Canadian pdf

CANADIAN LITERATURE
BY
S. MAHENDIRAN,
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR,
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH.

UNIT 1
1. 'JOURNEY TO THE INTERIOR' BY MARGARET ATWOOD
This poem is written in free verse and presents a multi-dimensional exploration of the
concept of journey. Some read it merely as a description of a physical journey that describes the
early exploration of the Canadian interior, but to do so is to ignore the many complex shades of
meaning that are also present. Atwood's layered approach allows her to explore and delve into
hidden recesses of landscape that are physical and metaphysical in nature. Her mental
wanderings take her on a quest to discover the meanings associated with identity and nationhood.
This offers access and insight into the poet's mind and soul.
The reader is guided into a private and unexplored world, evocatively described via
symbol and imagery that is rich with unexpected meaning. Atwood provides the signposts for
our 'journey' into her 'interior' by references to geographical and personal surroundings. Negative
connotations imply that this inner terrain represents a heart of darkness', an inner sanctum of the
soul. Atwood shows that within the darkness of her mind, there is a 'vacant wilderness' where
words are 'pointless', as no one can hear you scream. Vulnerability increases, for like the
physical Canadian landscape, the 'interior' of your mind becomes a multifarious world of 'danger'
where many have trodden, 'but only some have returned safely'.
A deceptively casual tone and pace is used to being the poem. The phrase 'There are
similarities I notice' introduces the parallel levels of meaning that she will explore. The poem
exists as an extended metaphor where the idea of journey becomes synonymous with self-
reflection and examination. ‘Journey to the Interior’ by Margaret Atwood Essay Sample

‘Journey to the Interior’ by Margaret Atwood is a text that uses physical or material things to
show an interior journey. It uses the metaphor of the Canadian landscape to explicate the journey
of life and the interior journey of self-discovery. The rubric ‘Journey to the Interior’ implies of a
journey from the exterior world to the interior deepnesss of the human mind. In historical times
the rubric would connote the find of a new land. geographic expedition into the unknown that
could affect danger. Similar thought is presented in this verse form. Margaret Atwood is diging
into the enigmas of the human head. unsure and discerning “many have been here. but merely
some have returned safely” .
‘Journey to the Interior’ begins with the character speech production to the audience in first
individual. which creates familiarity between the character and the respondent. The first stanza
negotiations about similarities between the human mind and the environment. ‘There are
similarities…’ introduces the verse form straight off ; allow the respondent become funny and
admirations to make full the empty. By utilizing physical analogy. Atwood suggest the same
theories apply in the journey within. For case. a Prairie is a metaphor for holding no obstructions
or guidelines in life. It is an unfastened sweep of land where you have many picks in where you
go on that piece of land. It is the same impression when it comes to inner journey. Atwood
besides suggest that the journey within is non easy as people thought of it. ‘cliff is non known as
unsmooth except by hand’ . the journey within ‘ is non the easy traveling from point to indicate.
A flecked line on a map’ implies a similar thought with the romantics that human possible can
non be mapped ; scientific discipline can non explicate human conditions. Although that the

procedure of find is non easy. but there is happiness and joy at the same clip. ‘Light and dark at
all time’ . At the terminal of stanza one. Atwood suggests when it comes to the find of one ego.
Journey is the finish. When people explores an unknown country. they do not even know where
they traveling hence ‘There are no finishs apart form the journey it self’ .
The 2nd stanza shows the differences between the interior journey and the physical journey. This
journey is defined with “the deficiency of dependable charts; ” and with little distractions. This
stanza introduces some unusual images to the respondent; “your shoe among the brambles under
the chair where it shouldn’t be”. “a sentence traversing my path” . These are distractions
forestalling her from researching her inner ego. She knows she must not take her journey
excessively serious because “the danger: many have been here. But merely some have returned
safely” . Here she makes a allusion to Saliva – a author who suicide ‘. Demoing how others have
tried to research their mind and as a effect have become lost in themselves and their interior
mind. The character shows her uncertainness in the aside. ‘have I been walking in circles once
more? ’ this aside is an effort to go out the dark and depressive universe that is environing her.
the universe of herself.
See Atwood as a female author who had divorce experience. Another reading of the verse form
could be that ‘journey to the interior’ is about the troubles of adult females to accomplish self-
awareness and accomplish their ain individuality. This district has been described as ‘ a hapless
country’ implies the female capacity for self-exploration has not been able to be developed.

The break to her journey by domestic points could be symbolic of how female domestic duties
can interfere with self – cognition. The ‘shoe’ may be seen to stand for the traditional cleansing.
clean uping function most adult females undertake. Whilst the ‘white mushrooms and the paring
knife’ seem symbolic of a cooking function. The mushrooms are ‘lucent’ . reflecting. looking to
wave the character from her ego – contemplation. The aside “have I been walking in circles once
more? ’ echoes the frequently heard call that women’s traditional domestic jobs are repeating and
ne’er stop. The ‘sentence’ traversing her way that she was ‘sure I passed yesterday’ seems
symbolic of the insistent petitions of household in the domestic lives of adult females. This use
symbol of traditional women’s function shows the ties and demands that make it hard to stay
focal points on the journey of self-exploration.
The concluding paragraph shows journey’s trouble. The character realizes nil is dependable to
direct in an interior journey. Traditional navigational tools will not work- ‘A compass is useless’
and the Sun is excessively ‘erratic’ to be of used. Even talking is ‘pointless’ as there seems no 1
to react. The text besides implies that physical journeys are really easier than journeys within.
Without any counsel signifier maps. Sun or even other people. People on internal journeys are
entirely. “Vacant wilderness” is used in the verse form proposing people are entirely when doing
their determinations as in a vacant wilderness no 1 will hear you naming.
This verse form is full of ocular imagination. Mentioning to the landscape and environment.
These images are dark and unusual which adds to the unsure and eerie ambiance of the verse
form “I move surrounded by a tangle of subdivisions. a net of air” . The sound imagination

