions in two parts. Part One, 'The Pioneers: First Questions Second Thoughts,' focuses on early white immigrants to Canada who are haunted by dreams of a destroyed red culture and threatened by a powerful landscape negatively associated with it. Gutteridge's preoccupation with both national and meta­ physical dichotomies succinctly emerges in the final lines of this section: 'The colour of my country / is white and red.' Part Two, 'Tecumseh: Dreams and Visions,' examines the chiefs career from a variety of perspec­ tives and mingles Gutteridge's lyrics with documentary texts drawn from history, autobiography, journals, and Richardson and Mair's poems. Fasci­ nated by his power as an orator, Gutteridge makes him a focus for observa­ tions on the limitations and power of language: Without language there is no catastrophe and no poetry to make peace with ourselves. 39 Finally, the poet's purpose and Tecumseh's vision are inextricably joined: I want to fashion good words forever, stretch my body into a continuous sentence, humiliate the air with speech, break the chronology of my people's despair, sew them green stories, chronicles of hope, weave a new history from our twin beginnings. (p

I I 2)

Echoing the conclusion of Wiebe's 'Where is the Voice Coming From?', Gutteridge's Tecumseh looks forward to a time when human understanding will free mankind from the limitations of language and release him into a world where he can 'utter those poems that have / no need for the curvature of words... .' Only through such understanding can Canadian red and white cultures be joined.

II6 A Native Heritage

In The Temptations of Big Bear, Rudy Wiebe bridges these cultures through his introduction of a Cree leader rarely seen in heroic terms by whites. Old and wrinkled, Wiebe's Big Bear is physically unprepossessing in comparison with his nineteenth-century predecessors; yet what The Tempta­ tions of Big Bear documents is the tragic defeat of 'the head and soul' of the Plains Indians. What Big Bear lacks in physique he gains through associa­ tion with the sun, the focus of all life within Cree culture. Thus, in his first confrontation with whites, he appears in dramatic silhouette, 'huge against the sun.' At Frog Lake, in a final attempt to prevent a massacre that will lead inexorably to his own defeat and to that of his people, the Cree Chief sud­ denly appears in a doorway: 'It was Big Bear, with the sunlight spraying around him so brilliantly they could only see his blanketed outline set in the black lines of the doorway ... .' 40 At Big Bear's trial, Kitty McLean is deva­ stated by her sense of isolation from Big Bear's power and vitality as 'the last red edge of the sun slashed across his closed monolithic face.' As the title of Wiebe's novel suggests, Big Bear has a saint-like relationship to the govern­ ing power and vitality of the universe whether that power is identified with the Cree Sun or the Christian God; as the chief dies, at peace with his god, Wiebe suggests in the dawning image of 'the red shoulder of Sun at the rim of Earth' hope for the resurrection of Big Bear's people. The temptations referred to in the book's title are two extreme choices: acceptance of the treaty offered by the government, the option followed by leaders like Sweetgrass, a 'Company or Missionary old woman' who accepts the promises offered to his people without question or, violent resistance as advocated by the young men of the Cree who still believe that the white man can be obliterated from the prairie. Big Bear refuses to follow either path. While accepting the inevitability of dramatic changes in the cultural envi­ ronment of his people, he insists on careful negotiations which do not fit the timetables of the treaty-makers. He argues for an arrangement which acknowledges the complexity of Cree culture rather than one which simply subjugates it for the convenience of Ottawa. Possessing a spiritual integrity nowhere evident in white culture in the novel, Big Bear truly comprehends the doctrine outlined by St Paul in the book's epigraph: God who made the world and all that is in it, from one blood created every race of men to live over the face of the whole earth. He has fixed the times of their existence and the limits of their territory, so that they should search for God and, it might be, feel after him, and find him. And indeed, he is not far from any of us, for in him we live, and move, and have our being. (Acts 17)

I 17

Indian Heroes

As the white man fails to acknowledge limit to his dominance or assigned territory, Big Bear most fully embodies the principle of Christian brother­ hood that preoccupies Wiebe throughout his work. Other Indian heroes pale by comparison with Big Bear. As his youngest son watches him in council with Sitting Bull and Crowfoot, the boy cannot believe reports that 'they were almost as great as his father.' Wiebe's reader comes to share the boy's perspective as the bellicose Sitting Bull tries desperately to reassert his power, while the accommodating Crowfoot is jealous of the pres­ tige of both Sitting Bull and Big Bear. Piapot is dismissed as one who 'spoke a half-wisdom, though he himself rarely knew which half was which.' In contrast, Big Bear embodies a spiritual integrity that overwhelms even his opponent Edgar Dewdney: 'To sit on the ground there in his lodge is to face a man who seemingly contains so complete an assurance of and confidence in his own self-ness - that is not a good word but you understand I'm struggling - that he cannot be moved by any, mere, white words.' Big Bear retains that integrity not only in withstanding the temptations of either war or easy acquiescence in confronting the white man but also in the face of the destruction of his own culture. Reminiscent of an Old Testament patri­ arch, Big Bear loses his power to sons who cannot understand that the dynas­ tic patterns handed down through generations are inadequate responses to the threat of the white man. Big Bear's conviction for treason-felony by a white court is simply a foot­ note to the sequence of events that leads to the erosion of his position as leader of his people. Compelled to sign a treaty by their starvation, he despairs. In a confrontation between his warriors and the police involving an alleged assault on a farm instructor, Big Bear has sufficient power over his people to prevent open conflict. Yet he senses that his own power must inevitably disintegrate in the face of dependence on the white man, and at Frog Lake he is helpless as the frustration of his young warriors vents itself in murder: There was a time when young men sat around me to listen; I was the greatest chief of the First People. But now they laugh at me. For some time they have been trying to take away the good name I have lived so long, and now they have done that very well. It will do them no good, but they have thrown away my name. It is gone, and I am old. That is the way things are. (p 267) His conviction for complicity in the massacre he risked his power to prevent simply confirms Big Bear's belief that white institutions have failed his

I 18

A Native Heritage

people and unless modified by negotiation and compromise will continue to fail them. Born under the warrior spirit, Big Bear is not a pacifist out of fear or reluctance when faced by war. His song threatens: 'my teeth are my knives / my claws are my knives,' and he repeatedly recalls 'The Great Bear' of his first vision, 'the terrifying shaggy form towering there, maw agape and reaching up, stars glistening from those giant claws.' Big Bear's son, Little Bad Man, reminds the reader of his father's power and vitality as a young man: 'powerfully broad like his father, immense mahogany face under roached hair and his naked arms and chest splattered all over blood from butchering.' What Little Bad Man lacks is his father's realization that open aggression against the white man can bring only further destruction of the Cree people. As white witnesses testify to the 'utter contempt' in Little Bad Man's treatment of his father at Frog Lake, the personal element in Big Bear's tragedy assumes an intensity that parallels the pathos engendered by his public failure to reconcile his people with the white man. Big Bear's power rests solely on the authority that they are willing to grant him. When Crowfoot suggests that the Cree are a 'leaderless people,' Big Bear quickly replies; 'That's because my People are so free.' His vision of freedom underlies his resistance to the white man, and to a government agent such as Edgar Dewdney, the Cree concept 'of individual liberty goes beyond all democracy; it is anarchic.' Yet Big Bear's vision of freedom triumphs over that of the novel's white men, and his imprisonment testifies to the failure of white culture to acknowledge the principles of freedom honoured and affirmed by Big Bear. The Cree leader's assertion at the beginning of the novel that 'no one can choose for only himself a piece of the Mother Earth. She is. And she is for all that live, alike,' is starkly juxtaposed by the judge's comment at the end of Big Bear's trial: 'This land never belonged to you. The land was and is the Queen's. She has allowed you to use it. ... The land belongs to the Queen.' The judge's remarks, followed immediately by his sentencing of Big Bear, confirm the chiefs earlier response to Alexander Morris's argument that 'the law is the same for red and white.' Big Bear replies: 'That may be. But itself, it is only white.' Big Bear threatens white men who can justify their actions only by clinging to their own laws. After being sentenced, Big Bear asks only that the court 'print my words and scatter them among White People' so that history can judge his beliefs and his guilt or innocence. With a powerful resonant voice that evokes comment from almost every white who meets him, Big Bear alone recognizes that words, oral or written, offer the only hope for freedom - not the easy accepting words of Sweetgrass,

I 19 Indian Heroes Crowfoot, and the others who sign treaties bearing only the white man's words but the words offered by the leader of a powerful confederacy of western Indians that will force the white man to conciliate and to negotiate fairly with the Indians. Dewdney analyses Big Bear's strategy: 'I believe Big Bear realizes that red moral power, once mustered would outweigh any other kind of power we would willingly apply and that the strongest moral stand they now can make is to unite under his leadership, who has never yet signed any treaty with any white.' Even in the defeat of his trial and conviction, Big Bear recognizes that the language used to limit his world is also the only means of releasing his people from starvation and oppression: 'A word is power, it comes from nothing into meaning and a Person takes his name with him when he dies. I have said my last words. Who will say a word for my people? Give my people help! I have spoken.' For Wiebe, any dream of human brotherhood depends on the discovery of common words that link all men under the all-encompassing 'word' of God. Wiebe's role is to rein­ troduce white readers to a hero and a people whom we had forgotten, leading us not only to re-evaluate our own society, past and present, but also to discover in Big Bear belief and principles to sustain and guide us in the future. Other red leaders join Big Bear and Tecumseh as heroes of works by twentieth-century white English-Canadian writers. Norma Sluman's novel, Blackfoot Crossing (1959), features Crowfoot and Sitting Bull, and the Teton Sioux warrior appears again in Andrew Suknaski's Wood Mountain Poems (1976) and Sharon Pollock's play, Walsh (1973).• Carol Bolt's first play, 'Daganawida' (first produced in January 1970), examines 'two sophisticated political systems, two religions, two languages, two cultures and two groups of men who can't get together' through the reputed founder of the Five Nations Confederacy identified in the play's title. 4' The hero of past struggles between red and white cultures who most fully engages the imagination of our writers is not an Indian, however, but a Metis, Louis Riel. Identified in J. Edmund Collins's The Story of Louis Riel, the Rebel Chief as an 'apostle of insurrection and unrest,' Riel has a radically different role in contemporary English-Canadian literature.4) In works published since World War Two, Riel is a hero who died in an attempt to mediate among the racial, linguistic, and political dualities that define Canada. Margaret Atwood identifies Riel as a figure who because of his failure to alleviate the plight of his people and because of Canadian ambivalence regarding the conflict between rebellion and authority, is the 'hero-as-loser or -victim.'44 However, this reading ignores the role assigned to Riel in English-Canadian literature as a guide in Frye's 'quest for the peaceable kingdom.'45 1

120

A Native Heritage

As early as 1828, Richardson's Tecumseh supports Frye's suggestion that a 'haunting vision of a serenity that is both human and natural' is a recurring motif in Canadian literature: The mountain-deer winds fearless to the tide, And laps his pendent tongue within the stream; Then panting casts him at the gaunt wolfs side, (Struck by the ardour of the raging beam,) Whose wearied frame, in strange inaction tied, Or incantation hung upon the scene, And chang'd his nature with creation's mien.'6 In sharp contrast to the world of war and death that engulfs his hero, Richardson's pastoral images introduce an alternative to that world that may not be realizable but remains an ideal. Early writers such as Rogers and Kidd are unconvincing in their iden­ tification of this ideal world with the actual world of their Indian heroes, and Richardson and Longmore separate their heroes from any ideal context in their insistence on the red man's essential savagery. Late nineteenth-century attempts to assimilate the dreams of red heroes into the political goals of white society stop short of suggesting harmony between red man and white man. Twentieth-century writers often chronicle only the destruction of red culture, their red heroes frequently being the doomed victims identified by Atwood. Yet Gutteridge's Tecumseh and Wiebe's Big Bear have a more powerful role as guides to a peaceful kingdom of men and between man and nature. That these heroes fail to achieve their goals in their own times does not diminish their stature, for they survive as reminders of the failures of the past and also as guides to the future. Significantly, both Gutteridge and Wiebe have also written about Louis Riel, and Tecumseh and The Temptations of Big Bear suggest the perspective adopted on Riel as hero not only by them but also by other writers of the last quarter-century. A cultural mediator through his own racial heritage, Riel consistently argued not for the expulsion of the white man from the west but for equal rights for both natives and immigrants. However, his role as media­ tor is not restricted simply to pragmatic political goals, for Riel's mystical visions led him to dream of a peaceable kingdom in the west and himself as a prophet of the new world. Historians and psychologists continue to debate Riel's sanity, but Canadian literature repeatedly presents him as an heroic martyr and saint whose stature cannot be diminished by political failure and death.47

121

Indian Heroes

John Coulter's Riel is the first literary work written after World War Two about the Metis leader, and the subsequent burst of interest in him among contemporary writers has been directly attributed to Coulter's influence.'8 A chronicle of Riel's role in the rebellions of 1869 and 1885, Coulter's play was first performed in 1950, later produced in both radio and television versions, and published in 1962. Two later plays, The Trial of Louis Riel (1968) and The Crime of Louis Riel (1976) complete a trilogy devoted to the figure whom Coulter sees as 'manifestly on his way to becoming the tragic hero at the heart of the Canadian myth.'49 The first scene of Riel introduces the issue of Riel's sanity and visions in a confrontation between the hero and a priest at Fort Garry in 1869, and Coulter focuses on Riel's religious beliefs throughout the play. Aligning his hero with Christ, he depicts Riel as a man directed by visions in both 1869 and 1885 and explores the relationship between sanity and sainthood. Cana­ dian critics, significantly, have found the play lacking a clearly defined national context for Riel's tragedy. 50 Gutteridge attributes his own interest in Riel to Coulter's play, but recalls his sense that although Coulter had researched his material thoroughly (much more thoroughly than I ever could or would), he had missed what Riel really was in Canadian terms. He had got his history straight - for the play is faithful to the known and observable facts - but he had missed the meaning. And I do not mean here that he had failed to explain Louis Riel in a psychological sense (for there is little meaning to be found there), but simply that he had not seen or felt the essential conflict and the pervading tragedy of those important events from our past. The very fact that Coulter chose to use a chronicle form indicated to me that he was not prepared to see the story in poetic or mythical terms.s' Gutteridge identifies the essence of the Riel tragedy as 'the clash of cul­ tures ... a tragic encounter between two fundamentally different people. 's> In his later play about Riel, Coulter complements exploration of the psycho­ logical aspects of Riel's individual tragedy with increased emphasis on his role as the voice of the Metis of western Canada. The Trial of Louis Riel, a documentary consisting of edited versions of actual testimony at the trial, repeatedly identifies Riel with both Metis and Indian as common opponents of the actions of the Canadian government and its representatives. In his concluding summation, the crown prosecutor pre­ sents this opposition as a conflict stemming from Riel's own racial inheri­ tance: 'As we watch and listen to the prisoner, what do we see? In the changing light in his dark Indian eye, in his theories, religious and political,

122

A Native Heritage

in his speaking, for he is an orator, and in French a very powerful one - we see the civilized man in him struggling with the IndianY The prosecutor, of course, argues that 'the savage in him at some point strangled the civilized man,' leading Riel into 'misguided reasoning, reasoning based on the pre­ mise that the whole country here belongs to the Indian.' The obvious truth of the view attributed to Riel radically qualifies the impact of the prosecutor's legal argument, and Riel emerges as the potential mediator between oppos­ ing cultures whom the white man refused to acknowledge and finally destroyed. Gutteridge's suggestion that Riel's story could illuminate 'the dilemmas of our own time - Quebec, Biafra, Vietnam: anywhere where the clash of cul­ tures, of values give rise to conflict and tragedy' becomes even more explicit in Coulter's The Crime of Louis Riel. In a foreword, the playwright identifies 'the Metis leader and the rebellions which he led as precursors of later and present uprisings all over the world, particularly the so-called Third World.' A prologue presents Riel 'as standing for men of whatever colour of whatever country who are driven to reject, rebel, take arms and fight against what they regard as government by an encroaching alien power.' 54 Combining the uprisings of 1869 and 1885, this final play lacks the historical authenticity of its predecessors but answers the criticism of Coulter's first play in its precise focus on Riel as the voice of a threatened people offering a vision of freedom and moral responsibility to a world guided by economic power and political expediency. Gutteridge interprets the emphasis of Joseph Kinsey Howard's Strange Empire: The Story of Louis Riel as being the divergent conceptions of the land in red and white cultures, and he follows Howard's approach in Riel: A Poem for Voices (1968), the first volume in the 'Dreams and Visions' tetralogy. 55 Contrasting responses to the landscape through the 'voices' of red, white, and Metis cultures, Gutteridge combines his own poems with documentary material from letters, journals, posters, and Indian folklore. Riel's communion with the land from the age of fourteen leads him to 'a togetherness of spirit' with all inhabitants of the land, a unity that contrasts starkly to the exploitation of both prairie landscape and society envisaged by whites such as John Schultz and Charles Mair. To men like Schultz, the prairie wind is a plague, but the Cree 'Song of the Northern Dancer' leads Riel and his Metis compatriots to consider it the voice of the north that as 'breathing god-sun / and god-star / comes dancing down to blood.' This wind unites sky and earth into 'one river,' and images of rivers, currents, and flowing dominate the poem. Riel's racial inheritance is represented by the meeting of two great rivers, the Red and the St Lawrence. He envisages

123

Indian Heroes

his return to Saskatchewan in 1884 with a divine mission as the time when 'the land and my soul shall be one flood'; the 'double flowing' Saskatchewan rivers must move in Riel's vision 'to a single rivering / to one / Saskatche­ wan.' These images contrast with the poem's images of conflict among men of different races and religious and cultural heritages. Riel alone, identifying himself with David and guided by 'this flowing: coiled inside like a smooth stone,' envisages a fusion expressed in a final union of images from both Roman Catholic and Cree traditions: 0 Jesusmaryjoseph Let my blood Be wind. (p 63) White men such as Thomas Scott, 'a man without root, with no touch of the soil I In Him or wind on him,' fail to grasp Riel's vision, but even as they rejoice at his death, his vision haunts the land they have never understood. 5 Riel's role as visionary and poet is shown in a pamphlet entitled Poesies Religieuses et Politiques par Louis 'David' Riel published by Riel's family in 1886, just a few months after his execution. Consideration of Riel as a poet appears more recently in John Robert Colombo's found poem, 'The Last Words of Louis Riel,' based on Riel's address in his own defence at his trial, in the publication Louis Riel: Poesies de jeunesse (1977), and in a current project at the University of Alberta to publish all Riel's poetry.57 Responding to Riel as prophet and poet, both Dorothy Livesay and John Newlove ex­ plore the charge of madness levelled against him by his contemporaries and subsequent generations. Livesay's Riel in 'Prophet of the New World: A Poem For Voices' argues that 6

Madness is the meat of poetry; and every poet's mad who has a message burning in his bowels. Say I am mad; say that the slowly turning world rifled with hate, red skin against white fathers perverting sons, and all of nature made into a kitchen midden for man's wasteful heart call these things sane? and their existence, bliss? Still I am mad, who would destroy and burn the shame of racial hate; I, the half-caste neither white nor brown, am therefore mad:

124

A Native Heritage

more human, less possessed of bigotry nearer, I feel, to the great God who came to be amongst us, flesh, to feel the animal passions of this creature, man. 58 This prophet announces: 'The land was ours: it shall be ours and yours,' and the poet adds her voice to that of her hero in reaffirming his convictions and vision. Swallowed up in the noise of a world of hatred, war, and death, the speaker in Newlove's 'Crazy Riel' retreats into the noise of poetry, 'to fill up a page. / To fill up a hole. / To make things feel better.' 59 As he recalls his boyhood home near Frog Lake, he also recalls the Indian and Metis heroes of the 1885 conflict: Noise The noise of images that are people I will never understand Admire them though I may, Poundmaker. Big Bear. Wandering Spirit, those miserable men. Riel. Crazy Riel. Riel hanged. Politics must have its way. The way of noise. (p 18) Against the inevitability and insignificance of individual deaths, animal or human, Newlove's speaker explores the 'noise' of these admired heroes of the past. Thus he imagines 'crazy Riel' as a saint rather than a mad destroyer, a man guided (like the poet) by visions not born in the noise of this world. Like Coulter, Gutteridge, Livesay, and Newlove, Wiebe attempts to give a voice to a vanquished people, and in The Scorched- Wood People ( I 977) he explores events in the Canadian north-west between 1869 and 1885 through Pierre Falcon, composer of the song of the Battle of Seven Oaks in 1816 and the spiritual voice of the Metis people. Wiebe contrasts Riel and Dumont with heroic figures from white cultures such as Prime Minister Macdonald, President Grant, or Queen Victoria: Were they actually people, those great-names, nothing but names - did they ever look in a stained mirror at the pore and follicle pattern far too familiar on their faces, feel triumph teetering like fear in their stomach . ... Ever think about what they looked like to the breathing people who stared at them, the millions they inevitably ruled.60