throughout the verse form is fickle. With no form or construction. Which reflects what the poet is
stating that the inner and subconscious cannot be charted and explained? There is no fluxing beat
through the lines. the poet’s idea continues throughout lines which disorientates the reader. The
beat is besides unsettling. Another illustration at the author’s despair to get away the earnestness
of her interior universe; “whatever I do I must maintain my caput.” This is a unsafe journey” I
know it is easier for me to lose my manner everlastingly here. Than in other landscapes”. The
character realizes the lone thing can protect her is that a composure and rational head.
Not merely does the journey affair over the reaching at the terminal. But besides. ‘Journey to the
interior’ is connoting that some journeys may ne’er acquire to a stopping. This besides proposes
the fact that terminations are non accomplishable without the journey. And. many none even
come to go through if the journey is ongoing.
2. Indian Reservation Caughnawaga.
Theme of preservation of Tradition in
A.M.Klien's 'Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga’
Abraham Moses Klien was a Canadian poet, journalist, short story writer and a
lawyer. He is renowned for his poems. ‘Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga' is one of his famous
poems, where Klien advocates preservation of traditions. Those who alienate themselves from
the traditions are dismissed by him as mere ghosts. In this poem Klien depicts the corrosive
impact that the western culture has effected on the Red-Indian's traditional life style.

Klien laments the extinction of the ancient Red Indian Race in the first stanza of
the poem as follows:
Where are the braves, the faces like autumn fruit?
Who stared at the child from the colored frontispiece?
And the monosyllabic chief who spoke with his throat?
Klien records his ache to meet the brave Red Indians whose faces were like the autumn fruit.
The autumn fruit stands for the possession of ripe wisdom by Red Indians. The poet longs to see
the Red Indians standing at their 'frontispiece'[the door step] gazing at their children walking out.
He is very eager to meet the 'monosyllabic' chief who spoke briefly in a gruff and guttural voice.
He calls the Red Indians affectionately as 'feathered bestiaries', because they with their fur and
feathers resemble mythic animals such as Chief Running Deer, Black Bear, and Old Buffalo
Head featured in the fables of Aesop, a Persian story-teller. He says:
Where are the tribes, the feathered bestiaries?-
Rank Aesop's animals erect and red,
With fur on their names to make all live things kin-
Chief Running Deer, Black Bear, Old Buffalo Head?
In the second stanza of the poem, lien records the strong feeling he had nourished for
the Red Indians, when he was a child. He wished to escape from the class room chalk, the
varnish smell, and the watered dust of the street and paddle to the shore where the chief lived
with his followers so that he would enjoy the clean out doors and the Iroquois track of the Red

Indians. He was very eager to meet the chief, 'with arms akimbo'[with his hands on the hip]
whom he had seen only in a calendar. In the picture, the chief was looking like a mascot or a
person bringing good luck. The child did not know that the Red Indians are nonexistent and are
to be seen only in pictures.
Klien then proceeds to describe the degradation of the Red Indian Civilization. The Red
Indians have given up their traditional life style being lured by the commercial western culture.
They adopt modern French names. They neither daub themselves with paints nor wear bronze
jewels. The Red Indian 'Squaws'[wives] no longer cover themselves with vegetables outfit which
puffed like a tent. The Red Indians now days wear overalls. They grow very commercial and
degrade themselves by adorning themselves with bedraggled feathers and dancing their
traditional dance to please a white Mayor after receiving a bribe. Their children 'bite ‘the dust to
pick up the brown pennies thrown by the tourists at church doors.
Klien laments in the last stanza that the relics of Red Indian Civilization have become
saleable commodities. He mourns that 'their past is sold in the shop’. The things once used by
them such as the beaded shoes, the sweet grass baskets, the burnt wood by which they drew
designs on their bodies, gaudy clothes, and inch-canoes are affordable for sales now. The 'grassy
ghetto' is no more their home and is preserved as relics in the museum. Hunting occupies no
place in their life. The fauna or animals hunted by them at the risk of their life are also kept in the
museum with their pale and bleached bodies. They have abandoned their native religion and
converted to Christianity. They become pious and prosperous, but Klien rejects them as ghosts of
their vital original selves as there is nothing original in them. He says:
About they watch

As through a mist, the pious prosperous ghosts.
The poem ‘Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga'[Caughnawaga- name of the colony inhabited by
Red Indians] epitomizes Klien's feelings that the civilization of the Red Indians has disappeared
and can never be revived or revitalized.
3. Peacock and Nightingale by Robert Finch
“Isn’t ironic” a phrase that we are so accustomed to hearing. It is ironic how the sun shines but it
is pouring down rain. This same type of irony is found in Robert Finch’s poem “Peacock and
Nightingale”. Clugston writes, “Irony is created when a discrepancy or contradiction occurs
between what is expected to happen and what actually happens in a situation or in an expressed
statement” (2010). What makes the irony in this poem stand out in a good way is the message
that is being presented to the readers. Some the most interesting elements of this poem are the
rhyme, language, and the theme which all work together to show the irony of the poem. A key
element of this poem is the rhyme. It gives the poem a dynamic that hooks the reader and also
gives a vivid visual. Reading this poem, I could imagine this situation unfolding before my eyes.
Finch uses rhyme and flow to move the poem along which keeps us as readers interested in the
poem. It also allows the poem to paint the picture of how the peacock views its self. The rhyme
in the opening line sets the tone and shows the authors rhyming pattern, “Look at the eyes from
my tail! What other eyes could look so well? A peacock asks a nightingale” (as cited in
Clugston, 2010, section 10.5). Not only is the rhyme scheme an intricate part of this poem but
the language used by the author is another. Finch's words choices help take this poem to another
level. He writes, “Who would not fall in ecstasy before the gemmed enamelry of ruby-topaz-

sapphire me?” (As cited in Clugston, 2010, section 10.5). It is very rare to find writers in the
modern day that can convey a message in this same manner. People no longer speak this way,
the days of to “thin own self be true” (Shakespeare, 1600) are gone and words are now acronyms
and abbreviations that...
It was a dark and stormy night… just kidding, Shmoopers. It's a dark and quiet night, and the
speaker welcomes his friend and her sister to join him on a bridge overlooking a green bit of
nature, where they begin chatting about the night sky.
A nightingale interrupts their chat with its melancholy song. But wait, says the speaker. Who
decided that it sounds melancholy? Nature is never melancholy, he argues. It all just depends on
the mood of the person who is listening.
In fact, he goes on to say, everyone would benefit from spending more time in nature, really
experiencing it, rather than projecting their current feelings onto it. He then recounts a story
about a pretty grove where a maiden makes nightly visits to listen to the birds. In a fairy-tale
twist, he says that, every time the moon comes out, the grove turns into a chorus of songs.
At the end of the night, the speaker bids everyone (including the nightingale) farewell, but not
before reminiscing how his son came to associate nature, and especially the night sky, with joy.
He hopes that his son will always enjoy the night sky, even if most people seem to associate
night with gloom and doom in the same way they associate the nightingale's song with sorrow.

UNIT II
GLIMPSES BY STEPHEN GILL
Stephen Gill, an Indian settled in Canada for the last two decades, writes Immigrant1, his second
novel, to picture the strife immigrant’s face in a new country. As he portrays a new Canadians
plight-- language barriers, ethnic prejudices, cultural discrepancies, and a longing for the
motherland-- he seems to offer a factual record of his own experiences in Canada (though the
novel is not necessarily his autobiography). As an immigrant writer he, however, tells of the
difficulties in making his voice heard. Like many others, (and his protagonist in Immigrant), Gill
suffers a marginalized existence against "two solitudes"2, i.e. the Anglophone and the
Francophone that are ever in tension but equally forceful in preventing "outsiders", i.e. members
of ethnic minorities "from gaining access to power, privilege and prestige".
As a poet and novelist, Stephen Gill, who strongly believes in promoting world peace,
universal brotherhood and global understanding, thinks that through literature "we enrich our
own culture by borrowing certain elements from other cultures. This makes society more
rational, and friendlier, and it helps to promote brotherhood".
He is ever in search for a literary space for himself, organizing his discourse of tolerance,
inter-cultural communication, understanding, and respect for other people's ways of life. He
raises issues of cultural identity and acculturation, discussing dichotomies such as modernism
versus traditionalism, foreign or global cultural values versus indiginism, cross-cultural
interaction versus marginalization of cultures. He points to several cases of oppression,
exploitation, abuses, violence, and bestiality and yet echoes the possibilities of living together,
reconstructing a Canadian reality to make people see and understand.

As a social researcher he applies his creative intuition to the condition of man to discover,
what Niels Bohr calls, "the relations between the manifold aspects of our experience". From his
own interior, Gill debates, evaluates and comments on immigrant condition: the novel is the
analysis of man in his own environment, revealing aspects of reality one must ponder over for
integration in a genuine human culture without straying into skepticism, cynicism or despair.
As a novelist, keenly aware of Asian life and experiences, and cultural differences
between Canada and India, he faithfully portrays Reghu Nath, an Indian student's difficulties in
adapting to a foreign socio-political scene: He highlights the plights of the Indian settler-- culture
shock, ethnic and racial prejudices, inequality, discriminations and biases in a culturally
pluralistic society (which Canada appears to be from a distance), not necessarily to criticize, but
to seek a change a la a culturally tolerant society, accommodating diverse people and practices.
He affirms the need for enculturation of both the individual immigrants and the host society
with a sense of mutual `give and take', fulfillment and enrichment, justice, equality, access, and
participation.
Gill's Immigrant is an exploration in immigrant's aspirations for economic livelihood,
social well-being and intercultural understanding vis-a vis the dimensions of the centrality of
communication and politics in the affairs of the people. The novel voices the need for openness,
for dialogue, for expression of differences and cultural pluralism to minimize misunderstandings,
conflicts, exclusiveness, and manipulations. The novelist seeks to preserve our common
humanity alongside the differences and diversities to promote mutual understanding, maybe,
through trial and error, and a perception of goodwill.