125 Indian Heroes

To Falcon, the heroes of white culture are remote from the people for whom they are icons; in contrast, Dumont and Riel are extensions of their people, the collective hero of the novel's title. Reflecting on Dumont, Falcon notes that 'he and his brothers and their people were their own lords, their only rulers the sky and the long land and slow muddy loops of prairie rivers, and the buffalo their true king and ruler who gave them everything for life and happiness.' Dumont, 'short, ugly, strong as a buffalo bull,' is 'the greatest hunter of us all' and prince of a people whose first allegiance is to the land. Riel, on the other hand, emerges as a giant in comparison with white heroes. 'If God had willed it, he could have ruled the world.' To his people, Riel offers his voice and his words: 'And he was writing; words to fill the leather suitcase, to give his unwritten people a place on paper before the frozen earth closed them away one by one and no one would hear them ....' Ultimately, the words of Riel, Falcon, and Wiebe form a single vision demanding acknowledgment of a forgotten people. Falcon confesses his failure to find a song of Riel for his people, 'a song of faith, of belief in vision for which the mud on their feet gives them no evi­ dence.' Not until his own encounter with death can Falcon fully understand his hero's role as 'prophet of the New World.' Pragmatic Gabriel, however, becomes the most devoted disciple of Riel's dream of 'God's perfect king­ dom' in the north-west. Indeed, Riel can scarcely understand the intensity of Dumont's faith: 'Riel had never known anyone who had the faith to find him in his godless reaches of silence and he did not yet grasp that this man had given him his commitment of fealty before an altar and he would never retract it even after the name Riel meant at best madman, at worst pathetic child.' Dumont's faith remains firm even in the face of Riel's failures and is the novel's most convincing evidence for the legitimacy of Riel's apocalyptic vision. Riel's misjudgements at Batoche and his trial are attributed to two factors: first, his vulnerability to a 'strange outward stasis which cycled in him throughout his life' and secondly a 'life-long sense of inadequacy in the face of white custom.' Yet, while acknowledging Riel's failure to initiate a new peaceable kingdom, Falcon insists that his hero must not be judged only by what he accomplished during his life. He quotes Dr Augustus Jukes's opin­ ion 'that we are too likely to call men whose understanding of life goes counter to our usual opinion, insane' and continues: if the prosecution had asked, as they did not, whether earthly success was then ultimate proof of divine inspiration, Jukes would have answered that if immediate success were proof, then surely Alexander, Attila, Ghenghis Khan, and Napoleon

126

A Native Heritage

were the most divinely inspired of men while Jesus and St Francis must be very questionable indeed since they were long dead before their teachings were widely established with the masses. (p 331)

Falcon acknowledges that 'the lost rebellion of course quite destroyed our people,' but he insists on Riel's stature as saint and prophet and ends the novel with a prayer that his people may regain the faith in themselves that Riel inspired. The failure of Falcon's dream dominates Carol Bolt's Gabe (1976), in which she dramatizes the contemporary reality of two twentieth-century namesakes of Dumont and Riel. Gabe and Louis, like their historical for­ bears, both dream and act, but like their cultural ancestors, they achieve only exile and imprisonment. Like Ryga's 'Indian,' Bolt's play suggests that the parole of the two men simply moves them from a physical jail to an equally enervating social prison in which violence, sex, and liquor offer limited release from an overwhelming sense of futility and failure. Only the memories of past heroes and the unique bond with the wilderness repeatedly attributed to the Indian and Metis promise an alternative to the world of contemporary Batoche. Yet like Margaret Laurence's Jules Ton­ nerre, both Gabe and Louis assert some personal freedom in insisting on their spiritual independence from the white man's world.61 If the play ends with little optimism as Louis returns to prison and Gabe hopes for release in immersion in the wilderness, Bolt nevertheless suggests the survival of val­ ues in red culture that continue to offer hope for the future. The desire of the play's only white man to share that dream of the future mirrors the search for completion that seems to underlie the pervasive contemporary fascination with Riel and Indian heroes of the past. Discussing George Woodcook's 1975 biography of Gabriel Dumont, Margaret Laurence articulates a credo that also seems to underlie the emergence of heroes such as Big Bear, Tecumseh, and Riel in the work of her contemporaries: Has the voice of Gabriel anything to tell us here and now, in a world totally different from his? I believe it has. The spirits of Dumont and Riel, of Big Bear and Pound­ maker, after the long silence, are speaking once again through their people, their descendants. Will we ever reach a point when it is no longer necessary to say Them and Us? I believe we must reach that point, or perish.... There are many ways in which those of us who are not Indian or Metis have not yet earned the right to call Gabriel Dumont ancestor. But I do so, all the same. His life, his legend, and his times are a part of our past which we desperately need to understand and pay heed to.62

6 Indian Myths and Legends While red heroes of the past are guides for many white writers to a new understanding of Canada's landscape and history, others locate new sources of meaning in the red man's myths and legends. 'Haunted' by a 'lack of ghosts,' the 'stranger' in Douglas LePan's 'A Country without a Mythology' finds only 'savage people, masks/ Taciturn or babbling out an alien jargon." As the efficacy of imported mythologies weakens and dies, the stranger recognizes no alternative mythology and the poem ends: And not a sign, no emblem in the sky Or boughs to friend him as he goes; for who Will stop where, clumsily contrived, daubed With war-paint, teeters some lust-red manitou? (p 11) The poem has been read as offering 'a completely negative view of the coun­ try,' but the potential irony in its concluding question suggests the direction followed by many English-Canadian writers who recognize a vitality and power in the red man's myths important to all Canadians in search of a 'home." An anonymous essay in The British American Magazine of Toronto in 1863 reflects a pervasive white attitude that explains one reason for initial reluc­ tance to assign any significance to the red man's myths. The writer acknowl­ edges that Canada has an aboriginal mythology born out of 'the dim shadowy traditions of the Indian,' but finds in the red man's myths 'little power of moving the sympathies of the races so much stronger and mightier in thought and deed, so much fuller of heroic action and passion.') Other writers may not be so obviously barred by their own cultural predispositions and pre­ sumptions from achieving continuity with the myths of the red men but may,

128 A Native Heritage like Irving Layton, question the whole possibility of crosscultural influence, mocking 'the men poets displaying codpieces of wampum/ the safer legends of prairie Indian and Eskimo.' 4 Yet beginning in the early nineteenth century is a tradition of translation, interpretation, and incorporation of red myths and legends into English­ Canadian literature. Ethnopoetics, the recently developed study of new approaches to the translation of songs and stories found in cultures with strongly oral traditions continues these attempts at transcription and trans­ lation. From this study emerges a new recognition of stylistic and formal parallels linking the verbal expressions of white and red men and of how those traditions meet. 5 The sentimental interpretations of red myths and legends stemming from Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha give way in twentieth-century literature to recognition of the red man's narratives as significant responses to the landscape and its gods. Expressing this recognition, the white writer emerges as the shaman who gives mythical shape to physical, social, and psychological landscapes through reference to red myths and legends. EARLY ADAPTATIONS

Widespread interest in the literary potential of red myths and legends appears in English-Canadian literature by the mid-nineteenth century. By 1850, writers such as Harriet Cheney and Rosanna Leprohon were publish­ ing highly romanticized legends in The Literary Garland, and interest in red myths and folklore increased steadily in succeeding decades of the nine­ teenth century.6 Influences from the United States may partially explain the growing appeal of such subjects. In 1842 the American Ethnological Society was founded, and in I 85 I Lewis Henry Morgan introduced a new standard of anthropological study of the North American Indian with the publication of his League of the Iroquois. Four years later, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, on whom Anna Jameson had relied in 1837 for her versions oflndian legends in Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, found new interest in his work as folk­ lorist as a result of the publication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha (1855). Longfellow's poem drew heavily on Schoolcraft's research. Its anthropo­ logical inaccuracies did not trouble the readers and imitators, who made it one of the most popular poems of the century. In a journal of her experiences in North America, Lady Dufferin records her delight at seeing the Minne­ haha Falls west of Minneapolis, 'as Longfellow's poem is one of my earliest recollections'; later she breakfasts with the poet himself in Boston. 7 Writing of the 'poets of Confederation,' Carl Klinck suggests: 'Almost every older

129 Indian Myths and Legends

Canadian of literary tastes has had his "Longfellow period." If he was not carried away by the New Englander's felicitous expression of conventional sentiment, he was at least drawn to Evangeline and Hiawatha, for the one is about a Nova Scotia village and the other about Indians known above and below the international border.'8 Nor did the American poet's influence end with the nineteenth century. In 1901, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company published Hiawatha or Nanabozho: An Ojibway Indian Play, an edited text of Longfellow's poem which was the script for an outdoor pageant presented annually at Desbarats, Ontario.9 Selections in John Gar­ vin's Canadian Poets (1916) and Edward Caswell's Canadian Singers and Their Songs (1919) reflect Longfellow's continuing influence on the poets of the 'Maple Leaf School,' and as late as 1928, R.D. Cumming, the author of a volume in the series of Ryerson Poetry Chapbooks directly acknowl­ edges Longfellow's influence. ' Early literary explorations of red myths and legends by white Canadian writers display the same emphasis on sentiment and romance evident in Longfellow's Song. Repeatedly, writers were drawn to sensational and senti­ mental aspects of legendary Indian sacrifice for love (preferably at a cliff or waterfall) in the days before the arrival of the white man. In 'Taapookaa: A Huron Legend,' a poem which appeared in both E.H. Dewart's Selections from Canadian Poets and W.D. Lighthall's Songs of the Great Dominion, Charles Sangster tells of a young Huron girl who leaps from a cliff rather than marry a man other than the one she loves. In 1830, Adam Kidd pro­ vided a happy ending for a variant of the Taapookaa legend in 'The Huron Chief; Sangster, however, leaves the pathetic ending intact, although nothing in his alternately rhymed quatrains, apart from proper names, indicates par­ ticular awareness of Indian traditions." Rosanna Leprohon's verse 'cantata,' 'The White Canoe,' focuses on human sacrifice to the gods of Niagara Falls and on the love which sends a Seneca chief and his beloved daughter 'over the Cataract into Eternity.' 12 Charles Mair supplies a poetic version of 'The Legend of Chileeli,' 'a transposition from "Schoolcraft",' and William Kirby recounts the legend of Mondamin in The UE., but the figure who dominates works dealing with Indian myth and legend in the latter half of the nineteenth century is Gloos­ cap, a Micmac and Malecite cultural hero.'} Charles Leland's The Algonquin 0

Legends of New England or Myths and Folk Lore of the Micmac Passamaquoddy and Penobscot Tribes (1884) and Silas Tertius Rand's Legends of the Micmacs

( I 894) introduced the Glooscap stories to a wide audience. '4 Many writers were attracted to these myths in their attempts to join white literary forms with red mythology.

130 A Native Heritage

Writing about Acadia's 'Outlook for Literature' in 1886, Charles G.D. Roberts noted that the source from which most is commonly expected is our store of Indian legend. There is continual surprise that it should be so long unharvested. Both the demand and the surprise are as old as literature in North America, and are likely to grow much older before being satisfied. The legends are, some of them, wildly poetic, and vigorous in conception; and they are easily attainable, both from the lips of their hereditary possessors and from such books as Leland's admirable 'Legends of the Algonquin lndians." 5

Although he acknowledges the vitality of the Indians' recorded myths and legends, Roberts finds little evidence of their successful use in white litera­ ture. American literature inspired by the Indian constitutes 'a museum of lamentable failures,' and even Longfellow's Song of Hiawatha is not fully satisfying· to Roberts. Despite these reservations, he attempted in both 'The Succour of Glus­ kap' and 'The Vengeance of Gluskap' to translate Malecite legends into ballads. In the first poem, Gluskap saves a Malecite camp from Mohawk destruction by sending a frost which kills the Mohawks as they sleep. In alternately rhymed quatrains, Roberts builds a mood of mystery and mild suspense, but he overwhelms the death and violence of the original legend with intrusive rhymes and a sentimental conclusion. In 'The Vengeance of Gluskap,' he employs rhymed couplets and tercets to tell of Gluskap's conversion of his wizard-enemies into rocks. Again the narrative element of the poem is somewhat powerful, but sensational poetic diction and forced rhymes diminish the effect: They came upon the tempest's midnight wings, With shock of thunder and the lightning's slings, And flame, and hail, and all disastrous things. 16 Roberts' source provides a basis for experimentation in the ballad, but his poems suggest little of the tone of the original legends. 'The Departing of Gluskap,' which first appeared as 'The Departing of Clote Sharp' in In Divers Tones (1886), tells of the withdrawal of Gluskap from the world after arranging that each animal on earth should speak a different language. The myth has etiological parallels with Genesis, and Roberts reinforces those parallels through the use of quasi-biblical syntax:

131 Indian Myths and Legends

It is so long ago; and men well-nigh Forget what gladness was, and how the earth Gave corn in plenty, and the rivers fish, And the woods meat, before he went away. His going was on this wis�. ' 7 The poem's simple diction is uncharacteristic of Roberts' experiments in the ballad form, and for the white reader the rhythms complement the poem's content. Archibald Lampman also uses an etiological myth of Glooscap in 'The Loons,' a Petrarchan sonnet recounting the origins of the haunting cries characteristic of loons. Happy as long as Glooscap was on earth, the loons now mourn his departure: And now, though many hundred altering years Have passed, among the desolate northern meres Still must ye search and wander querulously, Crying for Glooscap, still bemoan the light With weird entreaties, and in agony With awful laughter pierce the lonely night. 18 Haunting and strange, the loons' cries link the myths of the red man and the world of the white man. Lampman saw in the poetry of Bliss Carman 'a new and peculiar and most beautiful imaginative spirit, a spirit which is that of our own northern land, developed in the atmosphere of the Norse, with tinges of Indian legend. 119 Poems such as Carman's 'In a Grand Pre Garden' in which the speaker discovers personal sources of inspiration and order in Glooscap and in the Nordic god, Balder, suggest the basis of Lampman's assessment. Refuting Schoolcraft, Charles Leland had argued in his Legends of New England for the close parallels between the myths and legends of the eastern Algonquin tribes and the Norse and Germanic myths of Europe. Building on this asso­ ciation, Carman's speaker begins his reflections while sitting in the garden of the title in early September and introduces Glooscap by relating two legends that illustrate the gpd's power. The first of these stories concerns the freezing of the enemies of the Malecites as related by Roberts in 'The Succour of Gluskap.' Carman, however, succinctly and successfully treats in three tercets what Roberts takes fifteen quatrains to relate. Unfortunately, such conciseness is uncharacteristic of Carman's poem; only after a long and

132 A Native Heritage

somewhat disjointed series of reflections on the nature of terrestrial and divine order does the speaker acknowledge Glooscap and Balder as his guides. In the legends of these gods, Carman's persona finds a kinship with all nature and in their example a pattern of love which is his 'being's source and goal.'' Many of Carman's contemporaries share his emphasis on a meeting of red and white races in white encounters with red legends and myths rooted in the landscape. Despite his indebtedness to Longfellow, Wilfred Campbell moves beyond banal imitation in his poetic explorations of the Chippewa legends of the Bruce Peninsula of Ontario." 'Legend of Restless River,' 'The Legend of Dead Man's Lake,' and 'The Vengeance ofSaki' establish atmospheres of eerieness and dread in their recollection of red legends associated with the apparently placid features of the natural world. Influenced perhaps by some of the same legends of the Indians of Bruce County with which Campbell was familiar, Isabella Valancy Crawford provides, not poetic versions of these legends like so many of her contemporaries, but rather lyric and narrative poems that combine the Indian's imagery and animistic perception of the landscape with her own vision. In 'Malcolm's Katie' (1884), one of the last nineteenth-century narrative poems dealing with the pioneer experience in Canada, Crawford neither identifies the Indian with the landscape as dual antagonists of the white pioneer nor follows O'Grady in presenting the red man's relationship to the land as a simple primitivist alternative. Instead, she 'Indianizes' the landscape by exploiting red mythology and sets up a fusion reconciling landscape, red man, and white man in a vision of natural harmony. The opening lines of 'Malcolm's Katie' show Max, Katie's lover, combin­ ing love and work as he presents her with a ring he has made from the first coin he received as a wage. The poem ends with the birth of their child and the fulfilment of Max's work in the harmony enjoyed as the family sits on the verandah overlooking the farm chopped out of the wilderness. His axe has created a new order in the wilderness, and controlling that new order will be the love that transforms the clearing into a new Eden. Inevitably, Max is an agent of white progress, but it is crucial that his ambitions be relatively modest. Early in the poem he insists that success 0

Means not a throne propped up with bleaching bones; A country sav'd with smoking seas of blood; A flag torn from the foe with wounds and death; Or Commerce, with her housewife foot upon Colossal bridge of slaughter'd savages,

133 Indian Myths and Legends

The Cross laid on her brawny shoulder, and In one sly, mighty hand her reeking sword, And in the other all the woven cheats From her dishonest looms." A modest home, a small farm, and a family bound by love are the aims of Crawford's pioneer. Avoiding potential conflicts between the white conceptions of ownership and possession of the land espoused by Max and the Indians' aboriginal rights, Crawford sends her pioneer into a landscape in which the red man has never set foot. Buffalo are the chief animal inhabitants of this land, and Crawford takes pains to remind us that they have never seen the red man: For never had the patriarch of the herd Seen, limned against the farthest rim of light Of the low-dipping sky, the plume or bow Of the red hunter; nor, when stooped to drink, Had from the rustling rice-bed heard the shaft Of the still hunter hidden in its spears His bark canoe close knotted in its bronze, His form as stirless as the brooding air, His dusky eyes two fixed, unwinking fires. (p 200) Rather than an antagonist to Max's efforts (indeed, it is a halfbreed who assists him), the Indian provides an animistic view of nature crucial to the poem's vision of harmony. Crawford describes the approach of autumn at the beginning of Part II by personifying the South Wind as an aging warrior who laid his moccasins aside Broke his gay calumet of flowers, and cast His useless wampum, beaded with cool dews, Far from him northward; his long, ruddy spear Flung sunward, whence it came, and his soft locks Of warm, fine haze grew silvery as the birch. (p 198) Autumn mists sweep across the landscape, engulfing herds of buffalo and presaging 'the late, last thunders 1 of summer storms. The forest is also vul­ nerable to the changes of autumn as the South Wind changes character. As J�mes Reaney has pointed out, it is crucial that the forest be 'serf d by its

134 A Native Heritage

own wealth' with leaf and branch locking and interlocking.2) The density of the forest assists it to resist autumn; however, the surfeit of trees is also a justification for Max's woodcutting. Max will change the landscape with his axe, but he is not simply cutting down trees as an ordinary pioneer. He is asserting a new order where, before his arrival, the forest was a prisoner of its own abundance. Thus, his role can be equated with autumn's and his actions with seasonal change. The forest cannot defeat Max's axe as long as he is supported by his love for Katie, nor can it resist the changes brought by the Moon of the Falling Leaves: In this shrill moon the scouts of Winter ran From the ice-belted north, and whistling shafts Struck maple and struck sumach, and a blaze Ran swift from leaf to leaf, from bough to bough, Till round the forest flash'd a belt of flame, And inward licked its tongues of red and gold To the deep-crannied inmost heart of all. (p 199) Central to the changes brought about by autumn and Max is the acknowl­ edgement of a higher power. The crucial flaw in the character of the perfidi­ ous lover Alfred, Max's chief rival for Katie's affections, is his refusal to acknowledge as Max does the significance of love. Just as Crawford empha­ sizes the cycle of change in nature, she marks the effects of time on human life in the final tableau of the poem by juxtaposing the aging Malcolm with Max and Katie's child. Yet over all is the direction given by Manitou, god, and love. The regeneration that Alfred is unable to recognize in human life is sig­ nalled in nature by the return of summer as Indian summer just before winter closes in. The sequence is presented as an attack by the Sun on the Moon of the Falling Leaves for presuming to kill his 'gold-ey'd squaw, the Summer.' She returns with a promise of spring: I am still the mother of sweet flowers Growing but an arrow's flight beyond you In the Happy Hunting-Ground- the quiver Of great Manitou, where all the arrows He has shot from His great bow of Power, With its clear, bright singing cord of Wisdom. Are re-gathered, plumed again and brightened, And shot out, re-barbed with Love and Wisdom; Always shot, and evermore returning. (p 202)

135 Indian Myths and Legends

Thus, in a description of seasonal change in terms of a romanticized version of the Indian's animism, Crawford finds a correlative for the 'love and wis­ dom' which govern the world of Max and Katie. Part IV of the poem opens with the introduction of the North Wind in a sequence reminiscent of the South Wind in the earlier section!• Having frozen the giants of wood and water, the North Wind calls for his squaw, the Snow, to cover his victims and thus help him resist 'our great chief, the Sun.' Once again, seasonal cycles are referred to a higher power: High grew the snow beneath the low-hung sky, And all was silent in the wilderness; In trance of stillness Nature heard her God Rebuilding her spent fires, and veiled her face While the Great Worker brooded o'er His work. (p 215) As 'the Great Worker' varies the seasons of the natural world, Max will change the contours of the forested landscape, but love and order guide the work of both. Novelists of the late nineteenth century were less successful than Craw­ ford in incorporating Indian myths and legends into their narratives. Graeme Mercer Adam and Ethelwyn Wetherald's An Algonquin Maiden (1887) introduces a digression in which the father of the Indian girl relates legends of his people. In a review in The Week, Sara Jeannette Duncan criticizes the chiefs 'grandiloquent' language: 'If this is a genuine product of the aborigi­ nal intelligence fifty years ago, one is moved to tears at the thought of its degeneration under the vitiating influence of modern civilisation since.' 25 If Duncan finds the language used in relating these tales troubling, twentieth­ century readers find the legends as romantically embellished in content as they are in style. Neither the narrator of the novel nor the characters seem to comprehend the implications of the legends; instead, the tales simply func­ tion as narrative digressions to delay the resolution of the novel's romantic complications. In a related pattern, stories such as E.W. Thomson's 'Red­ Headed Windego' and William Henry Drummond's 'The Windigo' simply exploit the wendigo figure of red legend in their plots. Neither writer explores the significance of the wendigo for the Indian; instead, Thomson transforms the threat of it into a practical joke and Drummond simply incor­ porates the figure as a deus ex machina of wrath and justice. Several of Gilbert Parker's stories are ostensibly based on Indian folklore and legend, but his accounts are heavily manipulated in the interests of romantic adven­ ture or, in some cases, apparently pure fictions of Parker's mind attributed to the Indian. In 'The Stone,' Parker tells of an Indian legend about a massive

136 A Native

Heritage

stone balanced on a crag above a settled valley, but his narrator concludes that 'white men pay little heed to Indian legends.' 26 Ironically, the comment could apply to Parker himself. 'The Tall Master' is ostensibly based on a figure of Indian legend but owes more to Sir Walter Scott's poem, 'The Dance of Death.' Even when he does focus more on Indian legends, Parker's handling of the material is marred by moral lessons and melodramatic additions. In 'Temagami,' a sonnet describing a canoe trip through northern Ontario, Archibald Lampman refers to 'the weird magic of old Indian tales.''7 He rarely explored the literary possibilities of the myths and legends of the red man in his own poetry, but his nineteenth-century predecessors and con­ temporaries firmly established a pattern of incorporating the red man's mythology into their work, a pattern that anticipates the increasing fascina­ tion with these subjects among twentieth-century poets and novelists. EXPERIMENT AND INTEGRATION