Gill creates a text and context to cope with the politics of sharing and survival, the
communication problems and socioeconomic and political contradictions, ambiguities and racist
and ethnic prejudices that cause disillusionment and distrust in an immigrant in everyday life.
We see a tolerant and humane critical reason in action, presenting the predicament of Reghu
Nath, who is young and seeking a better future in a new land: In the opening pages, we meet him
flying over the Atlantic in the VC 10, worried about "the problems which normally harass a
foreigner".The flight is seven hours late and he lands in Montreal at the height of Canada s
centennial celebration, Expo '67. There is no accommodation possible there and he must reach
Ottawa "at least three days before" to be able to register himself for admission to the university.
Without sleep and rest, he is already disturbed, and there is no one to help him.
Gill traces Reghu's trials and tribulation as he suffers culture shock, manipulations for
dole, demanding professors, difficult women, Canadian bureaucracy and haunting memories of
his native India.
“It was an awesome feeling to know he had been in so many different countries within
such a short span of time. Life stretched before him now like the never-ending street on which
he was travelling, and the world emerged as an enormous village of people with diverse tastes,
yet basically very much alike”.
The novelist examines Reghu's mental aberrations and sufferings caused by displacement
(to the so-called "land of opportunities"). He is at war with himself vis-a-vis the reaction of the
native Canadians as also the established immigrants:

"He mustered all his courage to say politely `I love you'. The girl glanced to one side,
then the other, before finishing her whisky in a gulp." "While shopping, when he held the hand
of a compatriot whom he had met within a few days of his arrival in Canada, he quickly found
out that it was a sign of perversion in the West. His friend severed his hand at once, saying, "This
is not India".
Reghu went up to the apartment when the musician invited him. Unexpectedly, Reghu met
with an unusual welcome. The man pulled out an empty beer bottle from under the bed and
asked Reghu to return it and buy a beer for him."
"For me, friendship is one thing, but marriage is another. Marriage is more than a mere
friendship between two souls."
"Don't you think a common background, outlook and tastes are important for a
successful marriage?"
"At this point Reghu became emotional. Looking into her eyes he said, 'Not at all ...'".11
Reghu discovers there is no taker for his "eastern wisdom" in Canada. He is unable to form
a lasting or meaningful relationship with any girl.12
He finds the situation in the university, too, intolerable: he suffers hostile professors who
force him to take extra courses that affect his regular studies and w ho harm his interests,
academically and financially. The "mockery of education" forces him to "quit university
without obtaining his degree."
He is harassed for payment of loan by Mrs. Butler; he is denied help for getting a job by
the Canada Manpower Office; he would not be accepted even for a job no Canadian will agree to

accept; he felt humiliated by the way the Welfare Office worked; and even after obtaining
Canadian citizenship the situation does not improve for him.
Reghu, who has a sense of dislocation, alienation and loneliness vis-a-vis his effort to
negotiate a space for himself between two worlds, two cultures and more than two languages--
he appears nearly pragmatic trying to learn to adjust against the "French and English cultures
mingled with African and Asian ways of life"15 -- suffers anxieties about homelessness, and
near impossibility of returning to his own country, India : "Why don't you go back to your
country?"
In fact, there are others like him, for example, the Queen of Sheba from Trinidad and Mrs.
Wallace who find Canada a police state and living there a waste of talent.18. He was himself
driven to wonder why the government disgraced welfare recipients. Though it does not take
much time for him to control his Indian mannerisms and he readily rejects what had become
virtually a part of him to adapt to the values of the new land, Canada ("... I am managing to get
by."20), he is chagrined to discover he is neither fully acceptable in Canada nor can he go back
to his native Asian routes for fear of being ridiculed as failure by both his family and friends.
The novelist structures the complex view of the double vision of the immigrant-- both a looking
forward and a yearning backward, the conflicting tendencies of regression and progression, the

desire to settle down in a new country and the external pressures to return to the motherland. His
protagonist at times evinces symptoms of psychoneurosis: Like characters in Anita Desai's Bye
Blackbird, Kamala Markandeya’s The Nowhere Man, Ruth Prawar Jhabwala’s A Backward
Place, B. Rajan’s The Dark Dancer, Bharati Mukherjee's Wife, or Arun Joshi's The Foreigner,
Gill's central character in Immigrant appears an "ailing alien" in the oppressive socio-
psychological dimensions of other characters' behavior and situation. He is in the lookout for
friends who could help him "overcome the sharp pangs of life."22 Writing from the margins,
Gill, like other immigrant Indian authors such as Rohinton Mistry, Uma Parameshwaran, etc.,
articulates an Indian voice in a foreign setting, recreating moments of crisis, anguish and anger
as against the struggles for existence and identity, shocks of racism and bigotry, and various
prejudices and adjustment pangs "in the land of my dreams".
He depicts the frustration of unemployed youths from the Indian sub-continent at Asian
Brotherhood Centre and worries about loss of communal values and conviviality and rise of
selfish, self-centred neurotics23 in the so-called democratic set up, where MPs unaware of the
anxieties of their electorates, waste "time and money on futile, long and weary debates.24 . But
the "idealist" Reghu's views are dismissed as a poet's just as his expectation to involve white
Canadians at the Centre is rejected by his apparently friendly white colleagues. Reghu himself
perseveres in his efforts to find "a suitable job of any sort, to be free from the financial clutches
of welfare" but is continually a victim of racial/color discrimination .The novelist seems
convinced that existence of ethnic or racial barriers in a population is potentially dangerous to
democratic state.

"He felt that the country did not need scholars, or people who specialized in one branch or field.
Canada had a handful of openings, usually filled by the persons born here or by British and
American immigrants, who encountered no prejudice because they were not a visible minority
like the Africans and Asians, who spoke differently and looked differently. The situation grew
worse with the increasing number of American professors at various university departments, who
loved to hire their compatriots."
Their discriminatory policy is so horrible that Prabha, an M.A. in Library Science,
"tolerated as a cancer in their main body"26, is forced to do a cataloguer's job, and driven to
commit suicide. Dr. Hafeez cannot get a position in the area of his specialization despite his
established reputation in the U.K.27
He can derive consolation from people like Dr. Menard and his assistant professor in
Ottawa, who hoped the situation would improve one day (though they eventually leave the
university in protest)28 and Mrs. Clifford, who wails about industrial and economic prosperity
and material comforts of scientific progress that have rendered us, the westerners, lonelier,
without love, and "robbed us of our peace of mind".29 Reghu Nath, with the stigma of a
foreigner (or from a different region of Canada), himself discovers: "No matter whatever
company he was in, he felt alone, at a distance. The more he tried to come close, the wider grew
the gap".30
He is, however, aware of the political and economic climate, contributing to white
Canadians' dislike for Asian immigrants31, particularly from the Indian sub-continent, who

become the scapegoat for all kinds of slander, harassment and violence, possibly
because they (Indians) are not united, or are jealous of each other? He is equally convinced that
it is not the average Canadian but the privileged class, "the people with power", who carry the
venom of racist discrimination: "Obviously, it was a tactic of the ruling power to divert the
citizens' attention from the country's growing economic unrest".
Possibly, Aggarwal, too, is part of the same complexes of the elite class when he
generalizes prejudices of the white Canadians against immigrants because they are Christians.
But Reghu is not ready to yield to any misconceived notion, irrational belief, malicious reaction,
vindictive attitude, or egoistic superiority.
Gill does not seek to condemn Canadian culture: Reghu Nath understands human beings
are basically alike everywhere. "Every nation has its own problems. No country was a paradise"
and "I don't see any difference. Men and women all over the world are the same basically.
These so-called cultures are man-made and cause confusion and anarchy".Gill's message,
therefore, is clear: The problems that we face are best resolved through mutual knowledge; we
should wipe out ignorance, the root of all prejudices, for better understanding of humankind.
UNIT III
ECSTASY OF RITA JOE BY GEORGE RYGA

Drama in two acts by George Ryga, premiered at the Vancouver Playhouse, November 23, 1967,
directed by George Bloomfield, set and lighting designed by Charles Evans, costumes designed
by Margaret Ryan, featured Frances Hyland, August Schellenberg, Chief Dan George, Henry
Ramer, Walter Marsh, Robert Clothier, Patricia Gage, Rae Brown, Claudine Melgrave, Bill
Clarkson, Merv Campone, Alex Bruhanski, Jack Leaf, Jack Buttrey, Leonard George, Robert
Hall, Frank Lewis, Paul Stanley, Willy Dunn and Ann Mortifee as the Singer. This production
opened the studio theatre of the National Arts Centre in 1969, and played in Washington, DC, in
May, 1973, with George and Hyland. It has subsequently been produced by Alberta Theatre
Projects in 1976; by Citadel Theatre in 1979, with Susan Andre and John Hamelin as the lovers,
Tanya Ryga, the playwright's daughter, as "The Singer", and Margo Kane as Eileen Joe; by
Prairie Theatre Exchange in 1981, with Tom Jackson as Jaimie Paul and Margo Kane as Rita
Joe, and an all-Native cast; and by Western Canada Theatre Company in 2009 (dir. Yvette
Nolan), with August Schellenberg as David Joe, Lisa Ravensbergen as Rita Joe, Kevin Loring as
Jaimie Paul, and Layne Coleman as the Magistrate.
The play was published by Talonbooks in 1970, and anthologized in Modern Canadian Plays Vol
1 (ed Jerry Wasserman) in 1985. It was translated into French by Gratien Gélinas and presented
at the Comédie-Canadienne. It was adapted as a ballet by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet in 1971.
Although aboriginal and critical responses have varied since its first production, the play is
seminal in the history of modern Canadian drama. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe recounts the story of a
young aboriginal woman who comes to the city to find freedom from the limitations of reserve

life, only to experience racism, marginalization, and finally rape and murder. This contemporary
tragedy condemns the brutality of a system that limits, rejects, or sentences Native people to
lives of social and spiritual poverty, that takes away their pride, their traditions and their
language. The death of Rita Joe comes as a consequence of the imposition of a colonizing power
on indigenous peoples.
The story is told in songs, montages and disconnected scenes -- in a stream-of-consciousness
style which collapses past and present, as Rita Joe recalls her youth on the reserve during her
arraignment in court on charges of prostitution. Events and characters are presented from her
point of view, as the salient moments of her life are replayed just before her moment of death.
Her "ecstasy" is an ironic allusion to the euphoric state of enlightenment experienced by a
Christian martyr before her reunion with God.
Ryga effects this collapsing of time through the set design -- a circular ramp that encloses the
present, with a cyclorama to evoke the past. Lighting effects isolate characters and cast shadows
of prison bars across Rita Joe as she sleeps, creating a mood of fear and claustrophobia. This
"expressionist" style and form projects the state of mind of the protagonist, externalizing feelings
through action and image. Ryga portrays the helplessness of the individual in the face of large
social and political forces. The structural metaphor of The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is that of the trial -
- of Rita Joe, but more significantly, of the audience.

The characters, particularly the white antagonists, tend to be stereotypes representing large,
impersonal forces -- the law, the church, white "do-gooders." The portrait of Rita Joe is more
complex: she is insecure and defiant, caught between two cultures.
The critics were virtually unanimous on two counts: the work's structural challenges; the work's
odd power. Jack Richards of the Vancouver Sun echoed many other writers with, "I don't know
if it is a great play. But if the role of the stage is to communicate...Ryga and...Bloomfield have
accomplished their purpose." On the revival in 1976, Jamie Portman of the Vancouver Province
wrote, "Yet...the play still worked. Rita Joe was a landmark in more ways than one. It was - and
remains - a play for all seasons and for all peoples." However, indigenous playwright Kenneth T.
Williams has called it a white tourist play, "poverty porn", which is "just as destructive as the
forces of colonization Ryga decries in his play" (quoted from Day, 23). More recently, it has
been regarded by director Yvette Nolan as just as current and powerful as when it was first
produced.
UNIT IV
THE DIVINERS
The Diviners is a 1974 kunstlerroman, or novel about the writing of a novel, by Canadian author
Margaret Laurence. The semi-autobiographical narrative follows the life and memories of Morag
Gunn, a writer and single mother who grew up in Manawaka, Manitoba, and her struggle to