In the early decades of the twentieth century, Pauline Johnson's Legends of Vancouver ( I 911) introduced Indian myths and legends to a wider audience than the work of any of her predecessors. The collection and publication of such recorded narratives continues, but more interesting in the context of this book are early twentieth-century works in which white writers explore Indian mythology for their own artistic purposes. Novels by W.D. Lighthall, Marius Barbeau, and Frank Parker Day illustrate varyingly successful approaches to such incorporation in fiction. Constance Lindsay Skinner's poetry links the development of free verse with the forms and structures used by the Indian in the songs and chants that preserve the myths of red cultures. William Douw Lighthall published The Master of Life: A Romance of the Five Nations and of Prehistoric Montreal, a fictionalized account of the estab­ lishment of the League of the Iroquois, in I 908. According to the author, the book was an attempt 'to picture the strange ideas of the Red Man's mind, life and melancholy. It is an aboriginal romance without a white man in it.'28 Much of the novel concerns the visions and dreams of Hiawatha and the supernatural qualities which are a part of his character; part of Lighthall's intention seems to have been, first, to make this character credible to the white mind and, second, to increase the white man's appreciation of the level of culture attained in North America before the arrival of Europeans. Thus, 'the master of life,' whether called 'God' or 'Manitou,' governs all men, and Hiawatha's ascent into paradise is reminiscent of Christ's. The most extended treatment of Indian myth and legend by a Canadian novelist

137 Indian Myths and Legends

up to Lighthall's time, The Master of Life is consistently faithful to Iroquois accounts of the formation of the League. Lighthall is unable, however, to incorporate these accounts into a narrative that sustains the novel, and his penchant for lavish descriptive detail repeatedly impedes the book's pro­ gress. Marius Barbeau is more successful than Lighthall in The Downfall of Temlaham ( I 928) by his counterpointing of west coast Indian myths with historical narrative. The novel has four parts. The first section, comprising more than half of the book, is set among the Gitksan Indians of the Skeena River Valley in I 887 and tells of the breakdown of traditional tribal patterns in the valley of Temlaham because of the intrusion and imposition of white values during 'the so-called "Skeena River Rebellion" .' 29 The last three sections retell incidents from Gitksan mythology which anticipate the destruction of the Skeena River society. Barbeau suggests that these myths are 'given as a corollary as it were,' but he understates the impact of this counterpointing of past and present, myth and history. Each account shows a movement from paradise lost to paradise regained, a pattern which is both poignant and gives a new perspective to the historical narrative of the novel's first part. Temlaham has fallen only to rise again, like Troy and other past civilizations; the record of this pattern in myth brings a hope for a return to glory of the Skeena tribes. Yet in the mouth of one progenitor of the 'Rebellion,' an old woman who was forced to choose between the traditions of the past and the white promise of the future, Barbeau strongly implies that the pattern has been broken, that a civilization has been virtually erased: What is Temlaham today, what is it to us, who live on reserves conceded by the Ramkseewah, the White Man? A legend of the past, a barren stretch, two miles below Hazelton on the Skeena, a place which we still visit at times, when we are sad at heart. Our people once lived there, lived happily for an age. So we are told, so we believe. But we survive in a world greatly changed, greatly defaced, in a country that no longer remains its true self.... (p 243)

Overwhelmed by a foreign culture unthought of until the last century, Tem­ laham has little hope of rising to its former glory until the white culture that destroyed it can discern 'its true self.' In the introduction to the novel, Barbeau acknowledges his sources of information for the legends of the Gitksans and also provides specific refer-

138 A Native Heritage ence notes in the text for passages of particular interest. Yet while insisting on his fidelity to the oral traditions of the culture he depicts, he also acknowledges that 'the narrative itself is couched in the author's style and composition.' Barbeau's abilities as a novelist are inferior to his talents as a sympathetic recorder of the folklore of another culture, but the dramatic impact of the episodes recounted in this first section counterbalances the somewhat awkward prose of many later passages. Legends of Glooscap return as the central focus of the most successful early twentieth-century attempt to incorporate Indian legend into the novel. Frank Parker Day's John Paul's Rock (1932) tells of the retreat from civili­ zation of a young Micmac after he has committed a crime of passion in murdering the casual white seducer of his wife. Severing himself from the white civilization in which his people are declining, John Paul discovers a new awareness of his past and a new understanding of himself as he lives on the rock of the title. He finds an image carved in stone and discovers in his little carving 'a real link with the ancient past of his race. '30 During his seven years of isolation John Paul acquires a new understanding of Glooscap as the legends which he had earlier dismissed as 'idle fancies' return to people his solitary world. Initially, the stories of Glooscap are recalled by John Paul, and his dim recollection, at first, of only the basic legends allows Day gradually to intro­ duce a tradition foreign to his white readers. One example will illustrate the repeated technique: A strange confidence in the Rock as his friend grew and grew; the Rock and the loons upon the lake were his sentries. He remembered the story his grandfather had told him: how Glooscap had at first taken Kwemoo, the loon, for his dog, but dismissed him as dog and retained him only as messenger, when he absented him­ self overmuch. Two wolves Glooscap had then taken as dogs, one white, one black, to serve him by day and night. John Paul loved the impudent loon with his mocking cry, and understood why Glooscap had first chosen him for watcher. (p 59) Later, the rock and the stone image contribute stories to John Paul, stories 'from a far-off past, legend and fancy that he knew not when and how he had acquired.' The points of reference in Micmac mythology necessary to an understanding of these tales are carefully included by Day, and the stories often build on knowledge gained from earlier recollected tales. Perhaps the most significant aspect of Day's combining of narrative and dozens of folktales is John Paul's situation. His isolation over seven years lends credibility to his recollection of the stories and beliefs of his people, a credibility often lacking in the works of writers who attempt simultaneously

I 39 Indian Myths and Legends to advance a narrative, educate a white reader in red culture, and relate Indian myths and legends. The reader of Day's novel watches the protago­ nist change as he pursues his solitary existence, relying upon the skills and stories of his people's past. Somewhat disconcertingly, John Paul's self-imposed exile ends when the father of the young man whom he had killed arrives at the rock to avenge his son's death. The old man collapses, is saved by John Paul, and forgives his saviour. However, he persuades John Paul to enlist in the army to fight in World War One where, after great success as a sniper, John Paul dies in battle. The title of the chapter relating John Paul's death is ironically entitled 'Civilization' and the reader draws obvious conclusions about the death of the red man in the white man's war. The stone carving which John Paul found soon after arriving at the rock is in his pocket and in death he finally meets Glooscap. The father of the boy whom he had killed then arranges to name the rock after him. Despite melodramatic and sentimental intrusions, Day's novel is one of the most ambitious and successful treatments of Indian myth and legend in novel form in English-Canadian literature. By creating a narrative frame for the relation of the Glooscap legends, Day successfully blends the Indian's oral tradition with the novel form. P A fusing of forms also characterizes the most interesting use of red myths and legends in poetry of the early twentieth century. Accompanying the growing interest in imagism and free verse in the second decade of the cen­ tury was a burst of interest among North American writers in the songs and legends of the red man. 32 In an introduction to George W. Cronyn's The Path on the Rainbow (1918), 'the first authoritative volume of aboriginal Ameri­ can verse,' Mary Austin observes that the reader of Cronyn's anthology will be struck at once with the extraordinary likeness between much of this native product and the recent work of the Imagists, vers librists, and other literary fashion­ ables. He may, indeed, congratulate himself on the confirmation of his secret suspi­ cion that lmagism is a very primitive form; he may, if he happens to be of the Imagists' party, suffer a check in the discovery that the first free movement of poetic originality in America finds us just about where the last Medicine Man left off.33 Cronyn's anthology includes not only translations of songs from various North American tribes but also 'interpretations' by Austin, Johnson, and others, the largest number of poems in this latter group contributed by Con­ stance Lindsay Skinner. Born in British Columbia, Skinner won a prize from Poetry magazine in 1915 for poems based on the Indian legends and rituals of the Pacific coast.

140

A Native Heritage

A year later, in a letter to the New York Times, she argues: 'Free verse rhythm is elemental, primitive, of the earth, it is the music of primitive man expressing the aspirational, the passional, the vast simple outpourings of his being, his minglings with nature, his communings with God.' 34 In Songs of the Coast Dwellers (1930), Skinner collected many of the poems in which she explores the vision and forms of the Indian's world. In a foreword, she emphasizes that the poems are neither translations nor adaptations oflndian poems. Instead, they attempt to exploit 'primitive symbolism' and the rhythms that Skinner and predecessors such as Mary Austin consistently associated with indigenous poetry. These rhythms, extensions of those of nature, link the worlds of red and white, but Skinner fears that the white man may no longer be able to respond to them: 'Nature herself is the source of rhythm to primitive peoples - to those poets whose house of life and most intimate companion is the wilderness. Rhythm is visible and aural to the poet of the wilderness whose senses are not beset by the din and confused motion of civilization.' 35 To recapture that harmony in a series of lyrics set in an imaginary coastal community is Skinner's primary goal. Reviewing Songs of the Coast Dwellers, Louis Untermeyer praised the poems as being neither 'the painfully onomatopoetic translations that look less like lyrics than distorted phonetics nor the stilted perversions that might well be rejected Smithsonian theses.' 36 Instead, he found the songs to be 'excellent ethnology and, what is even rarer, they are poetry.' Other reviews were equally favourable, but Skinner's poetry, like that of successors such as Hermia Harris Fraser, is now largely unread.3' Despite the meeting of aboriginal and modern verse forms and Skinner's serious attempt to give vitality and diversity to her Indian speakers, the equation of modern and aboriginal sensibilities is not entirely successful. Too often, the poems seem mannered and precious, with the symbols drawn from red culture distancing the reader from the author's vision rather than involv­ ing him with the various personae. Yet even if Skinner's book is not wholly successful, it serves, along with the novels of Lighthall, Barbeau, and Day, as an illustration of the continuing fascination of early twentieth-century white writers with the structures and content of the red man's myths and legends and of both the potential and the problems associated with the com­ bination of red and white forms. NEW VISIONS

In a poem entitled 'On the Edge,' Peter Stevens suggests that contemporary urban white society 'has cancelled out / all possibilities of myths and

141 Indian Myths and Legends

legends' while Indian chiefs wait to 'call up their long dead legends/ and worship their gods/ surviving in their myths.' 38 Dale Zieroth's 'Travelling the Indian Country' acknowledges that the past world of the red man and his spirits is a model of heroism, reverence, sacrifice, and social and personal harmony, but the poem's speaker discovers no links between it and his world, even as he encounters common landmarks. For other contemporary writers, however, these aboriginal myths and legends have a significance not restricted to red cultures of the past. Just as the hero of John Paul's Rock comes to understand his environment through the Glooscap myths, writers of the Canadian west such as John Newlove and Andrew Suknaski locate guides to a new sense of place in the myth and legends of the prairie Indians. George Bowering, Susan Musgrave, and Fred Wah extend the experiments of predecessors such as Constance Skinner in their identification of the roles of shaman and poet. Novelists such as Sheila Watson, Robert Kroetsch, and Leonard Cohen do not retell the myths and legends of the Indian but instead make elements borrowed from red mythology central to the thematic and structural development of their novels. As Newlove's 'The Pride' moves from initial stanzas isolating incidents in the history of prairie tribes to a catalogue of gods and myths of Pacific coast Indians, the poem argues that 'they are all ready/ to be found, the legends/ and the people, or/ all their ghosts and memories.'39 Having presented these images as indicators of the rich history and mythology in the culture of the western Indians, the poem addresses both poet and contemporary man: But what image, bewildered son of all men under the hot sun, do you worship, what completeness do you hope to have from these tales. (p 70) Ninety lines later, the poem answers: the knowledge of our origins, and where we are in truth, whose land this is and is to be. (p 73)

142

A Native Heritage

The poem does not assume an easy crosscultural assimilation of indigenous myths. It does, however, insist that an answer to the question, 'where is here?' is integrally related to the forging of a link between the white man now living on the land and the red man who first inhabited it. An exploration of the past leads the poem's speaker to recognize that 'the plains are bare/ not barren.' The past comes alive through the chronicles ofSaukama­ pee recorded by David Thompson in the eighteenth century. Here the speaker finds intense vitality in the harmony of the Piegans with their envi­ ronment before the white man fatally altered tribal balances and traditions. For the white man, understanding of the land and his place in it will come through these stories, myths, and memories of the past, 'the pride, the grand poem/ of our land, of the earth itself.' However, it will come only when whites mysteriously and overwhelmingly join these red ancestors in a shared perspective: we seize on what has happened before, one line only will be enough, a single line and then the sunlit brilliant image suddenly floods us with understanding, shocks our attentions, and all desire stops, stands alone. (p 72) From this shared perspective comes not only a sense of a past but also a focus for present existence and a direction for the future. 'At home freely/ at last, in amazement,' the speaker identifies with the original inhabitants. No longer are the Indians merely the distant stuff of legends told by themselves or others but an insistent presence: our desires mirages, mirrors, that are theirs, hard riding desires, and they become our true forbears, moulded by the same wind or rain, and in this land we are their people, come back to life again. (p 74)

143 Indian Myths and Legends

Recalling A.M. Klein's hymn to his Jewish ancestors in 'A Psalm Touching Genealogy,' Newlove's speaker insists on the red man's presence 'in/ our breath, in our ears, in our mouths,/ in our bodies entire, in our minds,' and suggests a rebirth for both red and white cultures in the white man's assimi­ lation of the red man's vision. In his identification of sources of vitality in the red man's culture, Newlove does not minimize the violence done to those cultures by whites. 'Last Summer a Number of Our People Died Just for a Want of Something to Live On' is a found poem in which the treachery and lies of the white man are revealed in a pleading letter written in 1824 by a Delaware Indian; 'Ride Off Any Horizon' recalls the displacement and destruction of the tribes of Poundmaker and Big Bear; 'Like a River' portrays the successors of these nineteenth-century chiefs as ghosts 'searching for food and for what they once knew.' Yet 'The Pride' insists that the myths and legends of the red man do retain their power. In 'Sis-i-utl, the double-headed snake,' Newlove discovers an image for the painful but necessary act of remembrance that binds past and future. In 'Resources, Certain Earths' he finds in the totems and legends of the Pacific coast tribes an affirmation of life in the face of death: their fears, legends of malicious tricks, colours and maskings, knowledge of the wild woman of the woods wearing a humming bird in her hair, deaths, are mine, because I am a man also and hemmed in, it is done to me. • 0

Haunted by the guilt that he sees all white Canadians sharing, Andrew Suknaski also searches in Indian myths for sustaining principles. The first poem of Wood Mountain Poems (1976) ends with a prayer to Coyote: silence and a prayer to you shugmanitou for something to believe in. 4' Later the hope is more clearly defined as the speaker asks shugmanitou 'for strength and light/ to illuminate dark faces of the last / gods among these southern hills.' Throughout Suknaski's work, the legends of his personal past

144 A Native Heritage

mingle with the language, history, and beliefs of the Santees, Dakotas, Gros Ventres, and Teton Sioux who once lived at Wood Mountain. Octomi (1976) retells five stories of the cultural hero and trickster identified by the Teton Sioux with octomi, the spider. Suknaski notes that the legends were origi­ nally told to children, and his own poems offer clear and direct versions of these narratives as related to him. The initial poem in the volume, however, returns to the figure of Coyote by tracing the etymology of Coyote's identifi­ cation as 'shugmanitou': therefore shoonka 'dog' became shugmanitou 'wild dog of the prairie' subspirit and god next to manitou42 In the union of prairie and spirit is divinity. Writers such as George Bowering, Margaret Atwood, and Susan Musgrave also explore the Indian's mythic relationship to the landscape. Atwood's 'poem for voices,' 'Oratorio for Sasquatch, Man and Two Androids' (1970), anticipates Surfacing in its emphasis on the transformation of contemporary whites into automatons through their failure to understand the divinity of nature and that destruction of any part of it violates the divinity of all creation. In 'The Religious Lake,' Bowering writes of the secularization of Lake Louise by 'speculating Whites' who disregard the Indian's sacred 'place.' Musgrave, perhaps more intensely than any other contemporary Canadian poet, aligns her personal vision and images and myths of Pacific coast Indians. In 'Windigo,' Bowering describes an Ojibway cannibal spirit who em­ bodies the malevolent power of a northern landscape and the potential of all men for the windigo's destructiveness. The voices of red shaman and white poet unite as each argues that the windigo must first be acknowledged and then appeased through prayer and song. 'Hamatsa,' meaning 'cannibal,' introduces a related figure from Kwakiutl myth who lends his name to the highest Kwakiutl dance society. As in 'Windigo,' this poem links red and white worlds in identifying common cannibalistic, destructive impulses. More interesting, however, is the identification of the hamatsa initiate with the poet.

145 Indian Myths and Legends

Both poet and shaman are members of a visionary elite. Yet in spite of this status, each is also a servant to his society. The poet serves his white companions on Kitsilano Beach by transliterating a legend of the hamatsa ritual. In relating this legend he animates this 'unknown' landscape with the names and legends of its ancestral inhabitants. Finally the poem acknowl­ edges our flesh full of the flesh of others, voices reflecting off the same trees Hamatsa the cannibal, down off the mountain hidden in the forest of our eyes.0 Poet, hamatsa, red man, and white man meet in a shared human landscape. Stephen Scobie suggests that Bowering's poems are most successful when he discovers 'a very solid subject matter, a complete set of images, physical facts, references, on which to base the poem.'•• Kwakiutl and Ojibway legends provide this basis in 'Hamatsa' and 'Windigo,' but Bowering bor­ rows not only images and facts from the legends but also the impact of words from Indian languages. Thus, 'Hamatsa' includes the following lines: He called together his sons, Tawixamaye, Zoaqoasililagilis, Yaqois, Nulilokue, to speak. (p 48) Robert Gibbs comments that such lines 'have such force as they're intended to have. They lie outside us the way the primitive art they derive from must do.'45 Gibbs argues that Bowering gains power for his poem through the Kwakiutl words, which 'provide for cumulative force, overcharging the eye as well as the ear.'46 Surveying her own history, of the house in which she lives, and of the Vancouver landscape, the speaker of Dorothy Livesay's 'The Artefacts: West Coast' also finds a meeting point between past and present, red culture and white culture, in the act of naming:

146 A Native Heritage The map leaps up from namelessness to history each place made ceremonial when named and its name peopled! 47 Yet she mourns the failure of the most recent generation of white inhabitants to acknowledge Indian history and senses herself, house, and culture as 'unmoored / launched on a vast sea.' Musgrave shares Livesay's preoccupation with the act of naming, an act that links her to the Indian shamans she recurrently invokes in her work. Questioned about her use of the myths of the Pacific coast Indians, Musgrave comments: People say I write out of northwest-coast myth, but it's not really that I know so much about the myths or that I was imposing those myths onto my own experience; rather the other way around. I would see birds, for example, and have a sense that they were really people who had been turned into birds.... It just seems always to work like that; the animals and birds were in touch with the people who live out there around them. And that's how the Indians saw it, too. It wasn't conscious mythologizing on my part. 48 Rather than lend poetic form to the myths and legends of the red man or create red personae like those of Constance Skinner, Musgrave herself becomes a shaman-figure. In expressing her personal vision, she may echo the forms and attitudes of her traditional Indian counterpart, but the vision is her own. Exploring cycles of creation and destruction in the 'Kiskatinaw Songs,' Musgrave exploits many of the devices associated with the songs of the Indian shaman in her use of chant-like rhythms, recurring images, and refrains. A poem such as 'Cultus Wawa' recalls Bowering's 'Hamatsa' in its use of the sound values of names from red mythology: Gamnakotlokoniqan May he save Yakasinkinawaske He who made us Guwitlka nasukwin patlke! Great woman chief.49

147 Indian Myths and Legends

Such lines have immediate resonances in the poem where they appear, but they also draw the reader into the larger elemental world of many of Mus­ grave's poems in which naming of experience takes on new importance. Sharon McMillan comments: A common practice in mytho-magical societies is the use of naming and chants to control both spirits and the unknown. It is a verbal tradition; the voice is a prime force and the words that a voice forms are essentially magical. Musgrave has an intuitive knowledge of the process of naming as a charm, and particularly of the chant as a controlling type of magic. 50

In 'Kung,' Musgrave writes of naming 'what others have / lied about.' 5' The myths of the red man and the forms of those myths serve in innovative and powerful poems in which she repeats the primal act of naming. In the end, distinctions between red and white visions and red ;md white forms blur.52 The epigraph to Fred Wah's Pictograms from the Interior of BC (1975) expresses a concern with moving beyond borrowed mythologies to adoption of a communal vision linking this volume to Musgrave's work. Taken from Coleridge's Literary Reminiscences, the epigraph reads: 'Not the qualities merely, but the root of the qualities is transcreated. How else could it be a birth, a creation?' The volume balances, on facing pages, reproductions of Indian pictographs collected by John Corner with poetic responses to these by Wah. The poems are neither simply verbal transcriptions nor interpreta­ tions of the paintings but rather, as the epigraph suggests, attempts to move through language to the visionary experience underlying the paintings in a process of 'transcreation.' Both red and white voices find expression as Wah writes in response to the pictograph at the book's centre: Birds, plants, animals a dream of myself as whole parts of a body wings outstretched a rainbow and a father.53 Combining his words with the red man's pictographs, Wah finds a meeting place between cultures in 'pictograms.' A joining of elements drawn from both red and white cultures also char­ acterizes the work of several contemporary novelists. As Sheila Watson focuses on individual quests for identification with the landscape, society,