understand and accept her identity. Laurence is considered one of Canada’s greatest writers. The
Diviners is the fifth book in her “Manawaka” series of books set in or around the fictional town,
including The Stone Angel and A Jest of God. In 1972, Laurence was made a Companion of the
Order of Canada. She died of lung cancer in 1987.
The novel opens with a section titled “River of Now and Then.” Morag, 47, wakes up in her
Ontario log cabin to discover her 18-year-old daughter, Pique, is gone. She has left a note behind
asking her mother not to worry or “get uptight.” Pique, who is Metis, of mixed First Nations
ancestry, has headed West in search of her roots. The note unlocks Morag’s own memories of
when she was Pique’s age and headed East from her Manitoba hometown, looking for her own
identity. Morag searches her house for photographs from her childhood, ones she has treated
carelessly over the years but has never been able to throw away.
In the next section, “The Nuisance Grounds,” the narrative flashes back to Morag’s early years.
Both her parents died of polio when she was young, and she was taken from her comfortable
upper-middle-class home to a poor foster family in Manawaka. Her foster parents, Christie and
Prin Logan, loved and raised her, but she treated them with contempt, looking down on their lack
of education and impoverished circumstances. Christie was the town “scavenger,” or trash
collector, taking the town’s refuse to the dump, which the town referred to as The Nuisance
Grounds.

Christie proves a natural storyteller, and furnishes Morag with made-up stories about her
ancestors. He tells her tales of a Scottish hero named Piper Gunn, claiming that he is Morag’s
ancestor several generations back. Piper’s exploits are actually based on the real history of
Archie MacDonald, but Morag will not learn the truth until much later. Piper’s wife is also
named Morag, and this ancestor helps give Christie’s untethered foster daughter a sense of
identity and belonging. She believes her past and her people were rich and respectable—that
they, not the Logans, represent who she is and where she comes from.
The next section, “Halls of Sion,” sees Morag escaping Manawaka as soon as she can for
university in Winnipeg. She marries a professor 15 years her senior, Brooke Skelton, and moves
to Toronto. The marriage is not a happy one. Brooke is pessimistic and controlling. Morag wants
children, but Brooke tells her the world is too harsh to bring a child into. He ridicules her
attempts to write. He confines and restricts her. One night, Morag encounters a childhood friend,
Jules “Skinner” Tonnerre, who is Metis, on the street. She invites him in for dinner only for
Brooke to insult him. In response, Morag leaves the house with Jules and has a three-week affair
with him without protection, hoping she will become pregnant. She does, and it ends her
marriage.
The final section, “Rites of Passage,” follows Morag as a writer and single mother. She moves
first to Vancouver, where she writes her first novel, Spear of Innocence, and gives birth to her
daughter, Pique. Jules is rarely present in their lives, though he stays with Morag for two months
when Pique is five. Jules and Morag are drawn to each other through their shared sense of

alienation from their hometown and their ongoing search for acceptance and belonging. As a
“half-breed,” Jules has always been looked down upon, considered inferior for his racial
heritage. He tells stories of his Metis ancestors that rewrite history, just as Christie did with his
stories of Morag’s fictionalized ancestors.
Jules leaves and Morag moves to England with Pique, hoping she will find a community of like-
minded writers to thrive in. But reality does not match her imagination, and she is as lonely as
ever in her new home.
Eventually she returns to Canada, to the log cabin home of the novel’s beginning. She goes on a
journey to Scotland as well, in search of her ancestors, but does not actually travel to Sutherland,
where her people came from. She realizes that Manawaka is her true home, and returns there to
find that Christie is dying. She tells him he has been a father to her. More than that, her true
heritage is not Scottish but Canadian.
Pique returns home after her own search for identity. Her relationship with Morag is sometimes
uneasy, but they reconcile. Morag returns to her log cabin home and finishes her novel.
The Diviners was a controversial book when it was first published. It continues to be challenged
and banned from school districts for perceived coarse language and blasphemy. Despite this, it is

widely considered a classic of Canadian literature. In 1993, it was adapted into a popular made-
for-TV movie starring Sonja Smits and Tom Jackson.
UNIT V
BEAR BY MARIAN ENGEL
Marian Engel 1933-1985
Canadian short story writer, novelist, and children's writer.
Considered one of the most articulate feminist fiction writers of contemporary Canada, Engel
insightfully portrayed the ongoing war between the sexes and highlighted the few, often
devastatingly poignant, options left for heterosexual women of her generation.
Biographical Information
Engel was born on May 24, 1933, in Toronto to parents who were both teachers and was raised
in several Ontario towns where she claimed to have had a happy childhood. Engel attended
McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. As a
university student, she was actively involved in the production of the university newspaper and
literary magazine, as well as in the dramatic society and debating society. One of the major
influences that informed Engel's concern with the power of words and directed her approach to
writing was her continuing friendships with the fellow students from her academic years, many
of whom went on to teach at universities, became writers, or engaged in politics. Her travels and