148 A Native Heritage and god, she turns, in The Double Hook (1959), to Indian myths of the west for the figure of Coyote as pivotal trickster. Robert Kroetsch also suggests a key to understanding the twentieth-century world in his use of trickster figures in his 'Out West' trilogy and, like Watson, links these figures to Indian culture. Finally, Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers uses the Mohawk myth of Oscotarach to trace the protagonist's journey from a material and rational world to a mystical one. Paul Radin's The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology notes the prevalence of trickster figures in both eastern and western myths. Dis­ cussing this figure in Amerindian folklore, Radin says: In what must be regarded as its earliest and most archaic form, as found among the North American Indians, Trickster is at one and the same time, creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. ... He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions, all values come into being. ... Trickster him­ self is not infrequently identified with specific animals such as raven, coyote, hare, spider, but these animals are only secondarily to be equated with concrete animals. Basically he possesses no well-defined form. 54 Watson's Coyote embodies many of the qualities outlined here, but the inability of the white community in The Double Hook to come to terms with the unpredictable and ambiguous nature of human existence has led to the casting of Coyote not simply as trickster but as a powerful force associated with fear and death. The opening lines of Watson's book introduce each character 'under Coyote's eye'; his presence, however, is not only that of an unseen divinity. The whole landscape embodies him. A harbinger of sterile east winds, 'Coyote made the land his pastime. He stretched out his paw. He breathed on the grass. His spittle eyed it with prickly pear.' 55 While such a stringent environment has excluded the concept of a loving and compassionate deity for the inhabitants, they have easily adopted the Indians' belief in a force manifested daily in the blood-curdling howls of the prairie wolf. Initially, Mrs Potter is the person most closely associated with Coyote. Thoughts of fear and death that she inspires before and after her murder are linked with the community's adoption of a belief in the Indian deity. Thus, when Ara investigates the river bank where she saw the old lady's spectre, she finds the paw mark of a coyote. Even the cows flee from the old woman, and in her defiance of God she unwittingly allies herself with Coyote, who functions in satanic opposition to Old Testament Jehovah. Like Jonah, Mrs

149 Indian Myths and Legends

Potter could have saved the community if she had allied herself to God's will and been a benevolent matriarch and spiritual guide. However, she defies God, and her fish bring neither sustenance nor salvation to the community. Kip's role as an agent for Coyote's designs is made explicit when Ara and Felix hear Coyote crying through the thunder 'Kip, my servant, Kip.' Although aware of Coyote's duplicity, Kip nevertheless attempts to seduce Lenchen and deliberately antagonizes James. In his thirst for the illusory 'reflected glory' of god-like perception and control, Kip is victimized by Coyote just as Mrs Potter was. 56 While James is the cause of both his mother's death and Kip's loss of sight, he is also the principal victim of these agents of Coyote's will. Sight images convey the intimidation which moves James to matricide and Greta to suicide. James lives to sbarl! in the community's renewal, but Greta sacrifices herself to Coyote: And Coyote cried in the hills I've taken her where she stood my left band is on her head my right hand embraces her. (p 85) The sexual innuendo in these lines joins Greta's repression and Coyote's excessive sensuality in many Indian myths. He is the great seducer, to sex and death. In Greta's suicide, Ara sees new hope for an end to the community's purgatorial existence. Earlier, she imagines God, 'the glory of his face shaded by his hat. Not coaxing with a pan of oats, but coming after you with a whip until you stand and face him in the end.' William is quick to point out that this conception 'sounds only a step' from the Indians' description of their trickster god. Like Theophil, William rejects a god of fear, but his narrow-mindedness disallows a higher conception of deity, and he asserts that he does not think he would be 'surprised' if confronted by God. Ara, however, has a vision of a renewed world conveyed in Christian symbols: 'Everything shall live where the river comes, she said out loud. And she saw a great multitude of fish, each fish springing arched through the slanting light.' Coyote delivers a typical benediction on the attractiveness of death, but now Ara sees liim as a simple prairie wolf. Thus, she reduces the power which the crippling belief in death-dealing Coyote has had over her. The Widow Wagner, with her many invocations to God, shares Ara's earlier conceptions of a deity of vengeance and justice: 'Dear God, she cried. Then she stopped. Afraid that he might come. Father of the fatherless. Judge

150 A Native Heritage of widows. Death and after death the judgment.' Finally, maternal instincts mingled with a strong fear of the judgment after death move her to partici­ pate in the redemptive birth of her grandchild. Angel interrupts one of the Widow's many profane invocations with 'There's no use wailing on God.' She views the latter's conceptions as inapplicable to the way of life imposed on the community by the stringent environment and replaces these ideas with a stronger belief in Coyote than any other character. Significantly, however, Angel relegates Coyote to the status of 'meddler,' where the Indians originally placed him. Angel's world is not particularly complex, and when she has problems or doubts she assumes Coyote is the cause. The daily frustrations imposed on her in the community are viewed as 'spirits let out of a sack ... by the meddler Coyote,' in a refer­ ence to Indian myths which relate that the world was originally created as an Eden until Coyote released from a sack the spirits of fatigue, hunger, and disease. Despite her doubts about communal action and responsibility, Angel provides the pragmatic approach essential to achieving those goals. If Angel is the epitome of positive practicality, her husband Felix engen­ ders the spiritual affirmation at the novel's end. Felix rejects the oblivion offered by Coyote's promise of forgetfulness in retreat and death by reiterat­ ing, 'I mustn't forget.' Instead, having accepted Lenchen and Kip into his house, he assumes his communal responsibilities and asks Angel to return. As he comforts Lenchen in childbirth, Felix reflects that he can begin again with the help of remembered phrases from the Christian liturgy. Kip's pain and the birth of his namesake break through the 'huge indifference' in which Felix has previously cloaked himself. Although Theophil is implicitly damned for his refusal to participate in the community's renewal, there is no instant release for those who share this development. In the midst of the joy of birth and rebirth surrounding the arrival of young Felix, Coyote cries: I have set his feet on the soft ground I have set his feet on the sloping shoulders of the world. (p 134) Ara foreshadows this final pessimistic note when she thinks of the baby Felix: 'I never see baby-clothes ... that I don't think how a child puts on suffering with them.' Even in their moment of triumph against the fear and passivity that have crippled their lives, the loss of balance 'on the sloping shoulders / of the world' is a continuing threat. Yet, affirming human love and the essential

151 Indian Myths and Legends worth of all existence will force recognition and acceptance of the dualities of human existence identified by the Indian with Coyote.57 In the twelve 'Old Man Stories' that begin The Stone Hammer Poems (1975), Robert Kroetsch honours a figure closely identified with Coyote, Old Man, the culture hero and trickster of the Blackfoot Indians. In their emphasis on the eternal war of appetite and chaotic amorality against a world of moral and social order, the tales are reminiscent of the narratives compris­ ing Kroetsch's 'western' trilogy, The Words ofMy Roaring ( 1966), The Stud­ horse Man (1969), and Gone Indian (1973). Like the Blackfoot, Kroetsch links the tricksters of these novels to unbridled sexuality. He finds in this association a focus for all the irrational and chaotic impulses that direct his characters' lives. In ordered communities that take pride in having 'turned Indian trails into highways,' Kroetsch's heroes introduce the disorder identified with the trickster, a figure more and more explicitly associated with the Indian as the trilogy progresses. 58 In the first novel, a 'damned walleyed farmer' living in the midst of the prairie Depression of the 1930s sarcastically responds to the hero's assur­ ances of rain before election day with the suggestion that Johnnie Backstrom should assume the role of shaman: 'You ought to be setting up your fireworks and pounding your drums. You ought to be putting on your feathers. And your paint Backstrom. Your sea shells and your porcupine quills. Hell of a medicine man you are.' The annoyed Backstrom asserts that he is 'no half­ wit Indian who thinks you can make it rain by kicking up dust.' Yet the rain appears on cue, leaving both Johnnie and the reader to sort out the distinc­ tions between the power of positive thinking and the coincidences of an unpredictable world. Twenty-four years before The Studhorse Man begins, the protagonist, Hazard Lepage, saves from drowning a Cree Indian who is struggling to save a colt that becomes the progenitor of Hazard's stallion, Poseidon. In his pursuit of a worthy mare for his horse, Hazard embarks on an Odyssean quest in which he is duped, attacked, mocked, and sexually exhausted, but he dies only when he forsakes the quest. After the rescue of Poseidon's ancestor and his Indian protector, the Cree addresses Hazard: "'I saved your colt," the Indian said. "It isn't mine." The Indian smiled his disbelief. "Don't fear. I shall demand nothing".' 59 In commenting on the episode, one critic suggests that 'the colt symbolizes Indian territory and nature in gen­ eral. Hazard saves both the colt and the red man, but the Cree's reaction reveals the different concepts of property of the white and Indian cultures.'60 Yet this primitivistic interpretation of the passage does not suit the ironic

152

A Native Heritage

stance underlying Kroetsch's novels. Such a reading also ignores the appa­ rent disappearance of the mysterious Cree in the grave that Hazard dis­ covers and the unsentimental presentation of an Indian named Mr Running Post in the chapter following the account of the incident. The latter Indian reports Hazard to the police for unsolicited impregnation of a mare by Posei­ don, profits as poundkeeper when Hazard is subsequently imprisoned, and attempts to steal the Bible on which he swears during Hazard's hearing. An alternative explanation of Kroetsch's introduction oflndian characters can be reached through an examination of the relationship between the Indian and the trickster. It is the mysterious Cree who gives Hazard the horse whose successors will lead their owner through twenty-four peripatetic years, a journey directed by the demands of the trickster-penis. 6' Thus, the figure who plays a dominant role in Amerindian mythology is symbolically transferred to a white man. This idea of the Cree as a messenger who links red and white cultures is reinforced in the description of his appearance in Hazard's dream in the opening episode of the novel. Dressed 'in a breechcloth and a messenger's cap,' he delivers and receives telegrams and then prepares to depart, 'tip­ ping his messenger's cap, snapping a clip onto his bare right leg, lifting his leg over his red CCM bicycle.' Like his alter ego, Mr Running Post, the Cree's primary role is as messenger. The assignment of this role in both the serious context which initiates Hazard's adventures and in Hazard's out­ rageous dream becomes clearer when we recall that Hermes, 'the herald and messenger of the gods and guide of travellers' in Greek mythology, is also 'the divine trickster' of that mythology. 62 References to Greek mythology in Kroetsch's novels thus complement the trickster myths of the North Ameri­ can Indians. Little understanding of the red man appears within white culture in the novel. A sterile cairn in front of the Legislative Building in Edmonton com­ memorates 'this land of prairie, foothill, mountain and river, where the Indian roamed.' The assistant curator of the provincial museum who would remove Hazard from a world of chaotic vitality includes an Indian chief along with five other representatives of the historical past among the life-size wax figures which surround her bed: 'The Indian figure wore feathers on its head; the pale feathers, silky, long, torn from an eagle's wing, turned the thin light.' A similar romanticized 'freezing' of the culture of the red man is imaged in the totem pole outside the narrator's window in the insane asylum. Yet the trickster figure of Amerindian mythology survives the white man's impulse to order and control, forcing a movement 'out of the rational frame. Out of the frame-up. He kicks loose. The modern fascination with the

153 Indian Myths and Legends

trickster simply indicates the degree to which we find our present society oppressive.'63 Jeremy Sadness, the protagonist of Gone Indian is a graduate student in English at the State University of New York at Binghamton and a man driven by two dominant obsessions: first, his frustration at his sexual impo­ tence in horizontal positions; second, his fascination with Archie Belaney's metamorphosis into Grey Owl. Like his predecessors in Kroetsch's trilogy, Jeremy's 'outrageous and eternal horniness' significantly defines his life. As in the cases of Hazard Lepage and Johnnie Backstrom, the penis links him to the irrational world and unpredictable world of the trickster. Jeremy leaves his university, his thesis director, Professor Madham, and his increasingly estranged wife, for a proposed three-day trip to Edmonton to be interviewed for a teaching position at the University of Alberta. However, as a result of confusion in luggage at the 'labyrinthine' Edmonton Airport, Jeremy enters the maze of bewildering events at the winter carnival of Notikeewin. 64 Within this maze he regains his virility in a world presided over by the appropriately named Roger Dorck, but he also dies, possibly 'into a new life,' as a contemporary version of Grey Owl. An analysis of Edmonton's annual Klondike Days festival in Kroetsch's travel book, Alberta (1968) clarifies the significance of setting Gone Indian during the Notikeewin winter festival: 'In putting on a costume we abandon our old identities. We cast off, slough off, an old self, like a snake getting rid of a skin that's too tight; we are freed, liberated ... from the suddenly unbearable monotony of our daily lot in life. And more important: we put on an identity which is surely closer to our true identity.'65 Jeremy arrives in Edmonton in 'faded blue denim shirt ... red lumberjack socks ... levis ... beaded moosehide moccasins ... red woolen cap ... [and) fringed buckskin jacket,' attire as conventional in Binghamton, New York, in the 1970s as in the frontier city of the north.66 However, after losing his suitcase, Jeremy acquires a new costume in Notikeewin, which an Indian couple whom he meets complete by presenting him with well-worn moccasins and an 'authentic' buckskin jacket. Only then can he proceed to the visions and experiences leading to his 'true identity.' Casting off old roles and assuming new identities as suggested in these costume changes also anticipates the approach to language and metaphysics in the novel. In a 1974 article, Kroetsch notes that while he once viewed the role of the contemporary Canadian novelist as ordering through 'naming,' he observes a pattern in novels by Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, and Rudy Wiebe in which the names and systems which define experience are viewed as a threat and explicitly demythologized. In his discussion of

I 54 A Native Heritage

Wiebe's use of such sources as government records and newspapers in The Temptations of Big Bear, Kroetsch echoes the title of his fourth novel: 'The sheer failure of that language to confront reality is both comic and appalling. We discover, finally why Wiebe is driven into complicity with the so-called renegade Indians. Like them, he must experience the decomposition of the world. He must, whatever the cost, go Indian himself. '67 The final sentence of this analysis suggests that the pattern of death and rebirth which Kroetsch recognizes in Wiebe's demythologizing of language and in the Indian's experience also has particular reference to the odyssey of Jeremy Sadness. In journeying to the frontier, Jeremy abandons a profession that he views as based on concepts of order and judgement. His inability to complete his dissertation reflects his disillusionment with the assumptions governing the world represented by Professor Madham. His ability to escape by exploiting the irrational vitality of his penis has apparently been limited by his depen­ dence upon vertical relationships. On the fourth day of his visit to the north­ ern frontier, after a two-day introduction to the Notikeewin world, Jeremy resolves to go for his job interview the following morning and then return to Binghamton. He has encountered Bea Sunderman but has been unable to respond to her power: 'To lift up a signalling hand he must lift up Carol, and me [Madham), and a suitcase that wasn't his, and four unfinished disserta­ tions, and his mother, and poor old Dorck laid out cold in a warm and comforting bed. And the darkness itself.' However, as Bea's daughter, Jill, drives Jeremy to his interview in Edmonton he sees an Indian family in an old pick-up truck and shouts to Jill: 'FOLLOW THAT INDIAN.' No explanation of this action is provided except that the power of the trickster had reasserted itself. Jeremy is thus drawn back into the world of Notikeewin and the fol­ lowing day, the first day of the winter festival, he regains his virility and a new vision of himself and disappears into either the wilderness or death with Bea Sunderman. When Jeremy meets the Indian family whom he follows at the pancake breakfast in Notikeewin, he fails to penetrate the father's reticence with his questions about Grey Owl and is viewed as a peculiar outsider by the wife and children. Later he watches the Indian deliberately lose a dogsled race and enters a snowshoe race in his frustration at the Indian's action. Guided by the spirit of Professor Madham in the form of a magpie, Jeremy achieves the white civilized ideal of 'winning.' For his accomplishment, he is badly beaten by local residents who take him for an Indian, an identity he refuses to deny. Left unconscious, Jeremy is rescued by the Indian family in the pick-up truck, now identified as Daniel and Mrs Beaver, Cree and Blackfoot respectively. Having suffered as an Indian, Jeremy is

155 Indian Myths and Legends

now accepted by the Beavers. While the pressures of the east earlier forced him to plan to return, he now finds that he has thrown away his keys and along with them, the constraints of that world of winning, order, and judge­ ment. When Jeremy asks why the Beavers are in Notikeewin, Mrs Beaver informs him that the ski hill of the carnival is the site of the last sun dance: "'The last sun dance where the fasters tortured themselves to win a vision." She had finally got a chance to talk. "My grandfather was there. The pointed sticks through the muscles of his chest. The rope to the top of the pole, to the medicine bundle-".' The conversation is completed in Jeremy's dream as he lies among the dogs in the back of the Beavers' truck. In a flamboyant and extravagant seriocomic vision, Jeremy dreams of the 'scalping of Edmonton' by regenerated Indians and buffalo. He is christened 'Has-Two-Chances' by Poundmaker and finds an animal lover in the Buffalo Woman of Blackfoot legend. After his vision, Jeremy is pulled back to Notikeewin, where he is to judge a beauty contest, making his selection from identical candidates. He refuses to judge and crowns Jill Sunderman queen instead. Carried to the funeral parlour of Johnnie Backstrom, Jeremy sleeps in a coffin and wakes as he is about to be crowned with a dunce cap that reinforces the traditional identifi­ cation of trickster as fool in both red and white myth. Escaping from the funeral parlour on a snowmobile called 'Sleipnir' - replacing the eight­ legged horse which carried Odin to the land of the dead in Scandinavian mythology - Jeremy first witnesses the revitalization of Roger Dorck, and symbolically of his own virility. He then goes to Bea Sunderman's ranch, where he achieves an almost beatific reconciliation of identity, sex, and death and as 'Has-Two-Chances' assumes a new identity, that of Bea's dead husband. The disappearance of Jeremy and Bea on that same night evokes various interpretations from the other characters of the novel. Jeremy's wife believes that, like Archie Belaney, Jeremy has assumed a new identity in a new world. The narrator, Professor Madham, the 'western boy who ever dreamed east,' locked in his world of moral judgement and order, insists violently that they had to die. As in Kroetsch's earlier novels, however, the conclusion is ambiguous since it is not the resolution of the quest but the pursuit of it that is significant. Like Mrs Beaver's grandfather struggling to achieve a vision in the sun dance, Jeremy has struggled successfully to achieve his own vision. The culture represented by an ice sculpture of Cree and Blackfoot figures which he sees on arriving in Notikeewin does not remain frozen and static but is vital to his development.

I 56 A Native Heritage When Jeremy discovers Grey Owl, his guide from white to red worlds, he is enduring childhood in Manhattan's Little Italy: I remembered, and tried to forget, and remembered: a sticky hot day in the sum­ mertime, with the bigger kids playing cowboy and me being the Indian. I didn't want to be the Indian at all. ... We'll hunt you down. ... And they threw broken bricks and they tied me up and stuck lit matches into the seams of my shoes, and one time they dropped a condom full of water from a rooftop and hit my head and nearly broke my neck. ... So the tailor across the hall from my mother's apartment brought me in his books of Grey Owl; one by one he brought them. Unfolded them. Unveiled them. He gave me his dream of the European boy who became ... path­ finder ... borderman ... the truest Indian of them all. (p 94) Later Jeremy articulates his fascination with Grey Owl by saying Belaney had 'died into a new life.' He follows him in 'going Indian.' If Kroetsch extends the role of Indian culture in the contemporary fiction of western Canada by incorporating the Amerindian trickster figure as an organizing principle in his novels, Cohen anticipates this approach in Beau­ tiful Losers (1966). The journey that Cohen's protagonist takes to achieve mystical union with eternal rhythms is closely identified with the pilgrimage by the Mohawks to the 'Eternal Hunt,' which ends at the hut of Oscotarach, the head-piercer. Cohen's concern that the reader recall the stages of the Indians' pilgrimage is demonstrated by his recounting this myth twice. First, Catherine's uncle anticipates his own death in describing the journey he must make, and later F. retells the story in almost identical terms: The Indians believed that after physical death the spirit made a long journey heavenward. It was a hard, dangerous journey, and many did not complete it. A treacherous river had to be crossed on a log which bounced through wild rapids. A huge howling dog harassed the traveler. There was a narrow path between dancing boulders which crashed together, pulverizing the pilgrim who could not dance with them. The Hurons believed that there was a bark hut beside this path. Here lived Oscotarach, meaning the Head-Piercer. It was his function to remove the brains from the skulls of a!J who went by, 'as a necessary preparation for immortality.'68 F. insists on the link between Oscotarach and himself: 'Ask yourself. Per­ haps the treehouse where you suffer is the hut of Oscotarach. ... Was I your Oscotarach? I pray that I was. The surgery is deep in progress.'