residence outside Ontario, including several years spent in France and Cyprus, also served as a
rich source of inspiration. Engel worked as a lecturer, teacher, and writer-in-residence at
universities throughout Canada, contributed stories and articles to journals and periodicals, and
won many awards for her writing. She died on February 16, 1985.
Major Works
Critics have commented on the ways in which Engel's fiction seems to incorporate the various
places she lived and visited. Her novel Monodromos (1973) is set in Cyprus and depicts the
summer adventures of a Canadian woman abroad. Mediterranean imagery and the western
Ontario landscape also inform her second novel The Honey man Festival (1970), which depicts
the experiences of a pregnant Toronto woman during a single night. In an early 1970s interview,
however, Engel herself claimed that, even though she found foreign places fascinating, she was
becoming more and more Canadian and that the Great Lakes region was her heartland. In Bear
(1976), probably her most widely read novel, Engel sheds light on the unendurable positions in
which Canadian society has placed its intelligent older women. The protagonist, Lou, who is a
veteran archival librarian in Toronto, receives a commission to spend an entire summer on a river
island in northern Ontario sorting out what has been left in a colonial mansion recently
bequeathed to the for which institute she works. What she discovers in the colossal house on the
mystical island is not so much valuable historical documents as her authentic self. She forms a
peculiarly erotic friendship with a pet bear that belongs to the house, as a potential alternative to,
and a possible compensation for, the humiliating and disappointing relationships she has had
with men. In The Glassy Sea (1978), Engel again created a lone, middle-aged female protagonist

who may at first seem simply confused about what she wants, yet who in fact embodies—and
eventually manages to articulate and condemn—conventional cultural norms and feminist
beliefs. A one-time Anglican nun and now dispirited divorcee who has barely survived her self-
righteous, religiously fanatic, lawyer/politician husband and the battle to save her hydrocephalic
and only child, Rita Bowen muses over the current status of affairs in heterosexual relationships.
Rita suggests the radical solution of having all women die at age thirty or in childbirth as older
women are considered useless and at the same time feared for their intelligence and
independence. The decision Rita makes at the close of the book indicates that her concern is
clearly not religious, but rather constitutes an ardent desire to offer refuge to the many women
who have been battered or discarded. In contrast to the lucid sense of loneliness and loss that
pervades The Glassy Sea, Lunatic Villas (1981) carries a generally cheerful tone. This novel is
considered entertaining, even though it has been deemed of much less literary value than Engel's
other fiction. The novel's protagonist, Harriet Ross, is a Toronto freelance writer who signs her
weekly magazine column, with a considerable amount of honesty, “Depressed Housewife.”
Harriet fiercely protects her brood of seven mismatched children as well as a few helpless
friends, managing on the side to harbor a married lover. Even though Harriet's battles are endless
and her responsibilities dauntingly enormous, Engel's buoyant sense of humor adds a great deal
of warmth and hopefulness to the narrative. In her last published work, the short story collection
The Tattooed Woman (1985), Engel featured a wide variety of characters, most of whom are
disillusioned middle-aged women. In the title story of the collection a woman learns of her
husband's affair with a younger woman; in response, she begins carving designs into her skin
with a razor, hoping to achieve the wisdom of older tribal women.

Critical Reception
Bear is by far Engel's most controversial work. The novel's ending has been hailed by some as a
victory over the misogyny of mainstream Canadian society, with which Engel constantly takes
issue. At other times Bear has been interpreted as a rather passive gesture of resignation and
acceptance of the status quo, not unlike the way some critics have read the closing of fellow
Canadian writer Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. Critics suggest that since Engel herself scoffed at
the trend to label every piece of fiction a roman a clef, it would be incorrect to see her women
characters as direct reflections and outgrowths of the author. Rather, they should be regarded as
literary vehicles through which Engel voiced her views of contemporary women's lives, their
difficulties and strengths. Even though Engel considered herself experiential—in the sense that
she tended to jump into situations—rather than theoretical or analytical, her fiction presents her
feminist principles unambiguously and cerebrally, in highly charged political language.
Canadiana is a funny and ridiculous thing — maple syrup tins, wooden hockey sticks, Mountie
hats, golden-era NFB and CBC logos developed in the socialist ’70s, when the national dream
was still so vivid; while Americans have apple pie, we have … I don’t know, roll up the rim?
Ours is not a cosmopolitan nostalgia.
Let me be clear: I grew up in a city, and I live in one now, but I’ve hiked in the Rockies and seen
the Northern lights. I’ve tasted Ontario’s peaches and Montreal’s bagels, and I’ve felt the mist on
my face in New Brunswick. I was even in an intramural ball hockey league as a fumbling
adolescent. But for the most part, artifacts of Canadian tend to leave me colder than Fort Mac in
January. But then there is 1976’s Bear, newly reissued this month. Earlier this year, a few

passages from the Canadian literary classic found their way onto Imgur, a social photo-hosting
service. The short excerpts of Marian Engel’s most well-known novel were viewed millions of
times. The passages described a woman coercing a literal bear into a sex act. What you can’t tell
from the short (and furry) erotic passages posted to the Internet is that Bear is a damn good book;
in fact, it is the best Canadian novel of all time.
Funny and sweet, Engel’s 1976 Governor General’s Award winning (more on that later!) erotic
novella follows Lou, a bookish 27-year-old woman employed by a pseudo government agency
called the Historical Institute out to a remote homestead in the Northern Ontario woods, where
she spends time investigating dusty old books. If Bear were first published today, we’d bill it as a
literary account of a woman’s quarter-life crisis; we’d say Lou’s journey of self-discovery is a
heart-rending portrait of the difficulty of maintaining a work-life balance. We’d congratulate
Engel for crafting such a profoundly relatable protagonist, in an era where work takes over more
and more of our lives and the traditional markers of maturity (marriage, home ownership,
pension plans, and legitimate weekends) are being lost on the rocky terrain of an increasingly
precarious contract-term economy.
Bear almost never was. Engel sent the novella, her third book, to her editor at Harcourt Brace,
and was met with rejection: “Its relative brevity coupled with its extreme strangeness presents,
I’m afraid, an insuperable obstacle in present circumstances.” Roberston Davies championed the
manuscript to his friends at McClelland & Stewart, who eventually brought the novel onboard,
only to have it be awarded the country’s most prestigious literary prize, the Governor General’s