I 57 Indian Myths and Legends The first stage of the Indian pilgrim's journey is to cross a hazardous river by balancing on a log; F.'s first lesson to the narrator also focuses on balance. This concept is integral to the book's definition of sainthood, for the saint is 'someone who has achieved a remote human possibility ... a kind of balance in the chaos of existence,' and F. repeatedly denies the effectiveness of reason in achieving this balance. Cohen borrows from Edouard Lecompte's account of the derivation of the name 'Iroquois' in order to illustrate the Indian's recognition of the limitations of reason. Lecompte explains: 'On sait que le nom Iroquois leur fut donne par les Franpis parce que ces sauvages terminaient tous leur discours par le mot Hiro {j'ai dit), en ajoutant le mot Koue, cri de joie OU de tristesse, selon qu'il etait prononce long OU court.'69 To a translation of this passage, Cohen's narrator adds: 'Thus each man took full responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres . ... Thus they essayed to pierce the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men ... attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion.' F. asserts that he and Edith transcended the boundaries of rational communication through the Telephone Dance and achieved fusion with 'ordinary eternal machinery.' Yet, if F. and Edith try to reach this state through repeated sexual exploitation, Catherine reaches the same end through mortification of the flesh, when, on her deathbed, she too hears 'ordinary eternal machinery.' These alternatives combine in the imagery of the Mohawk's journey as the narrator recalls Edith's attempt to subvert his reliance on rationality by painting herself in red greasepaint and inviting him to join her in becoming 'other people': 'Perhaps she meant: Come on a new journey with me, a journey only strangers can take and we can remember it when we are ourselves again and therefore never be merely ourselves again. Perhaps she had some landscape in mind where she always meant to travel, just as I envisage a northern river, a night as clean and bright as river pebbles for my supreme trip with Catherine Tekakwitha.' While Edith lived, the narrator rejected the super-world she affirmed, but now, guided by F., he recognizes the significance of any attempt to escape rationally directed behaviour. Like the Indian pilgrim, he understands the importance of balance and now can proceed to the next stage of his journey. Contact with the super-world cannot be achieved without effort and deter­ mination. As a boy, F. was frustrated by the narrator's lack of perseverance in the body-building program of Charles Axis. The comic book advertise­ ment promises immunity to beach bullies through only fifteen minutes of exercise each day. Cohen's narrator must learn to oppose threats from his

I 58 A Native Heritage

world just as the Indian pilgrim must withstand the harassment of a howling dog biting at his heels. F. explains that the achievements of Charles Axis and his devotees are not to be confused with actual entrance into the super-world: 'Charles Axis wants to be our uncle. He is one of us slobs who dwells pages behind Plastic Man. But can't you see that he has made his peace with Plastic Man? With Blue Beetle? With Captain Marvel? Can't you see that he believes in the super-world?' Although he stands 'at the sad edge of the spirit world,' Axis nevertheless is, in F.'s words, an embodiment of 'the triumph of election over discipline.' In his letter, F. recalls that he, like Axis, could never become the New Jew: 'I was the Moses of our little exodus. I would never cross.' Instead, he escapes from the hospital with Mary Voolnd only to hear of her mutilation by savage police dogs which pursue them just as the Mohawk pilgrim is pursued. The narrator has lacked the determination to follow the program which F. advocates, and years later acknowledges his failure: 'Yes, Yes I confess. I wanted miracles! I didn't want to climb to success on a ladder of coupons! I wanted to wake up suddenly with x-ray vision. I confess.' F. tells the narrator that he has waited a long time for the confession, and when he is asked to explain his smile, he replies: 'I'm smiling because I think I've taught you enough.' Walking 'through the narrow harbour streets of Montreal,' just as the pilgrim follows a narrow path to his third test, the narrator and F. reach the Quebec Libre demonstration where, like the pilgrims dancing with the boulders which surround him, the narrator stands in 'the crowd of which I was now a joyful particle.' Political and sexual frenzy combine as the narra­ tor becomes part of the seething mass, seeing the crowd 'all bound in the sweetest bursting daisy chain,' an identification that recalls an earlier image of 'a necklace of incomparable beauty and unmeaning.' The narrator's loss of rational self-consciousness leads F. to comment that he has passed: Passed what? The test? What test? The second to last test. (p 123) Having successfully passed through the various stages of the journey, the narrator reaches F.'s treehouse just as the Indian spirit reaches Oscotarach's bark hut. The pilgrim must have his brain removed before entering the

I 59 Indian Myths and Legends world of the Eternal Hunt, and now the narrator observes that his brain is 'ruined.' In the System Theatre, the narrator can enter the 'Magic' world for the first time. As his eyes blink at the same speed as the shutter in the projector, he becomes part of the magic world of film and its idols, and just as Marilyn Monroe and Richard Widmark are transformed by the magic of film, he too will undergo a transformation: The old man commenced his remarkable performance. ... Suffice it to say, he dis­ integrated slowly ... he dissolved from the inside out. ... His presence had not completely disappeared when he began to reassemble himself. ... His presence was like the shape of an hourglass, strongest where it was smallest. ... That is the beautiful waist of the hourglass! That is the point of Clear Light. (p 241) The Eternal Hunt ends as the narrator frees himself from the bonds of mind and body by uniting with 'the Magic length of God.' Like his predecessors, Cohen explores Indian myths for his own purposes. In a discussion of his collaboration with Susan Musgrave in the publication of Kiskacinaw Songs in 1977, Sean Virgo recalls some of the criticism to which any white writer who incorporates elements from red culture into his or her work is liable. Charges that their poems were 'anthropological pastiches' and a negative 'majority reaction' that rejected the poems because the authors were not Indians dogged Musgrave and Virgo until they created a fictional Indian author, who was quickly accepted. 10 Despite charges of literary imperialism, English-Canadian writers con­ tinue to attempt to transcend cultural boundaries through exploration of Indian images, myths, and legends. Part of the fascination of several contem­ porary writers with Emily Carr stems from her identification as one who combined the Indian's way of seeing with her own ·vision. In Klee Wyck (1941), Carr recalls her visit to the villages of Skedans, Tanoo, and Cumshewa and observes: 'The Indian had never thwarted the growth-force springing up so terrifically in them. He had but homed himself there awhile, making use· of what he needed, leaving the rest as it always was.' 71 As she captured the 'growth-force' acknowledged in the landscape by the Indian, Carr's paintings of the red man and his world were credited with 'a quality and power which no white person had achieved before.' 72 White poets find in Carr someone who offers a new vision. In a poem bearing her name as title, Wilfred Watson envisages her as a Jonah impri­ soned in nature,

160 A Native Heritage

Yet inscribing and scoring the uprush Sink vault and arch of that monstrous cathedral, Its living bone and its green pulsing flesh.n For Tom Marshall, she becomes a 'totem woman' in her union with the land through Indian power: Perhaps she found her way to the lost island where Indian power is stored Perhaps the island is in us all of us who are at home here 74

In Emily (1975), Florence McNeil creates a Carr who acknowledges that in capturing facets of the culture and landscape of the Indian, she herself becomes ' possessed.' Susan Musgrave acknowledges the desire that is impli­ cit in the work of so many of her contemporaries and predecessors: 'I guess it's in my blood/ to want to be like/ Emily Carr.'n To be like Carr is to go beyond defining physical, social, or psychological landscapes in relation to Indian culture. Instead, the goal is to discover a new way of seeing through an understanding and appreciation of the visions expressed in Indian myths and legends.

7 Conclusion In a 1975 article entitled 'Wilderness No Wilderness,' novelist Norman Newton argues that white Canadians 'have never really come to terms with the intellectual history of our country, which is preponderantly the intellec­ tual history of the Indians. Instead we have invented the idea of "wilder­ ness,'' simply to avoid facing it. The "wilderness" never existed.' Many of the works discussed in this book support Newton's contention regarding the limited degree to which the whites of Canada have come to terms with the cultures of its native peoples. Yet the existence of a counter-tradition in which white writers attempt to bridge cultures through exploration of the Indian's world anticipates a proposal by Newton that 'one of the missions of Canadian literature !could] be that of showing a certain absurdity in the split which one finds in both United States and Spanish-American literatures and which is caused by the conflict between a European tradition and a native one.' No one would argue that the transcendence of cultural boundaries recommended by Newton has been achieved, but the preceding chapters demonstrate a continuing movement of the Indian and his culture from a role in which he is simply a stereotype against whom the white man can assert the values of his own culture to a status in which his history and culture are guides to concerns common to all cultures. 2 As Canadian writers revise old attitudes towards the principles, heroes, and myths of Indian culture, they also offer a revisionist history of the explo­ ration of this country. Patrick Lane's 'For Simon Fraser' addresses the Pacific coast explorer who was repeatedly unsympathetic in his journals to the natives whom he encountered; Lane's poem reminds Fraser of the men who 1

rested in the small bay

162 A Native Heritage

having lived there as you in trembling filled with the conqueror's blood discovered them who did not know they were lost. 3 Paulette Jiles' 'Son of Raven' introduces a red speaker who served another explorer, Alexander MacKenzie: 'he said/ I was a talented aborigine/ Pretty soon I sold him everything.'4 Such a perspective is also expressed in Andrew Suknaski's poetry, as his speaker recognizes in 'Dreaming of the Northwest Passage': explorations and a chronicle of ironies leading to a single truth: the indian showed us the way to the heart of the prairie and distant mountains. 5 Bound to the Indian through the landscape and the history of white dis­ possession of red culture, Canadians discover the Indian as ancestor through his myths, religions, heroes, and history. An old Cree chief in Frederick Niven's The Flying Years (1935) comments: 'all this is Indian country and it turns even white men to Indians in time'; if our literature reflects our cul­ ture, the transformation is in progress. 6 Whether explicitly suggested as in the work of John Newlove, Andrew Suknaski, or Susan Musgrave or obliquely in the union with her Canadian ancestry of Margaret Atwood's protagonist in Lady Oracle (1976) through the union of Charlotte, her fic­ tional alter ego, with 'Redmond,' contemporary Canadian literature reveals the culmination of an identification with the Indian that pervades the litera­ ture. Writing in 1932 about Unexplored Fields of Canadian Literature, Lorne Pierce argued: 'we are nourished by the same soil that sustained the native red man, and we are, in a very real sense, his heirs.'7 Early writers such as Frances Brooke, John Richardson, and Charles Sangster often comment on the various theories prominent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regarding the origins of the red man; their twentieth-century successors instead reflect the white man's search for authentic roots in the landscape first named by the Indian. 8

163 Conclusion

Yet as early as I 846, The Literary Garland illustrates another response to this pattern of adopted ancestry: INDIAN JOKE

A white man, meeting an Indian, accosted him as brother. The red man, with a great expression of meaning in his countenance, inquired how they came to be brothers. The white man replied, 'O by way of Adam, I suppose.' The Indian added, 'Me thank him Great Spirit we no nearer brothers.'9

Although James Reaney asserts that 'we despise the Indian while eagerly sucking at the symbols he evolved from a life supposedly inferior to ours,' relatively few Canadian novelists, poets, and dramatists demonstrate overt hostility towards the Indian.'0 Yet if the image of writers 'sucking at symbols' seems extreme, we must acknowledge that throughout our literary history, the Indian and his culture are vehicles for the definition of the white man's national, social, or personal identity. Only a few dozen works focus directly on the red man and his culture, and even those works are governed by the white man's perspective. There is a delicate balance between exploring what is common to all man­ kind and exploiting the culture of a vanquished people. Alan Fry documents reservation life with graphic precision but is charged with failing to make his characters live. Hubert Evans' Misc on che River is viewed as a reflection of the complacent liberalism of the 1950s.'' Thomas Kinsella's use of an eighteen-year-old Cree narrator who recounts stories of life on an Alberta reservation in dialect makes the author vulnerable to the charges of patroniz­ ing complacency also often directed at W.H. Drummond's 'Leetle Bateeste' poems. '3 Is asserting a common humanity simply a way of escaping responsi­ bility for the Indians' plight? Is writing about the erosion of his culture simply an act of personal exorcism that also exploits a reader's sensitivity to this issue? Is using his myths or honouring his heroes simply an exploitation of symbols or a profound attempt to mediate between cultures through the discovery of a common past? If the separation of evaluative literary criticism from personal and cultural biases seems particularly difficult in discussions of works bridging two cultures, this book nevertheless documents a long and vital tradition of white English-Canadian writers responding imaginatively to Indian culture. Some dominant patterns have been identified, but many areas await further or fuller exploration. Regional studies of the literary impact of the Indian can illuminate both literature and culture. An issue of The Malahac Review sur­ veying 'The West Coast Renaissance' illustrates this approach in identifying 11

164 A Native Heritage

the importance of Emily Carr's understanding of native cultures: 'She per­ ceived that the native Indian culture was an expression of something central to the spirit of man and central also to the spirit of this place, and saw that both writers and painters could learn from this culture and understand its deep-rooted symbolism, its dramatic intensity and its wisdom." 4 Andrew Suknaski sees the trickster figure, Coyote or Shugmanitou, as a 'cherished icon for freedom and sexuality [unbridled] in prairie poetry' and argues that the 'Coyote myth must be milked for all that used to be.'' 5 Ken Mitchell suggests that writers of the Canadian west are 'attracted to Indian culture at least partly because the heroic stance; testing and pride in the face of defeat are very much part of their vision, part of the Prairie character.' 16 On the east coast, critics of literature and culture associated with the Atlantic Canada Institute investigate the impact of the Indian on the culture of east­ ern Maritime Canada with the same clarifying regional focus. Comparative studies of the Indians' role in Canadian literature in English with their roles in French-Canadian or American literature is another broad area for further study. Similarly, comparison of literary responses to the conflict between native and imported cultures in Canada and other Com­ monwealth countries could prove illuminating. Detailed studies of the treat­ ment of the Indian in exploration journals, settler's accounts, and travel books remain unwritten, and no comprehensive study of Canadian captivity accounts has been published. Examinations of the Indian's role for particular works and authors are only beginning to be written, and no analyses of the Indian's role in particular genres and sub-genres have yet appeared. Robert Kroetsch suggests a paradigm for Canadian culture in the central symbol of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook: The double hook. The total ambiguity that is so essentially Canadian: be it in terms of two solitudes, the bush garden, Jungian opposites, or the raw and the cooked binary structures of Levi-Strauss. Behind the multiplying theories of Canadian literature is always the pattern of equally matched opposites. Coyote/ God Self/ Community Energy/ Stasis The balance, whatever the specifics, is always so equal that one wonders how para­ digm can possibly issue into story. '7

Confronting the opposition between red and white cultures, many Canadian writers retreat from the stalemate threatened by 'equally matched opposites'

165

Conclusion

through explicit assertions of the value of one culture over the other. In the mainstream of Canadian literature, however, are authors from Brooke to Bowering who move towards the recognition that the apparently irreconcil­ able opposites embodied in the tension between Indian and white cultures are, in fact, complementary parts of a common humanity. Poised between cultures, these writers find in the Indian and his world unique touchstones through which they can illuminate the character and culture of the white man in Canada.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Keiichi Hirano, 'The Aborigine in Canadian Literature,' Canadian Literature XIV (Autumn 1962) 43-52; Chipman Hall, 'A Survey of the Indian's Role in English­ Canadian Literature to 1900,' unpublished MA dissertation (Dalhousie University 1969) 2 W.H. New, 'Fiction,' in Literary History of Canada, ed. C.F. Klinck et al., III (Toronto 1976) 248 3 Dorothy Livesay, 'The Native People in Our Canadian Literature,' The English Quarterly IV, 1 (Spring 197 l) 22 4 George Woodcock, 'Turning the Facts into Bad Fiction,' Maclean's LXXVII, 3 (Mar. 1974) 84 5 Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden (Toronto 1971) 235; Eli Mandel, 'Romance and Realism in Western Canadian Fiction,' in Another Time (Erin 1977) 57 6 James Reaney, 'The Canadian Poet's Predicament,' in Masks of Poetry, ed. A.J.M. Smith (Toronto 1962) I 17 7 Leslie Fiedler, The Return of the Vanishing American (Toronto 1968) 77

8 Children's books have been considered only in cases where books written for children illuminate aspects of an author's works for adult readers. 9 Dave Godfrey, / Ching Kanada (Erin 1976) np 10 Frye, The Bush Garden 249 CHAPTIJR TWO: INDIAN ANTAGONISTS

1 J. Mackay, Quebec Hill or Canadian Scenery (London 1797) 5. The poem has been reprinted along with Bayley's Canada, A Descriptive Poem in Three Early Poems from Lower Canada, ed. Michael Gnarowski (Montreal 1969). 'On the Celebration of Christmas Day - 1805 - at Quebec,' an anonymous poem published in the Quebec Gazette on 26 Dec. 1805 stresses the victory of the Christian church over the 'night

of superstition's reign' and celebrates the 'dawning' of the colony from an age of savage slavery, torture, and warfare. David Chisholme presents the same point of view in his introductory editorial to the first number of The Canadian Magazine and Literary Repository in July 1823:

168 Notes pp 7- I 1

2

3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 II

12 13 14

Though the country which we inhabit still bears the impress of infancy on her brow, and the stamp of uncultivated wildness on her forehead - though her woods are interminable and her soil lying waste - though the bear, the wolf and the buffaloc [sic) roam in all the untractabillity [sic] of their ferocious nature through all her regions - and though many of her native sons and daughters remain still unblest with the light of knowledge and Christianity - yet the time may come when her pre­ sent condition will be remembered no more - when the wilderness shall give place to the calm serenity of cultivation - when the wild beasts of the fields shall fly at the voice of man, and give place to the busy hum of a cheerful and industrious popula­ tion - when the sun of human intellect shall shine with refulgence on the darkest mind that ever traversed the woods - when the truth and glory of Christianity shall spread throughout the land the cheering and peaceful beams of their consolation and when society shall resume the order, the elegancy, and the permanency of the most civilized countries on the face of the earth. (1, 1, pp 5-6) Agnes Maule Machar, Lays of the 'True North,' and Other Canadian Poems (London 1899) 9 Stephen Leacock, Canada: The Foundations of Its Future (Montreal 1941) 19. Similar identifications of the savage red man emerge in Lincoln Frees the Slaves (London 1935) 12, and in The Greatest Pages of American Humour (Garden City, NY 1936) I. Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America, rev. ed. (Baltimore 1965) 199 James Walker, 'The Indian in Canadian Historical Writing,' The Canadian Historical Association Historical Papers ( l 97 l) 22 Recent works countering this historical bias include E. Palmer Patterson, The Cana­ dian Indian: A History since 1500 (1972), Cornelius J. Jaenen, Friend and Foe (1976), and Bruce G. Trigger, The Children of Aauncsic (1976). Thomas Cary, Abram's Plains (Quebec 1789) 3. The poem has been reprinted in Three Early Poems from Lower Canada, ed. Michael Gnarowski (Montreal 1969) 20. Joseph Howe, 'Acadia,' in Poems and Essays (Montreal 1874). Although Howc's poem was not published until after his death, M.G. Parks, in an introduction to a 1973 reprint, suggests that at least the first two sections of 'Acadia' were written in the early 1830s. Howe, 'The Song of the Micmac,' Poems and Essays 87 Howe, 'The Micmac,' Poems and Essays 90 Charles Sangster's 'The Iroquois,' first published in the Canadian Monthly and National Review IV (July-Sept. 1873) 2n-12, depicts intertribal warfare with a vital­ ity notably absent in McLachlan's narrative. An explanation of the radical difference in tone may be found in the setting of Sangster's poem in some distant pre-white era of the past. In his study of Sangster, W.D. Hamilton labels the poem 'a shameless imitation of Byron's "Destruction of Sennacherib".' John Richardson Wacousia, or The Prophecy, rev. ed. (New York 1851) 83 John Richardson, Wau-Nan-Gee, or The Massacre at Chicago (New York 1852) 100 Mary E. Herbert's Belinda Dalton; or Scenes in the Life of a Halifax Belle (Halifax 1859) exploits the sensational images of Indian warfare by juxtaposing a picturesque and patronizing account of an Indian wedding contemporary with the action of the novel against an account of an Indian massacre in New England a generation before. Laden with conventional images of darkness, fire, war-whoops, and demonic savages, the latter scene has no relation to the novel's action but is simply a sentimental and sensational digression.

169 Notes pp 11-24 15 Archibald Lampman, Ai ihe Lo11g Sault a11d Other New Poems (Toronto 1943) 1-2. A similar perspective dominates Nathaniel Benson's Dollard: An Epic of Ca11ada (Toronto 1933). 16 Ralph Connor, The Patrol of ihe Sun Dance Trail (New York 1914) 17 17 Thomas Raddall, Roger Sudden (Toronto 1944) 98 18 Thomas Raddall, In My Time: A Memoir (Toronto 1976) 218 19 J.E. Chamberlin's The Harrowing of Eden (Toronto 1975) describes the political and economic implications of this religious and territorial imperialism. Herschel Hardin exploits the association in his characterization of the corrupt Father John in The Greai Wave of Civilization (1976). 20 J.B. Brebner, North Atlamic Tria11gle (New York 1945) 34 21 Northrop Frye, 'Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,' in The Ca11adian Imagination (Cambridge, MA 1977) 26 22 In The Image of the Indian (Waterloo 1971), a study of perspectives on the Indian in popular national magazines read in Canada between 1900 and 1970, Ronald Haycock argues that by 1930, concern with converting the Indian to Christianity had also become significantly less evident in popular journalism than in previous decades. 23 Catharine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada (London 1836) 168 24 Catharine Parr Traill, The Ca11adian Crusoes (London 1852) 112-13 25 Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush II (London 1852) 51 26 George J. Mountain, S011gs of the l\7ilderness (London 1846) xx-xxi 27 Egerton Ryerson Young, Stories from bzdian Wigwams and Northern Campfires (London 1893) 92 28 Egerton Ryerson Young, Oowikapun or How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians (New York 1896) 23 29 [George Longmore] 'Tecumthe: A Poetical Tale in Three Cantos' The Ca11adian Review a11d Literary and Historical Journal I, 2 (Montreal 1824) 405. Mary Lu MacDonald's introduction to a 1977 reprint of The Charivari establishes Longmore as the author of this poem, 'Tecumthe,' and several other works. 30 Charles Mair, Tecumseh: A Drama, and Canadian Poems (Toronto 1901) 88 31 Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (Toronto 1966) 58 32 Margaret Lawrence, 'The Jesuit Martyrs of Huronia' Saturday Night IV (11 Nov. 1939) 8 33 Alan Sullivan, 'Brebeuf and Lalemant,' in Ca11adian Poets ed. John Garvin (Toronto 1916) 287 34 E.J. Pratt, The Collected Poems of E.J. Prall, 2nd ed. (Toronto 1958) 261. Marjorie Pickthall's 'Pere Lalemant' also identifies the Indian with animals, contrasting the gentle innocence of the Jesuit priest with the toughness of the 'wolf-eyed, wolf­ sinewed' Huron boatmen. 35 Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America, rev. ed. (Baltimore 1965) 196-212 36 John Richardson, Wacousta, or The Prophecy, rev. ed. (New York 1851) 125 37 In contrast to Richardson's treatment of Pontiac as a secondary antagonist, William Kirby focuses directly on his savage ferocity in 'Pontiac 1763 AD,' a narrative poem which appeared as part of Canadia11 Idylls (Welland 1894). After the failure of his 'conspiracy,' Kirby's Pontiac suffers isolation and ignominious death as the penalty for his opposition to the English. 38 A similar relationship exists in an anonymous novel published in the same year as Wacousta, Bellegarde: The Adopted /11dian Boy. A Canadian Tale (1832). From bar-

Sudden.

Wau-Nan-Gee, An Algonquin Maiden,

Roger

The UE.: A Tale of Upper Canada Quebec: A Poetical Essay The Acadian Exile and Sea Shell Essays The Eye of the Needle

Masks of Poetry,

The Years CHAPTER THREE: INDIAN ALTERNATIVES

Primitivism and Related Ideas of Antiquity Poetry of Tennyson, The History of Emily Montague

Critical Essays on the Quebec Gazeue

Primitivism and the Idea of Progress

(126).

Bellegarde: The Adopted Indian Boy. A Canadian Tale

Leaven of Malice For and Against the Moon: Blues, Yells and Chuckles The Emigrant The Huron Chief and Other Poems

171 Notes pp 32-8 sisting of ten stanzas alternately spoken by the two women of the title, the poem balances opposing arguments for life in red and white worlds. The final stanza firmly resolves the argument in the red girl's favour:

12 13

14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

No, sister it cannot my heart engage I would worry to death of this gilded cage And the high close walls of each darkened room Heavy with stifling, close perfume; Back to the free, fresh woods let me hie, Amid them to live, - amid them to die. (The Poetical Works of Mrs Leprohon [Montreal 188 !) 69) Douglas Huyghue, Argimou: A Legend of the Micmac, Maritime Literature Reprint Series (Sackville 1977) 6 Thomas Haliburton, Sam Slick the Clockmaker: His Sayings and Doings (Toronto 1936) 229. Thomas Raddall notes Haliburton's frequent use of 'lllinoo' in fictional references to Windsor, Nova Scotia: 'This was his base, the hub of his provincial travels, the viewpoint from which he called up all those lively images and experiences and put them on paper for the world to read. And "Illinoo" is the Micmac Indian word for man as distinguished from the animals. It seemed to me that he chose the name deliberately, because here at "Illinoo" he looked forth at his countrymen from the plain standpoint of Man ....' ('A Handful of Haliburton,' Journal of Canadian Fiction II, 3 (Summer 1973) 107) George Grant, Ocean to Ocean (Toronto 1873) 17 Wilfred Campbell, Lake Lyrics and Other Poems (St John 1889) 39 Campbell, The Poems of Wilfred Campbell (Toronto 1905) 352 Campbell, Lake Lyrics 82. Carl Klinck suggests that the poet's apprehension of an 'anguished call' may stem from the associations developed in another sonnet, 'Crags,' in which Campbell tells of an Oiibway legend that the cliffs along the shoreline are 'Indian warriors eternally fixed in stone by Nana Boza (Hiawatha) to keep guard over the spirits of bad Indians who are doomed to roam forever these desolate wilds.' Catharine ParI Traill, The Canadian Settler's Guide (Toronto 1854) 225 Alexander McLachlan, Poems and Songs (Toronto 1874) I 53 Charles G.D. Roberts, Songs of the Common Day (Toronto 1893) 22 Archibald Lampman, The Poems of Archibald Lampman (Toronto 1900) 225 William Kirby, The Golden Dog (Boston 1896) 435 Charles Mair, Tecumseh: A Drama (Toronto 1901) 120 Louis Dudek, Collected Poetry (Montreal 1971) 305 George Bowering, Rocky Mountain Foot (Toronto 1968) 28 The original radio version of the play was published as Trial of a City and Other Verse (Toronto 1952). Earle Birney, The Damnation of Vancouver (Toronto 1977) 38 Birney, Trial of a City and Other Verse (Toronto 1952) 19 James Bacque, A Man of Talent (Toronto 1972) 23 A.J.M. Smith, 'A Rejected Preface,' Canadian Literature XXIV (Spring 1965) 7 Al Purdy, Pressed on Sand (Toronto 1955) 10 James Reaney, Poems (Toronto 1972) 21 l Milton Acorn, This Island Means Minago (Toronto 1975) l 10 Don Gutteridge, Coppermine (Ottawa 1973) np

172 Notes pp 38-54 35 Gutteridge, Borderlands (Ottawa 1975) np 36 Silas Tertius Rand, A Short Statement of Facts Relating LO the History, Manners, Customs, Language and Literature of the Micmac Tribe ... (Halifax 1850) 29 37 Thomas Cowdell, The Nova Scotia Minstrel (Dublin 1817) 22 38 [George Longmore), 'Tecumthe. A Poetical Tale in Three Cantos,' The Canadian Review and Literary and Hisiorical Journal I, 2 (.Montreal 1824) 410 39 John Hunter Duvar, De Roberval: A Drama (St John, NB 1888) 72 40 Kidd, The Huron Chief 41 Carl F. Klinck, 'Literary Activity in the Canadas 1812-1841; in Literary History of Canada, ed. C.F. Klinck et al., I (Toronto 1976) 144 42 W.W.E. Ross, Sonnets (Toronto 1932) 58 43 Ernest Thompson Seton The Gospel of the Redman (London 1970) 105 44 Eldon Garnet, Brebeuf: A Martyrdom of Jean De (Erin 1977) np 45 Leonard Cohen Beautiful Losers (Toronto 1966) 3 46 Rudy Wiebe's First and Vital Candle (1966) insists in more orthodox terms than Beautiful Losers on the insufficiency of rational analysis. Arriving at a northern Ontario Indian reservation, the protagonist mocks both the Lutheran fundamentalism of the lay minister on the reservation and the religious ceremonies of the Indians. When he scoffs at the Ojibway ceremony of 'the shaking tent,' the minister argues with him: 'you shouldn't fight so hard,' Josh said. 'It takes an educated man to be less human than a heathen.' 'Less human!' 'Yes. Thinking he can logically explain everything that happens.' (p 145) Unlike Cohen's novel, however, First and Vital Candle proposes an alternative to reason not in the world of the Indian but in the all­ encompassing grace of God, and the novel ends with both the white protagonist and the Indians of the reservation accepting this redeeming grace. 47 George Grant, Technology and Empire (Toronto 1969) 117 48 Howard O'Hagan, Tay John (Toronto 1974) 21-2 49 Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (TorontO 1972) 7 50 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (New York 1959) 1 I. I am indebted to Catherine Telfer for first drawing my a11ention to the usefulness of Eliade's work in relation to Surfacing. Several recent commentaries, particularly those of Rosemary Sullivan, explore the novel in the context of various books by Eliade. 51 Ibid. II 52 Ibid. 27 53 D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York 1964) 52 54 Gilbert Parker, The Chief Factor (New York 1892) 208 55 Parker, The Translation of a Savage (New York 1913) 75 56 Huyghue, Argimou 139-40 57 Mazo de la Roche, Possession (Toronto 1923) 52 58 W.O. Mitchell, 'The Alien,' Maclean's LXVI (15 Sept. 1953) 9 59 Ibid. (1 Oct. 1953) 14 60 Ibid. LXVII (1 Jan. 1954) 24 61 Ibid. (15 Jan. 1954) 32. The dance also symbolizes union of white and red worlds in the work of several of Mitchell's predecessors. Augustus Bridle's Hansen (1924), sub­ titled 'A Novel of Canadianization,' describes the developing sense of a national iden­ tity in a Norwegian immigrant who in the final stage of his 'Canadianization' marries a girl of Cree descent. Hansen finds the girl in the midst of a tribal dance and is

173 Notes pp 54-67

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

drawn into a 'throbbing sensation of the infinite: worship, drama, melody, nature - all merged in one, with no sense of time except the sun and the metrical four-beat unison of the tomtoms.' In his poem 'Indian Dance,' Frederick Niven develops this same idea of the red man's dance as a link to the eternal, and the heroes of The Flying Years (1935) and Mine Inheritance (1940) both record similar responses to the dances of the Metis and Indians. Mitchell, The Vanishing Point (Toronto 1973) 185 William French, 'Minor Flaws Don't Lessen the Power' Globe and Mail (13 Oct. 1973) 34 William Blake, The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London 1966) 154 French, 'Minor Flaws .. .' 34 Margaret Laurence, The Scone Angel, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1968) 5 Clara Thomas, Margaret Laurence, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1969) 59 Laurence, A Bird in the House, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1974) 119 Laurence, A Jest of God, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1974) 168 Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1973) 74 Laurence, The Diviners, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1978) 275 Both the power and danger of Jules' sexual appeal are anticipated in descriptions of white lovers in earlier novels in the Manawaka series. Bram Shipley is a 'bearded Indian' who has 'been seen with half-breed girls.' Nick Kazlik, with his 'prominent cheekbones, slightly slanted eyes, his black straight hair,' is the son of a man with 'a wide hard bony face, high-cheekboned as a Cree's.' Stacey MacAindra not only con­ sistently identifies Luke Venturi with his Indian sweater but also notes that Buckle Fennick 'has a face like an Iroquois, angular, and faintly slanted dark eyes. His hair is night-black and straight.' CHAPTER FOUR DEATH OF THE INDIAN

1 William Douw Lighthall, Songs of the Great Dominion (London 1889) xxi 2 Andrew Suknaski, Wood Mountain Poems (Toronto 1976) 124 3 John Campbell, 'The American Indian: What and Whence; The Canadian Magazine II, 4 (Feb. 1894) 8. Campbell was not consistently hostile towards the Indian and in 'The Ancient Literatures of America,' published in 1896, he honours the red man's

4 5 6 7

past but insists that 'save in some favoured quarters, the remnants of the old Indian races have lost all their fire and energy, have become listless, apathetic, uninterest­ ing....' Anon., 'The Grievances of the Red Indian by One Who has Lived Among Them,' The Week II (7 May 1885) 365 Clark Blaise acknowledges the power of this attitude in 'Among the Dead': 'For too long our mandate to survive on this continent was derived from what the Iroquois had done to our fathers' confessors.' Tribal Justice (Toronto 1974) 22 I George Grant, Ocean ro Ocean (Toronto 1873) 34 G. Mercer Adam and A. Ethelwyn Wetherald, An Algonquin Maiden (Montreal 1887) 49. In a witty and ironic review of the novel, Sara Jeannette Duncan writes: 'True to the traditions of romance, the authors arrange a perfectly satisfactory termi­ nation of affairs for everybody concerned. Odd numbers being incompatible with unalloyed bliss, Miss Wetherald drowns the unfortunate Algonquin maiden ... in a

174 Notes pp 67-72

8 9 10

II

passage of such sympathetic grace that one becomes more than reconciled to the sad necessity of the act and convinced that the love smitten Algonquin maiden herself could ask no happier fate.' 'Saunterings' The Week IV (13 Jan. 1887) 112-13. Harriet Cheney's 'Jacques Cartier and the Little Indian Girl,' a story which appeared in The Literary Garland in 1848, Rosanna Leprohon's poem, 'The Tryst of the Sachem's Daughter,' and John Hunter Duvar's play, De Roberval, illustrate sentimental varia­ tions in other genres on the figure of the Indian girl who dies for love Northrop Frye, 'Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,' in The Canadian Imagination, ed. David Staines (Cambridge, MA 1977) 33 Frank Edgar Farley, 'The Dying Indian,' in Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge (Boston 1913) 251-60 Peter John Allan, The Poetical Remains of Peter John Allan Esq., ed. the Reverend Henry Christmas (London 1853) II9 Charles Mair, Tecumseh, a Drama and Canadian Poems; Dreamla11d and Other Poems; The America11 Biso11; Through the Mackenzie Basin; Memoirs and Reminiscences

(Toronto 1926) 271-2 M. 'Ode,' Upper Canada Gazette X, 44 (7 Mar. 1801) 2048 Adam Kidd, The Huron Chief and Other Poems (Montreal 1830) I William Kirby, The U.E.: A Tale of Upper Canada (Niagara 1859) 33 Charles Sangster, Hesperus and Other Poems a11d I.yrics (Montreal 1860) 177

12 13 14 15 16 Ibid. 178 17 John Hampden Burnham, Jack Ralsto11: The Outbreak of the Nauscopees (Edinburgh 1902) 210-11. Burnham reiterates this vision of the heroic red man in the intro­ duction to Marcelle (Toronto 1905) 18 William Alexander Fraser, The Blood Lilies (Toronto 1903) 91. The corruption of the Indian by alcohol was a literary cliche as early as 1829, when William Fitz

Hawley wrote in 'Quebec' of 'the insidious draught, whose maddening sway / Stole both their senses and their lands away.' Quebec, The Harp and Other Poems (Montreal

1829) 14 19 Duncan Campbell Scott, 'Indian Affairs, 1867-1912,' Canada and Its Provinces, ed. Adam Shortt and A.G. Doughty, VIII (Toronto 1914) 622-3 20 Scott, The Administration of Indian Affairs ill Ca11ada (Toronto 1931) 25-6 21 Scott, The Circle of Affection (Toronto 1947) 110 22 Scott, The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott (Toronto 1926) 149 23 In 'The Aborigine in Canadian Literature,' Canadian Literature XIV (Autumn 1962) 46, Keiichi Hirano finds Scott's introduction of 'the hand of God' in the poem's con­

clusion an intrusion of the white man's faith. Presumably the use of a word such as 'manitou' would answer this criticism, but there is no evidence that Scott regarded 'God' as designating only the supreme deity of the white man. Similarly, his use of the number three throughout the poem does not appear to be an attempt to incorpo­ rate Christian numerology. Instead, Scott probably is observing a tradition like that in Standish O'Grady's The Emigrant: And oft by hardships borne some hardy sire, Or best of clan left lingering to expire; the leave to solitude nor wait his grave, Resolved at length no human power can save, Still feed the blaze and though their food be scant,

175 Notes pp 72-86

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Leave three days store to serve the lingerer's want. (The Emigrant [Montreal 1842] 71) Scott's use of 'weird' may simply be an attempt to echo the Anglo-Saxon 'wyrd,' meaning 'fate,' in order to reinforce his emphasis on the inevitable extinction of the red man. Scott, The Circle of Affeaion l 22 Scott, Selected Stories of Duncan Campbell Scou, ed. Glenn Clever (Ottawa 1972) 45 Melvin Dagg, 'Scott and the Indians,' The Humanities Association Bulletin XXIII, 4 (Fall 1972) 8 Ibid. 10 Helen Porter, 'The Death of a Race,' Journal of Canadian Fiaion III 2 (1974) 93 Anon., Sketches of Savage Life (Toronto 1969) George Webber, 'The Last of the Aborigines: A Poem Founded on Facts,' in Canadian Poetry II (Spring/Summer 1978) 97 James P. Howley, The Beoihucks or Red Indians (Cambridge 1915) 342 Arthur English, The Vanished Race (Montreal 1927) 6 Peter Such Riverrun (Toronto 1973) 145. The Jost grave of the red man recurs in many other contemporary works including Matt Cohen's Wooden Hunters, Al Purdy's 'Remains of an Indian Village,' and Patrick Lane's 'Elephants.' Such, Vanished Peoples: The Archaic Dorset and Beothuk People of Newfoundland (Toronto 1978) np Nancy Naglin, 'The Destruction of a People,' Sacurday Night LXXXVIII (Nov. 1973) 55 Sid Stephen, Beoihuck Poems (Ottawa 1976) np Paul O'Neill, Legends of a Lose Tribe (Toronto 1976) 10 Al Pittman, Through One More Window (Portugal Cove, Nfld 1974) 17 Anon., 'The Indians of North America,' The Canadian Magazine and Literary Reposi­ tory IV (Jan.-June 1825) 414 Among such poems are Peter John Allan's 'Lament of the Indian,' Nicholas Flood Davin's 'The Indian's Song,' and three poems from The Literary Garland: H.J.K.'s 'The Far West,' D.D.D.'s 'The Last of the Indians,' and the anonymous 'The Indian Nurse's Death Song.' An earlier journal, The Bee, published from 1835 to 1838 in Pictou, Nova Scotia, reveals the pervasive influence of American writers such as William Cullen Bryant, who also exploited the lament as a form for poems on the death of !he red man. Frederick George Scott, 'Poems (Toronto 1910) 189 Charles Mair, Tecumseh, A Drama and Canadian Poems (Toronto 1901) 149 More recent examples of the Indian's lament include the 'Song of a Single Generation' that ends Herschel Hardin's The Great Wave of Civiliza.tion (1976). Sara Jeannette Duncan, The Imperialist (New York 1904) 429 A.M. Klein, The Rocking Chair and Ocher Poems (Toronto 1948) 12 Gwendolyn MacEwen, Noman (Ottawa 1972) 5. Raymond Souster's 'Indian' and 'The Touch' also develop images of the degeneration and destruction of the red man in Toronto. George Ryga, The Ecstasy of Rita Joe and Other Plays (Toronto 1971) 37 Al Purdy, Sundance al Dusk (Toronto 1976) 26 Hugh Garner, The Yellow Sweater and Other Stories (Toronto 1952) 226 Alan Fry, How a People Die (Toronto 1970) 168 Robert Weaver, review, Maclean's LXXXIII (Nov. 1970) 96

1 76 Notes pp 86-98 53 Fry's later novels, Come a Long Journey (1971) and The Revenge of Annie Charlie (1973), present a more optimistic vision than his first book in their emphasis on the meeting of cultures in terms of the union of individuals. In Come a Long Journey, a

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

white man is accepted as the 'brother' of an old Indian companion during a canoe trip on the Yukon River. In The Revenge of Annie Charlie the white protagonist marries the Indian girl of the title. Hubert Evans, Misc on eke River, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1973) 252 Mort Forer, The Humback (Toronto 1969) 314 Patrick Lane, Beware eke Months of Fire (Toronto 1974) 37 Duncan Campbell Scott, The Poems of Duncan Campbell Scott (Toronto 1926) 62. Steve McCaffery presents a more recent exploration of the power of the shamanic drum in 'Drum Language and Sky Text,' Alcheringa Ill 1 (1977) 79-84. Milton Acorn, The Island Means Minago (Toronto 1975) 109 Acorn, Jackpine Sonnets (Toronto 1977) 31 Nicholas Flood Davin, 'The Indian Song,' in Helen M. Merrill's Picturesque Prince Edward County (Picton 1892) 93 Robert Stead, The Empire Builders and Ocker Poems (Toronto 1910) 99 Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1960) 56 I am indebted to Erwin Panofsky's 'Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tra­ dition,' in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (New York 1955) 295-320.

Philip Child, The Village of Souls (Toronto 1948) 270 Matt Cohen, Wooden Hunters, New Canadian Library (Toronto 1975) 47 Wayland Drew, The Wabeno Pease (Toronto 1973) 218 Irving Layton, The Shactered Plinths (Toronto 1968) 36 CHAPTER FIVE: INDIAN HEROES

1 As early as 1893, other poets were writing tributes 10 Johnson such as Charles E. Dedrick's 'To E. Pauline Johnson,' The Canadian Magazine t, 5 Uuly 1893) 549. Carol Bolt's play 'Pauline,' first produced in March 1973, testifies to the survival of 2

interest in Johnson as a personality and poet into the latter half of the twentieth century. Norman Shrive, 'What Happened to Pauline?', Canadian Literature XIII (Summer 1962) 32

3 Charles Mair, 'An Appreciation,' in Pauline Johnson, The Moccasin Maker (Toronto 1913) 18

4 Gilbert Parker, 'Introduction,' in Johnson, The Moccasin Maker 5 Marcus Van Steen, Pauline Johnson: Her Life and Work (Toronto 1965) 46 6 Johnson's poem concludes: O! coward self I hesitate no more; Go forth, and win the glories of the war, Go forth, nor bend to greed of white men's hands, By right, by birth we Indians own these lands, Though starved, crushed, plundered, lies our nation low ... Perhaps the white man's God has willed it so. (The White Wampum [Toronto 1895] 62)

177 Notes pp 98-108

7 8 9 10 1I

12 13 14 I5 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

The assumption of some invincible superiority in 1he white man's culture in the final lines and the fatalistic acceptance of the doom of the red race inspired a 'Sonnet in Reply to an Indian Wife' by 'B' in The Week, II (25 June 1885) 457; 1his poet pro­ mises 'some racial conflict in a coming age' when the white woman will suffer as her red counterpart does now. Mair, 'An Appreciation,' in The Moccasin Maker 15-16 Robertson Davies, Fifth Business (Toronto 1970) 109 In his essay on Grey Owl, Thomas Raddall argues 1hat Belaney knew of Johnson's s1age career and 'mus1 have read some of her poetry.' Foomeps on Old Floors (Garden City, NY 1968) 138 Grey Owl [Archibald Belaney), The Men of the Last Frontier (London 1931) 30 Thomas Raddall, Tambour and Ocher Stories (Toronto I 945) 3 I -2. Brillon Cooke dramatizes the while man's search for heroes in 'The Translation of John Snai1h,' a 1wo-act play which first appeared in Canadian Plays from Hare House Theatre in 1926. In events preceding the action of the play, a halfbreed girl has supplied her northern Ontario milltown's need for a hero who can 'tie men's affections to 1he ground that gives them life' with an Indian hero of 1he past. When 'Golden Quill' is revealed as her own fictional creation by the girl's lover, John Snaith, 1he Jover himself, mus1 replace the hero he destroyed. Charles Sangster, Norland Echoes, ed. Frank M. Tierney (Ottawa 1976) 10 Sara Jeannette Duncan, 'Saun1erings,' The Week (21 Ocr. 1886) 757 Paul Hiebert, Sarah Binks (Toronto 1947) 151-2 Wallace Havelock Robb, Tecumtha: Shawnee Chieftain - Astral Avatar (Kingston 1958) 12 Rudy Wiebe, Where is the Voice Coming From? (Toronto 1974) 142 Thomas Flanagan, The Diaries of Louis Riel (Edmonton 1976) 7 Biographical and historical details cited in Allan Nevins' introduction to Robert Rogers, Ponceach, or The Savages of America (Chicago 1914) Ibid. 230 More than two hundred years later, Robertson Davies also contrasts red and white visions of North America in 'Pontiac and the Green Man' (1977). The leader of the green-jacketed guerrilla force known as Rogers' Rangers is alone in his understand­ ing and sharing of the red man's conception of 1he landscape. As in Rogers' play, this concept is juxtaposed to the corrupt values of white society - corruption extending in Davies' play to Rogers' wife and secretary, who are held responsible for 1he senti­ mental and propagandistic scenes in Ponuach. Ultimately Rogers is a man who has 'gone Indian,' an incomprehensible shift in perspective for his eighteenth-century contemporaries in the play but one very much in vogue in 1970s primitivism. [George Longmore), 'Tecumthe: A Poetical Tale in Three Cantos,' The Canadian Review and Literary and Historical Journal I, 2 (Montreal 1824) 392 John Richardson, The Canadian Brothers (Montreal 1840) 10 Ibid. 68 Ibid. 62 Richardson, War of 1812 (Toronto 1902) 5 Richardson, The Canadian Brothers 173 John Richardson, Tecumseh, or The Warrior of the West (London 1828) Adam Kidd, The Huron Chief and Other Poems (Montreal 1830) 41 Barry Dane U.E. Logan), 'National Literature,' The Week (21 Aug. 1884) 601

178 Notes pp 109-21 30 William Kirby, Ca11adia 11 Idylls (Welland 1894) 66 31 Charles Sangster, The St Lawrence a11 d the Saguenay, and Other Poems (Kingston 1856) 222 32 Sangster, 'Tecumseth,' Canadia11 Monthly and National Review II (July-Sept. 1872) 9 33 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power (Toronto 1970) 48 34 Mair, Tecumseh, a Drama a11d Canadian Poems 4 35 J.B. Mackenzie, Thaye11danegea: A11 Hiscorico-Military Drama (Toronto 1898) iii 36 Sara Jeannette Duncan, 'Saunterings,' The Week (21 Oct. 1886) 757 37 Cited in Odell Shepard's Bliss Carman (Toronto 1923) 183. The poem was later published in Far Horizo11s (Boston 1925). 38 Don Rubin, review, Toro11to Star (5 Aug. 1971) 28 39 Don Gutteridge, Tecumseh (Ottawa 1976) 96 40 Rudy Wiebe, The Temptatiom of Big Bear (Toronto 1973) 243 41 The published version of Pollock's play has a cover photograph not of 1he white hero who gives the play its name, Major James Walsh, but of the play's red hero, Sitting Bull. 42 Publicity release qooted in a review by DuBarry Campau, The Telegram (14 Jan. 1970) 72 43 J. Edmund Collins, The Story of Louis Riel, the Rebel Chief (Toronto 1885) 5. In the notes to Collins's A11nette, the Metis Spy (1886), the author acknowledges his author­ f ship of The Story o Louis Riel and emphasizes that the book is fiction rather than history. In A Stage i11 Our Past (1968), Murray Edwards notes that a play, Louis Riel, or the Northwest Rebellion, was apparently performed in London, Ontario, in 1886 but no text is extant. Although Riel plays a peripheral role in frontier fiction of the early twentieth century such as Connor's The Patrol of the Su11 Da 11ce Trail, he is not prominent as a literary hero until after the Second World War. 44 Margaret Atwood, Survival (Toronto 1972) 170 45 Northrop Frye, The Bush Garde11 (Toronto 1971) 249 46 Richardson, Tecumseh 57 47 In 'A Pathography of Louis Riel,' Canadia11 Psychiatric Associatio11 Journal XXIII, 7 (Nov. 1978) 461, S.K. Littman concludes: 'As regards Riel's claim to be a prophet of the New World, the jury, as it were, is still out until such a time that the relation­ ship of prophecy and psychopathology is examined more closely.' Thomas Flanagan's Louis 'David' Riel: Prophet of the New World (Toronto 1979) is the first biographical study to consider in depth Riel's religious beliefs and his conviction of his own role as prophet. 48 Geraldine Anthony, John Coulter (New York 1977) 71-2 49 Cited by Anthony, ibid., 61-2 50 Michael Tait comments: 'What is lacking is a sense that these events have been sufficiently disciplined and exploited to serve some insight into Canadian society or some more general view of human experience'; Literary History of Canada II (Toronto 1976) 157. Neil Carson argues: 'But Coulter presents the story against a background of European (as opposed to Indian or French-Canadian) Catholicism and introduces embarrassing parallels between the lives of Riel and Christ. By creating Riel as a kind of half-breed Saint Joan, Coulter obscures other aspects of his personality which are possibly more significant'; 'Canadian Historical Drama: Playwrights in Search of a Myth,' Studies in Canadian Literature II, 2 (Summer 1977) 221 51 Don Gutteridge, Riel (Toronto 1972) 66

179

Notes pp

121-8

52 Gutteridge, 'Riel: Historical Man or Literary Symbol?', The Humanities Association Bulletin XXI, 3 (Summer 1970) 13 53 John Coulter, The Trial of Louis Riel (Ottawa 1968) 60. Neil Carson also identifies this passage as a key indicator of 'those qualities which ... make Riel of continuing interest to the Canadian imagination'; 'Canadian Historical Drama: Playwrights in Search of a Myth,' Studies in Canadian Literature II, 2 (Summer 1977) 222 54 Coulter, The Crime of Louis Riel (Toronto 1976) l 55 Gutteridge, 'Riel: Historical Man or Literary Symbol?' 13 56 Gutteridge's poem ends with a vision of the 'gray towers' of Ottawa that have over­ whelmed Riel and his people and Roy Daniells' 'Farewell to Winnipeg' links the 'imminent doom' of the contemporary city to the destruction of Riel and the values he represented. The poem's only optimism lies in the hope that memories of Riel will be a 'living spark' that will ignite 'the flame of freedom' in whatever civilization fol­ lows the apocalyptic destruction of contemporary Winnipeg (Deeper into the Forest [Toronto 1948) 55). James Reaney also envisages the destruction of his technology­ enslaved city in 'A Message to Winnipeg' as he contrasts its enervated 'Neon People' with the heroic vitality of the Metis honoured by Pierre Falcon at the Battle of Seven Oaks. 57 Poesies Religieuses et Politiques par Louis 'David' Riel (Montreal 1886); John Robert Colombo, 'The Last Words of Louis Riel,' The Marxist Quarterly xv (Autumn 1965) 48-53; Louis Riel: Poesies de jeunesse, eds Gilles Martell, Glen Campbell, and Thomas Flanagan (Saint-Boniface 1977); Glen Campbell, 'The Political Poetry of Louis Riel: A Semiotic Study,' Canadian Poetry IIJ (Fall/Winter 1978) 14-25 58 Dorothy Livesay, Collected Poems (Toronto 1972) 151 59 John Newlove, Black Night Window (Toronto 1968) 18 60 Rudy Wiebe, The Scorched-Wood People (Toronto 1977) 11 61 George Woodcock ends his poem, 'On Completing a Life of Dumont' with a similar emphasis on Dumont as the embodiment of human freedom (Notes on Visitations [Toronto 1975) 99). In his biography, Woodcock notes that Dumont has not been cast as literary hero as has Riel. Only two works, Woodcock's radio play, 'Six Dry Cakes for the Fugitive' (published in Two Plays (1977) and also as Gabriel Dumont and the Northwest Rebellion [!9761) and E.H. Carefoot's privately published narra­ tive poem, Gabriel Dumon.t at Batoche (1973), treat Dumont in this context. 62 Margaret Laurence, Heart of a Stranger (Toronto 1976) 21 l CHAPTER SIX: INDIAN MYTHS AND LEGENDS

1 Earle Birney, 'Can. Lit.,' in Ice Cod Bell or Stone (Toronto 1962) 18; Douglas Le Pan, The Wounded Prince and Other Poems (London 1948) l l 2 Donald G. Priestman, 'Man in the Maze,' Canadian Literature LXIV (Spring 1975) 54. Margaret Atwood also argues for an ironic reading of the poem's final lines in Survival (Toronto 1972) 54. 3 Anon., 'Canadian Poetry and Poets,' The British American Magazine I (1863) 417 4 Irving Layton, 'Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1940),' in The Collected Poems of Irving Layton (Toronto 1971) 582 5 An examination of developments in this area is beyond the scope of this book. The following provide an introduction: Jerome Rothenberg, Technicians of the Sacred (1968) and Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the Indian Norch Americas;

180

6

7 8

9 10 11

12

Notes pp

128-30

Dennis Tedlock, Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indiaris (1972); the journal, Alcheringa (1970- ). John Bentley Mays argues for the importance of the Tedlock/Rothenberg concept of 'hearing the silence' to an understanding of all literary attempts to mediate between red and white worlds in 'The Flying Serpent,' The Canadian Review of American Studies IV, I (Spring 1973) 44-5. Rosanna Leprohon, 'The Huron Princess; in The Literary Garland V (Dec. 1850) 582 [also published as 'The Huron Chiefs Daughter' in The Poetical Works of Mrs Leprohon (1881)); Harriet V. Cheney, 'A Legend of the Lake; in The Literary Garland XL (Feb. 1851) 74-91 Marchioness of Duffcrin, My Canadian Journal, 1872-8 (London 1891) 314 Carl Klinck, Wilfred Campbell (Toronto 1942) 38 That the editor, L.O. Armstrong, was head of the colonization department of the CPR may suggest that the aims of the company were not entirely philanthropic. R.D. Cumming, Paul Pero (Toronto 1928) In a contemporary review of Sangster's The St Lawrence and the Saguenay (1856), Daniel Wilson argues: 'Were we to transport the scene to the firth of Clyde, or any other islanded home river, and change only a single term; that of the Red Man for the old Pict, or even the Red Gael, there is nothing in the description that would betray its new-world parentage. At best it is no true Indian, but only the white man dressed in his attire; strip him of his paint and feathers, and it is our old-world familiar acquaintance.' The Canadian Journal of Industry, Science and Art 111, 13 Uan. 1858) 19-20 Rosanna Leprohon, The Poetical Works of Mrs Leprohon (Montreal 1881) 36. Con­ temporary works preoccupied with sacrificial love in high places include: Conway E. Cartwright, Lena: A Legend of Niagara (Dublin I860); Dr Nostrebor, 'The Lover's Leap,' in Canadian Monthly and National Review X {July-Dec. 1876) 248-9; David Boyle 'Kee-Chim-Al-Tik: A Rhyming Legend of the "Broken Fall," now known as the Falls of Elora,' in Rose-Be/ford's Canadian Monthly V {July-Dec. 1880) 27-8. In 1923 Stephen Leacock parodied dramatic expressions of such narratives in 'Metta­ wamkeag,' a blank verse 'Indian tragedy' populated by Areopagitica, 'an Indian chief,' the Encyclopedia, 'a brave of the Appendixes' and Sparkling Soda Water, who leaps to her death over a waterfall after a disappointment in love. The play first appeared in Harper's Magazine CXI.VII Uuly 1923) 177 and in Over the Footlights

(1923). 13 Works based on Glooscap narratives include: Charles M. Lugrin, 'A Milicete Legend,' in The Week vm (23 Jan. 1891) 122-3; Agnes Maule Machar, 'The Passing of Clote-Scarp, or Glooscap; in L ays of the 'True North' (Toronto 1899) 12-15;

Jeremiah S. Clark, 'Glooscap' and 'Meskeek-Uum-Pudas,' in The Acadian Exile and Sea Shell Essays (Charlottetown 1902) 19-23; T heodore Goodridge Roberts, 'Gluskap's Hound,' in The Leather Bottle (Toronto 1934) 23-4; Theodore H. Rand, 'Glooscap,' in The Canadian Magazine VIII, 4 (Feb. 1897) 340

14 Leland acknowledges his indebtedness to Silas Tertius Rand for nine legends first published in The Dominion Monthly of 1871 and for a nine-hundred-page manuscript

of Micmac legends that Rand had made available.

15 Charles G.D. Roberts, 'The Outlook for Literature: Acadia's Field for Poetry,

History and Romance,' in Charles G.D. Roberts: Selected Poetry and Critical Prose, ed. W.J. Keith (Toronto 1974) 261 16 Charles G.D. Roberts, Poems (Toronto 1907) 78

181 Notes pp 131-9 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Ibid. 182 Archibald Lampman, The Poems of Archibald Lampman (Toronto 1900) 119 Lampman, 'At the Mermaid Inn,' The Globe (Toronto) XLV111 (1 Oct. 1892) 9 Bliss Carman, Songs from a Northern Garden (Boston 1904) 25. Carman returns to the traditions and legends of the Indian as a model for the union of man, nature, and god in Far Horizons (1925). Poems such as 'The Place of Vision' and 'The Truce of the Manitou' incorporate the traditions of the Kootenay Indians in a manner remi­ niscent of the younger Carman's treatment of the Glooscap legends. In his critical biography of Campbell, Carl Klinck comments: 'Campbell as a boy loved and imitated the didactic tuneful ballads that the whole English-speaking world knew. Hiawatha, his special favourite by reason of its Indian lore, is echoed in many of his Varsity poems. It must be observed, however, that Campbell's knowledge of Indians was not limited to what he could learn from Hiawatha. His subjects are drawn from native legends of the Wiarton district by virtue of more direct contact with the redmen than even Longfellow seems to have enjoyed. The young Lake Poet's apparent reliance upon his American guide serves only to emphasize his independence and his small but authentic contribution to our record of Indian legends. Longfellow, as he himself admits, used legends "drawn chiefly from the various and valuable writings of Mr Schoolcraft," who was best acquainted with the Iroquois; Campbell had personal knowledge of the Canadian Ojibways, or Chippewas, of Algonquin stock. The spelling which the Wiarton schoolboy adopts shows a characteristic difference s:iggesting original investigation of firsthand sources. For Longfellow's "Keewaydin" (the North-West Wind) he has "Kewaydin"; for "Mudwayaushka" (the sound of the waves on the shore) he has "Medwayosh"; and for "Nahma" (the sturgeon) he has "Nama" in "Nama-Way-Qua-Donk," the Bay of Sturgeons at Wiarton."' (Wilfred Campbell 38-9) Isabella Valancy Crawford, The Col/ecced Poems of Isabella Valancy Crawford (Toronto 1905) 196 James Reaney, 'Isabella Valancy Crawford,' in Our Living Tradition, ed. Robert L. McDougall, 2nd and 3rd series (Toronto 1959) 286 In 'The Ambivalence of Love in the Poetry of Isabella Valancy Crawford,' Queen's Quarterly LXXVU (Winter 1970) 404-18, Frank Bessai examines the contrasting moods of serenity and violence in the opening passages of Parts II and IV respectively and notes possible links with the narrative of Max and Katie. Crawford's description of the landscape in animistic images associated with Indian culture also appears in lyrics such as 'The Dark Stag,' 'The Lily Bed,' 'The Camp of Souls,' and 'Said the Canoe.' Sara Jeannette Duncan, 'Saunterings,' The Week (13 Jan. 1887) 112-13 Gilbert Parker, Pierre and His People (New York 1912) 206 Lampman, Poems 293 W.D. Lighthall, The Master of Life (Toronto 1908) v Marius Barbeau, The Downfa.ll of Temlaham (Toronto 1928) 247 Frank Parker Day, John Paul's Rock (New York 1932) 168 A contemporary of Day's, Lady Amy Redpath Roddick, also used the legends of Glooscap in what may be the most successful work in a relatively slight canon. The Seekers: An /,rdian Mystery Play (1920) is a five-act verse drama built almost entirely on the legends of Glooscap. The play appears to be the first attempt by a white writer to put these legends into dramatic form. As her sources, Roddick lists Silas Tertius Rand and Charles G. Leland.

182 Notes pp 139-46

32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42

43 44 45 46

47 48

The seekers of the play's title are young Mohawk and Micmac braves who reach the camp of Glooscap, where they are punished or rewarded according to their deserts. The atmosphere of the play is that of the folktale, with none of the reverence of Glooscap as deity evident in John Paul's Rock. Instead, Glooscap is both cultural hero and trickster. Incident is piled upon incident, each one based on a Glooscap legend, and this weak sequential structure combined with the artificiality of much of Roddick's verse makes the play more impressive as a masque filled with spectacle and simple moral lessons than as drama. A related interest characterizes the strongly nativist 'Jindyworobak' movement that developed in Australian literature in the late 1930s. George W. Cronyn, The Path on the Rainbow (New York 1934) xvi Constance Lindsay Skinner, 'Letter to the Editor,' in The New York Times (6 Feb. 1916) 12 Constance Lindsay Skinner, Songs of the Coast Dwellers (New York 1930) viii Louis Untermeyer, 'Tribal Songs,' The Saturday Review of Literature, VI, 45 (31 May 1930) 1092 Fraser's 'Songs of the Haida' first appeared in Songs of the Western Islands in 1945 and later in The Arrow-Maker's Daughter and Other Haida Chants (1957). The title poem of the latter tells a story of sacrificial love and death in a world torn by the struggle between the forces of good and evil at both human and divine levels. A sur­ prising absence of sentimentality distinguishes Fraser's poem from earlier treatments of similar legends, but the inclusion of a glossary of Haida vocabulary intensifies the impression of the poem as anthropology in dramatic verse. Peter Stevens, A Few Myths (Vancouver 1971) np John Newlove, The Fat Man: Selected Poems 1962-1972 (Toronto 1977) 69 Newlove, Moving in Alone (Toronto 1965) 73 Andrew Suknaski, Wood Mountain Poems (Toronto 1976) 26 Suknaski, Octomi (Saskatoon 1976) 7. Patrick Lane writes: 'Andy Suknaski is emblematic of the new Canadian. By this I do not mean the immigrant, but rather part of the first generation that sees itself as an actual part of the landscape. In a way, a new Indian ... Andy loses his own European ties once he perceives that the Prairie is himself. He is, in a sense, a spiritual nationalist, the first of the Prairie prophets who states unequivocably that this land is our history.' 'The Poetry of Andrew Suknaski,' Essays on Canadian Writing 18/19 (Summer/Fall 1980) 95-6 George Bowering, The Gangs of Kosmos (Toronto 1969) 55 Stephen Scobie, review in Books in Canada I, 11 (Oct. 1972) 30 Robert Gibbs, review, The Fidd/ehead LXXXV (May-June 1970) 110 Compare this critical attitude with Sara Jeannette Duncan's discussion of Joseph Brant's lineage: 'Brant's father was a Mohawk Sachem of the Wolf tribe, with a per­ fectly unpronounceable and virtually unspellable name - a name that should inspire us with gratitude that its owner sought the happy hunting-grounds before rendering King George any distinguished service which posterity would feel bound to acknowl­ edge. For beyond the fact that he was paternally connected with Thayandanegea, we know little of Tehowaghwengaraghkin.' 'Saunterings,' The Week (21 Oct. 1886) 756 Dorothy Livesay, Collected Poems (Toronto 1972) 343 Wayne Grady, interview with Susan Musgrave, Books in Canada vm, 4 (Apr. 1979) 32. Reviewing Marilyn Bowering's One Who Became Losi (1976), M. Travis Lane suggests parallels with Musgrave's poetry in noting that the best poems in Bowering's

183 Notes pp 146-51

49 50 51 52

53

54 55

56 57

58 59 60

book 'are not spoken by a poetic speaker who represents either the average human sensibility or even the average poetic speaker. Instead the speaker is woman-in­ nature - a primitive, an animal, a witch, a goddess - some sort of natural female force ... a point-of-view virtually female at the level of dream, totem, and myth.' The Fiddlehead {Winter 1977) 156 Susan Musgrave, Grave-Dirt and Selected Strawberries {Toronto 1973) 56 Sharon McMillan, 'Susan Musgrave: Hinging the Blind Memory,' The Malahat Review, XLV (Jan. 1978) 75 Musgrave, The lmpstone {Toronto 1976) 96 George Woodcock suggests a similar relationship in the paintings of Jack Shadbolt: 'Shadbolt is not imitating Indian artists, although he has obviously learned from them. He finds that some of their images evoke his own experience of living in the region of coast and rain forests which he shares with them, and so he adapts them to his own use in portraying the natural cycles that figure strongly in his work.' 'The Lure of the Primitive,' The American Scholar XLV, 3 (Summer 1976) 94 Fred Wah, Pictograms from the Interior of BC (Vancouver 1975) 26. Other poets and novelists also use Indian pictographs as a focus for the meeting of cultures. The cli­ max of Atwood's Surfacing occurs when the protagonist views submerged pictographs in Chapter 17; the speaker in Al Purdy's 'The Horseman of Agawa' envies his wife's silent communion with the Ojibway artist who left the rock painting on the cliffs of Lake Superior. Andrew Suknaski finds 'At the St Victor Petroglyph Site' a 'lost lan­ guage of a people who were whole / knowing the transient meaning of home/ and what is/ prairie ...' and confronting the defacement of these petroglyphs Glen Sorestad writes: 'I feel the need to apologize/ for people I don't even know.' Paul Radin, The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology (London 1956) ix-x Sheila Watson, The Double Hook {Toronto 1959) 22 For a discussion of Kip's relationship to Coyote in relation 10 the voodoo gods alluded to in Watson's 'The Black Farm,' see Leslie Monkman 'Coyote as Trickster in The Double Hook,' Canadian Literature LIX {Spring 1972) 72-3 Functioning both as the embodiment of an Indian civilization dying from cultural shock and the mythical agent of fear and uncertainty, Watson's Coyote calls down 10 two men in Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China (1970): 'Suddenly behind them, away from the highway, a sound burst at their very ears: a wail, clicks like bones breaking, the hard grinding roll of steel. The sound rushed from loud 10 explo­ sion as they leaped erect into their shadows, and immediately from the slope above them a voice coughing and almost laughter dying 10 a wail away. "What ... ?" the old man whispered finally. "I have set his feet on soft ground: I have set his feet on the sloping shoulders of the world".' {p 226) To the young representative of the new 'social revolution,' Coyote's call is a reminder of the insufficiency of human systems and the necessity for human love. To the veteran of decades of injustice the fragility of 1ha1 Jove is 'the big trouble with Jesus. ... He never gives you a thing to hold in your hand.' However, his young suc­ cessor recognizes that that love represents mankind's best hope as the only reconcilia­ tion of 'the double hook' of human existence. Robert Kroetsch, The Words of My Roaring (Toronto 1966) 6 Kroetsch, The Studhorse Man (Toronto 1969) 69 Konrad Gross, 'Looking Back in Anger,' Journal of Canadian Fiction Ill, 2 {1974) 53

184 Notes pp 152-62 61 I am indebted to an unpublished study of the fiction of Rudy Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch by Kenneth G. Probert for a discussion of the 'problematic' hero in a 'con­ tingent' universe. 62 Edward Tripp, Crowell's Handbook of Classical Mythology (New York 1970) 299; Radin, The Trickster 176 63 Donald Cameron, Conversations with Canadian Novelists I (Toronto 1973) 89-90 64 June Grimble suggests that the maze or labyrinth 'was a place where a living king­ god renewed his virility, where he "died" and was "resurrected" for the welfare of his people .... as a symbol it linked the world with the after-world, life with death, and death with resurrection! Boundaries of the Soul (Garden City, NY 1972) 255 65 Kroetsch, Alberta (Toronto 1968) 5 66 Kroetsch, Gone Indian (Toronto 1973) 11 67 Kroetsch, 'Unhiding the Hidden: Recent Canadian Fiction,' Journal of Canadian Ficcion III, 3 (1974) 45 68 Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (Toronto 1966) 183-4. Cohen's source for this account is Francis Parkman's The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto 1906) 78. 69 Edouard Lecompte, SJ, Une Vierge /roquoise: Catherine Tekakwitha (Montreal 1927) II

70 Sean Virgo, Deathwatcl1 on Skidegaie Narrows (Victoria 1979) 7 71 Emily Carr, Klee Wyck (Toronto 1951) 78-9 72 Lawren Harris, quoted by Ira Dilworth in the foreword to Klee Wyck (1951) np. In Six Journeys: A Canadian Pauern (1977), Charles Taylor also emphasizes the unique perspective developed by Carr in her paintings of the Indian and his landscape: 'Capturing the reverence - and the fear - which the natural world had always aroused in the Indian carvers, she showed their totem poles as part of the forest around them, growing right out of the trees, taking on the same forms, as sharing the same mys­ teries, evoking the same spirits.' (p 177) 73 Wilfred Watson, Friday's Child (London 1955) 55 74 Tom Marshall, The White City (Ottawa 1976) 71 75 Musgrave, The /mpstone 94 CHAPTER SEVEN: CONCLUSION 1

2

3 4 5

Norman Newton, 'Wilderness No Wilderness,' Canadian Literature LXIll (Winter 1975) 20 The assertion by Duke Redbird and Winston Wuttunee that they are 'Metis' rather than 'Indian' may indicate a reciprocal movement of the red man to a reconciliation of the values of his own culture with those of the white-dominated world in which he lives. The publication of Many Voices (1977), the first anthology of contemporary Canadian Indian poetry, the emergence of writers such as George Clutesi, Maria Campbell, and Marty Dunn, and the development of new translation techniques through the study of ethnopoetics ensure that the red man's perspective will be expressed. Patrick Lane, Beware the Months of Fire (Toronto 1974) 41 Paulette Jiles, 'Son of Raven,' in Mindscapes, ed. Ann Wall (Toronto 1971) 65 Andrew Suknaski, The Ghosts Call You Poor (Toronto 1978) 8-9. Watson Kirkcon­ nell writes out of a recognition similar to that expressed in the work of younger poets

185 Notes pp 162-5

6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

such as Lane, Jiles, and Suknaski: 'And so the white man's travels, redskin­ mentored, / From sea to sea with Indians to guide,/ Called 'exploration' in our white effront'ry, / Were ' guided tours' through most familiar country.' Centennial Tales and Selected Poems (Toronto 1965) 5 Frederick Niven, The Flying Years (London 1935) 137 Lorne Pierce, Unexplored Fields of Canadian Literature (Toronto 1932) 16 The widespread tendency to reproduce Indian speech in white biblical and liturgical styles may also be related to a pervasive sense of ancestral links between red and white cultures. A stage direction in Herschel Hardin's The Greai Wave of Civilization explicitly directs the actor playing one of the Indian characters to use 'a grandiose liturgical style' in his opening speech. Commenting on Rudy Wiebe's tendency to echo the syntax and occasionally the diction of the Bible in the speeches of Indian characters, Eli Mandel suggests that these echoes lend 'a prophetic voice' to The Temptations of Big Bear 'as if you'd made these Indian people a Biblical people.' Quill & Quire XL, 12 (Dec. 1974) 4 Anon., 'Indian Anecdotes,' The Literary Garland IV, 9 (Sept. 1846) 408 James Reaney, 'Local Grains of Sand,' in Canada: A Guide 10 the Peaceable Kingdom, ed. William Kilbourn (Toronto 1970) 27 Robert Weaver, review of How a People Die, Maclean's LXXXIII (Nov. 1970) 96 W.H. New, introduction to Mist on the River (Toronto 1973) Michael Smith, 'Misfits Unlimited,' Books in Canada VI, 6 (June-July 1977) 21 Robin Skelton, comment, The Malahat Review XI.V (Jan. 1978) 5 Andrew Suknaski, 'Old Man River,' NeWesi Review I, 6 (Jan. 1976) 9. Gary Snyder writes of similar responses in contemporary literature of the western United States in The Old Ways (San Francisco 1977) 67-93. Ken Mitchell, preface to Horizon (Toronto 1977) xi Robert Kroetsch and Diane Bessai, 'Death is a Happy Ending: A Dialogue in Thirteen Parts,' in Figures in a Ground, ed. Diane Bessai and David Jackel (Saskatoon 1978) 21 5

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Acorn, Milton 'Dig Up My Heart' 89; 'Ojibway Louis Cameron Speaks in Toronto' 89; 'On Speaking Ojib­ way' 38 Adam, Graeme Mercer and Ethelwyn Wetherald An Algonquin Maiden 66, 135 Aikins, Carroll The God of Gods 18 Allan, Peter John 'The Indian War­ rior' 68; 'Lament of the Indian' 1750 Armstrong, LO. Hiawatha or Nana­ bozho: An Ojibway Indian Play 129 Atwood, Margaret 3, 120, 153; Lady Oracle 162; 'Oratorio for Sas­ quatch, Man and Two Androids' 144; Surfacing 44 , 48-50, 144, 1830 Austin, Mary 139, 140 'Azakia: A Canadian Story' 51 Barbeau, Marius 136; The Downfall of Temlaham 137-8 Bayley, Cornwall Canada: A Descrip­ tive Poem 7 Belaney, Archibald. See Grey Owl Bellegarde: The Adopted Indian Boy

(anon.) 169-1700

Benson, Nathaniel Dollard: An Epic of Canada 169n Berger, Carl 110 Bessai, Frank 181n Birney, Earle 'Can. Lit.' 127, 1790; The Damnation of Vancouver 31, 36-7; Trial of a City 171n Blaise, Clark 'Among the Dead' 1730 Bodsworth, Fred The Strange One 64 Bolt, Carol 'Daganawida' 119; 'Gabe' 126; 'Pauline' 176n Bowering, George 36, 141; 'Hamatsa' 144-5, 146; 'Indian Summer' 38; 'The Religious Lake' 144; 'Win­ digo' 144-5 Bowering, Marilyn One Who Became Lost 182-1830 Boyle, David 'Kee-Chim-Al-Tik' 1800 Brebner, J.B. 15 Bridle, Augustus Hansen 172-1730 Brooke, Frances 28, 162; The History of Emily Montague 28-9, 30, 33 Burnham, Hampden 98; Jack Ralston 70; Marcelle 174n Burwell, Adam 'Ontario' 66

188 Index Campbell, Glen 179n Campbell, John 65 Campbell, Maria 184n Campbell, Wilfred 'Crags' 171n; 'Indian Summer' 35; 'Legend of Dead Man's Lake' 132; 'Legend of Restless River' 132; 'Medwayosh' 34; 'The Vengeance of Saki' 132 Carefoot, E.H. Gabriel Dumont at Batoche 179n Carman, Bliss 'In a Grand Pre Garden' 131-2; 'The Place of Vision' 181n; 'Tecumseh and the Eagles' 114; 'The Truce of the Manitou' 18 In Carr, Emily 159-60, 164; Klee Wyck 159 Carson, Neil 178n, 179n Cartwright, Conway 'Lena: A Legend of Niagara' 18on Cary, Thomas 26, 30; Abram's Plains 8-9 Caswell, Edward 129 Chamberlin, J.E. 169n Cheney, Harriet 128; 'Jacques Cartier and the Little Indian Girl' 174n; 'A Legend of the Lake' 18on Child, Philip The Village of Souls 90-1 Chisholme, David 167-168n Clark, Jeremiah 'The Acadian Exile' 170n; 'Glooscap' 180n; 'Meskeek­ Uum-Pudas' 180n Clutesi, George 184n Cody, H.A. 15 Cohen, Leonard 141, 148; Beautiful Losers 18, 43-4, 156-9 Cohen, Matt Wooden Hunters 91, 175n

Coleman, Helena 'Indian Summer' 37 Collins, J. Edmund Annette, the Metis Spy 178n; The Story of Louis Riel 119 Colombo, John Robert 'The Last Words of Louis Riel' 123 Connor, Ralph 15; The Patrol of the Sun Dance Trail II, 12-13, 178n Cook, Michael 'The Rim of the Curve' 78 Cooke, Britton 'The Translation of John Snaith' 177n Corner, John 147 Coulter, John Riel 121; The Crime of Louis Riel 121, 122; The Trial of Louis Riel 121-2 Cowdell, Thomas The Nova Scotia Minstrel 39 Crawford, Isabella Valancy 'The Camp of Souls' 181n; 'The Dark Stag' 181n; 'The Lily Bed' 181n; 'Malcolm's Katie' 10, 132-5; 'Said the Canoe' 1 8 In Cronyn, George W. 139 Daniells, Roy 'Farewell to Win­ nipeg' 179n Davies, Robertson 153; Fifch Busi­ ness 98; Leaven of Malice 30; 'Pontiac and the Green Man' 4, 177n Davin, Nicholas Flood 'The Indian's Song' 175n Day, Frank Parker 136; John Paul's Rock 138-9 Dedrick, Charles E. 'To E. Pauline Johnson' 176n de la Roche, Mazo Possession 52-3 De Mille, James 'The Indian Names of Acadia' 33

189 Index Denison, Merrill 11 Dewart, E.H. 129 Drew, Wayland The Wabeno Feast 91-4 Drummond, W.H. 163; 'The Windigo' 135 Dudek, Louis 36 Dufferin, Lady 128 Duncan, Sara Jeannette II4, 135, 173-4, 182n; The Imperialist 79-80 Dunlop, William 'Tiger' 34 Dunn, Marty l 84n Duvar, John Hunter De Roberval 39-40, 174n 'Eclogue' (anon.) 170n Edwards, Murray 178n Eliade, Mircea 49-50 Engel, Marian Bear 64 English, Arthur The Vanished Race 75 Evans, Hubert 85; Mist on the River 86-7, 163 Farley, F.E. 67-8 'Far West, The' (H.J.K.) 175n Fiedler, Leslie 4 Flanagan, Thomas 177n, 178n, 179n Forer, Mort 85; The Humback 87 Fraser, Hermia Harris 140, 182n Fraser, W.A. The Blood Lilies 70 Fry, Alan 163; Come a Long Journey 176n; How a People Die 85-6; The Revenge of Annie Charlie 176n Frye, Northrop 4, 6, 67, 102, 119 Garner, Hugh 'One-Two-Three Little Indians' 85, 86 Garnet, Eldon Brebeuf: A Martyrdom of Jean de 42 Garvin, John 37, 129

Gibbs, Robert 145 Glass, Joanna Canadian Gothic 64 Godfrey, Dave 5 Goldsmith, Oliver 11, 22, 26, 30; The Rising Village 9, 66 Grant, George M. Ocean to Ocean 33, 66 Grant, George P. 44 Grey Owl 96, 153, 154, 156; The Men of the Last Frontier 99-Ioo Gutteridge, Don 31, 120; Borderlands 38; Coppermine 38; Riel 122-3; Tecumseh II5, 120 Haliburton, Thomas 33, 171n Hamilton, W.D. 168n Hardin, Herschel The Great Wave of Civilization 169n, 175n, 185n Harris, La wren l 84n Hawley, William Fitz 'Quebec' 174n Haycock, Ronald 169n Herbert, Mary E. Belinda Dalton 168n Hiebert, Paul Sarah Binks I oo- I Houston, James Ghost Fox 64 Howard, Joseph Kinsey 122 Howe, Joseph 10, II, 14, 22, 26, 30; 'Acadia' 9-10; 'The Micmac' 10; 'The Song of the Micmac' 10, 168n Howison, John 34 Howley, James P. 75-6 Huyghue, Douglas 39; Argimou: A Legend of the Micmac 30, 32-3, 51-2 'Indian Nurse's Death Song, The' (anon.) 175n 'Indian's Lament, The' (anon.) 78 Jaenen, Cornelius J. 168n Jameson, Anna 128

190 Index Jefferson, Thomas 107 Jiles, Paulette 'Son of Raven' 162 Johnson, Pauline 59, 96, 99, 100, 176-7; 'As Red Men Die' 98; 'Canada' 97; 'Canada Born' 97; 'A Cry from an Indian Wife' 98; Legends of Vancouver 97, 136; 'Ojistoh' 98; 'On the Dedication of a Memorial to Joseph Brant' 97 Kidd, Adam 109, 120; 'The Huron Chier 30, 32, 40-1, 68 -9, 74, 96, 103, 106-8, 129 Kinsella, Thomas 163 Kirby, William 21, 108; Canadian Idylls: Pontiac and Bushy Run

109-10, 169n; The Golden Dog 35; The U.E.: A Tale of Upper Canada

24-6, 69, 129 Kirkconnell, Watson 184-185n Klein, A.M. 'Bestiary' 80; 'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga' 80-1; 'A Psalm Touching Genealogy' 143 Klinck, Carl 41, 128-9, 171n, 181n Kroetsch, Robert 141, 148, 153; Alberta 153; Gone Indian 153-6; 'Old Man Stories' 151; The Stud­ horse Man 151-3; The Words of My Roaring 151 Lampman, Archibald 'At the Long Sault: May, 1660' 11; 'Indian Summer' 35; 'The Loons' 131; 'Temagami' 136 Lane, Patrick 182n; 'Elephants' 175n; 'For Simon Fraser' 161; 'Treaty-Trip from Shulus Reser­ vation' 87-8 'Last of the Indians, The' (D.D.D.) 175n Laurence, Margaret 126; 'A Bird in the House' 57, 58, 59-60, 61; The

Diviners 57, 61-4; The Fire­ Dwellers 57, 58, 60-1; A Jest of God 57, 58, 60; The Stone Angel

57-8, 63 Lawrence, D.R. 50, 54 Layton, Irving 'Iroquois in Nice' 94-5; 'Osip Mandelshtam' 128, 179n Leacock, Stephen 7, 168n; 'Metta­ wamkeag' 180n; Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town 90 Lecompte, Edouard 157 Leland, Charles 129, 131, 181n LePan, Douglas 127 Leprohon, Rosanna 128; 'The Huron Princess' 180n; 'The River Sague­ nay' 66; 'The Tryst of the Sachem's Daughter' 174n; 'The White Canoe' 129; 'The White Maiden and the Indian Girl' 170-171n Lighthall, William Douw 33, 65, 129; The Master of Life 18, 136-7 Littman, S.K. 178n Livesay, Dorothy 3; 'The Artefacts: West Coast' 145-6; 'Prophet of the New World' 123-4 Logan, J.E. 108 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 128, 129, 130, 18In Longmore, George 102, 106, 107, 108; 'Tecumthe' 18, 39, 104-5 Louis Riel or the Northwest Rebellion

(anon.) 178n Lovejoy, A.O. 28 Lugrin, Charles M. 'A Milicete Legend' 18on McCaffery, Steve 176n Machar, Agnes Maule 'The New World' 7; 'The Passing of Clote­ Scarp, or Glooscap' 180n

The Champlain Road Saint-Marie among Quebec Hill or Canadian

the H11rons The Flying

Scenery Huldowget Thayendanegea

Years Mine Inheritance

Emily

Tay John

Tecumseh

Legends of a Lost Tribe

Wild Geese

The Vanishing Point

The Chief Fac­ tor The Translation of a Savage Songs of the Wilderness

I

I

Quebec: A Poetical Essay

Walsh

192 Index Pratt, E.J. 19; Brebeuf and His Breth­ ren 19, 20-1, 26 Purdy, Al 'Beothuk Indian Skeleton in Glass Case' 77; 'The Children' 85; 'The Horseman of Agawa' 183n; 'Onomatopoeic People' 38; 'Re­ mains of an Indian Village' 175n Raddall, Thomas 12, 171n; 'Bald Eagle' 100; Roger Sudden 13-15 Radin, Paul 148 Rand, Silas Tertius 39, 129, 181n Rand, Theodore H. 'Glooscap' 1800 Reaney, James 26, 38, 163, 179n Redbird, Duke 184n 'Red Revolutionary, The' (anon.) II4 Richardson, John 9, 14, 21, 102, 108, 162; The Canadian Brothers 106; Eight Years in Canada 106; Hard­ scrabble lo-II; Tecumseh, or The Warrior of the West 106, 120; Wacousta 8, 10- I I, 22-4; War of 1812 106; Wau-Nan-Gee 10-11 Riel, Louis Poesies de jeunesse 127; Poesies Religieuses ec Politiques par Louis 'David' Riel 123 Ringwood, Gwen Pharis Lament for Harmonica (Maya} 85

Roberts, Charles G.D. 'The Departing of Gluskap' 130-1; The Forge in the Forest II; 'Indian Summer' 35; 'Outlook for Literature' 130; 'The Succour of Gluskap' 130, 131; 'The Vengeance of Gluskap' 130 Roberts, Theodore Goodridge 'Gluskap's Hound' 180n Roddick, Amy Redpath The Seekers 181-182n Rogers, Robert 102, 103, 120; A Concise Account of North America

103; Journals 103; Ponceach, or The Savages of North America 4, 96, 103-4 Ross, W.W.E. 'The Indian Speaks' 41

Rothenberg, Jerome 179-18on Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 28, 29, 170n Rowe, Frederick W. 78 Rubin, Don II4 Ryga, George 81; The Ecstasy of Rica Joe 82, 83-4; 'Indian' 82-3, 126 Sangster, Charles 162; 'Indian Sum­ mer' 35; 'Lament of Shingwa­ konce' 79, 110; 'Sillery' 66, 70; 'Sonnets, Written in the Orillia Woods, August, 1859' 69-70; 'Taa­ pookaa: A Huron Legend' 129 Schoolcraft, Henry Rowe 128, 131 Scobie, Stephen 145 Scott, Duncan Campbell 33, 98; 'At Gull Lake, August, 1810' 51, 73-4; 'Charcoal' 72-3; 'The Forsaken' 67, 71, 72, 88, 174-1750; 'The Half-Breed Girl' 73; 'Indian Affairs' 70-1; 'Indian Place­ Names' 34; 'Lines in Memory of Edmund Morris' 71-2, 73, 88; 'The Onondaga Madonna' 72 Scott, Frederick George 'Waho­ nomin' 78-9 Scott, F.R. 21; 'Brebeuf and His Brethren' 26; 'Letters from the Mackenzie River' 81 Seton, Ernest Thompson The Gospel of the Redman 41-2 Shadbolt, Jack 183n Sketches of Savage Life (anon.) 175n Skinner, Constance Lindsay 136, 139, 141; Songs of the Coast Dwellers 140

193 Index Sluman, Norma Blackfoot Crossing 119 Smith, A.J.M. 37 Snyder, Gary 185n 'Sonnet in Reply to an Indian Wife' ('B.') 177n Sorestad, Glen 183n Souster, Raymond 21; 'Indian' 175n; 'La Crosse' 26-7; 'The Touch' 175n Stead, Robert 'The Seer' 89-90 Stephen, Sid Beothuck Poems 77 Stevens, Peter 'On the Edge' 140-1 Such, Peter Riverrun 74, 75-6 Suknaski, Andrew 65, 141, 164, 182n; 'At the St Victor Petroglyph Site' 183n; 'Dreaming of the Northwest Passage' 162; Oaomi 144; Wood Mountain Poems I 19, 143-4 Sullivan, Alan 'Brebeuf and Lale­ mant' 20; Three Came co Ville Marie 19, 20 Tait, Michael 178n Taylor, Charles 184n Tedlock, Dennis 179-18on Thomson, E.W. The Many-Mansioned House 79; 'Red-Headed Win­ dego' 135 Traill, Catharine Parr 34; The Back­ woods of Canada 15; The Canadian Crusoes l 5-16 Trigger, Bruce G. 168n Untermeyer, Louis 140 Virgo, Sean Kiskatinaw Songs 159

Wah, Fred 141; Pictograms from the Interior of BC 147 Walker, James 8 Waterston, Elizabeth 3 Watson, Sheila 141, 164; 'The Black Farm' 183n; The Double Hook 147-51 Watson, Wilfred 159-60 Wayman, Tom 'The Country of Everyday' 31; 'The Kumsheen Trilogy' 85 Webber, George 'The Last of the Aborigines' 74-5 Wetherald, Ethelwyn. See Adam, Graeme Mercer Whitney, Lois 170n Wiebe, Rudy 120, 153, 154; The Blue Mountains of China 183n; First and Vital Candle 172n; Peace Shall Destroy Many 64; The Scorched­ Wood People 124-6; The Tempta­ tions of Big Bear 116-19, 185n; 'Where ls the Voice Coming From?' 101-2, 115 Williams, David The Burning Wood 64 Wilson, Daniel 180n Woodcock, George 4, 126, 183n; 'On Completing a Life of Dumont' 179n; 'Six Dry Cakes for the Fugitive' 1790 Wuttunee, Winston 184n Young, Egerton Ryerson Oowikapun 18; Stories from Indian Wigwams and Northern Campfires 17-18 Zieroth, Dale 'Travelling the Indian Country' 141

This book was designed by BETH EARL