Award, by a jury of Canadian literature’s most notable names: Mordecai Richler, Margaret
Laurence and Alice Munro.
(I’m not sure, if the novel was first published today, that Lou would still fellate an actual bear, or
that it would win the GG, but one can hope.)
‘Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel’
The reason Bear is the greatest Canadian novel of all time is not because I, a 27-year-old woman
with a piss poor sense of the boundaries between work and life, found it relatable. Bear is great
because of what it manages to do through language in its meagre 115 pages. Engel’s prose turns
swiftly from the comic to lyric and back again — here she is being funny as hell, describing her
protagonist’s mounting frustration with her official task, and cracking at everything en vogue in
’70s literature: “She felt like some French novelist who, having discarded plot and character, was
left to build an abstract structure, and was too tradition-bound to do so.”
Engle’s comic range is broader than metafictional jabs: at one point, after licking Lou to the
brink of orgasm, the bear (who is never once anthropomorphized) actually walks away from her,
still in the glow of passion, trailing bear farts behind him.

I don’t want to spoil anything for you, or at least not more than I already have, but the thing
about Bear is how trivial the actual bestial fornication is in the grander scheme of the novel —
Lou is a contemporary woman, making her way in a world that wasn’t built for her. Sitting
beneath the portrait of the Colonel, depicted in regalia, whose library she is cataloguing for the
Institute, Lou, a military biography in her lap, extends her feet out into the fur of her animal
lover, and feels “exquisitely happy,” because “a woman rubbing her foot in the thick black pelt
of a bear was more than they could have imagined. More, too, than a military victory:
splendour.”
Studying some dead rich guy, staying in his historic family house, trying to parse together his
military connections to the region so that she can best preserve some arbitrary record, Lou
observes that the “Canadian tradition was, she had found, on the whole, genteel.”
And in part for its extravagant strangeness, for the disruption it poses to that staid, woollen
mitten of a tradition, Bear deserves to be celebrated. And yet. The niftiest trick Engel pulls is to
simultaneously disrupt and continue that tradition — a perfect sublimation of the tensions of
working to advance a living art form in a country with a hard on for the past.
HALFBREED BY MARIAN CAMPBELL
Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed is a story of survival, and of overcoming a sense of
shame related to ethnic identity. Campbell brings attention to the way in which race in the
Canadian multicultural society has been seen as real and definable. She describes the

consequences of such racial thinking on Metís individuals (half-breeds or non-status Natives),
the humiliating situations visibly Métis or Native people have experienced in their everyday
lives, and the consequent, debilitating sense of shame shared by many of them. At the same
time, as her story proceeds, Campbell develops a growing sense of empowerment as she takes it
into her own hands to define Métisness and introduces a politicized notion of the Métis as a
legitimate identity category within the context of Canadian multiculturalism. In Halfbreed, the
shame and anger resulting from the degrading, traumatic experiences are in the end not portrayed
as debilitating feelings. Instead, shame and anger are revealed as transformative forces that,
when managed through the act of autobiographical storytelling, accommodate a drive to fight
back, resulting in both individual and collective survival and the possibility of political change.
Maria Campbell’s autobiography Halfbreed (first published in 1973) is a classic account of a
young Native woman’s struggle to survive, to come to terms with the past and to find a way of
building a better future in a climate of social oppression and violence. Campbell describes her
own life, tells her own story, but her tone is openly political, her approach revisionist, and her
style provocative. She contrasts whites with Natives, and status Indians with Métis (“half-
breeds,” or non-status Native people) in a way that seems essentialist, presenting Métis identity
as something real, something definable. However, as suggested by Bonita Lawrence (2004:82-3),
communities of non-status Native people in western Canada have been created “by arbitrarily
externalizing from Indianness an entire category of Indigenous people, designated ‘half-breeds’
and now called ‘Métis.’”

Campbell, while essential sing race in a non-revisionist way, at the same time introduces a
political sense of Métisness as a legitimate identity category within the context of the Canadian
multicultural society. Rather than describing the people who are identified as Métis, or the
culture of those people, the term Métis has responded to the needs created by the larger society to
define and classify people.
In this way, Campbell operates within the framework of the colonial society, which, as Benedict
Anderson (1991:165) has put it, has a “(confusedly) classifying mind” that imagines identities,
instead of relating to ethnicity as the people themselves experience it. But instead of accepting
the half-breed identity imposed on her and “her people” by the colonial state, Maria Campbell
takes it into her own hands to define Métisness as she experiences it. Indeed, Campbell, later
followed by other Métis writers, has defined and re-defined the terms half-breed and Métis in her
writing, thus taking possession of those terms. In Halfbreed, Campbell documents both the
shame that she felt as a troubled young woman, as well as her growing sense of empowerment as
she comes to embrace her Métis identity.
Halfbreed establishes Métisness as a socially acceptable ethnic-cultural category, replacing a
sense of nothingness, of being neither Native nor white, of being only half-breed. The term Métis
has thus gained content and context, and become a reference point for other individuals of mixed
(Métis) heritage. Indeed, Halfbreed thus participated in the process of establishing Métisness as a
legally valid ethnic category in Canada, finally leading to the inclusion of the Métis as one of
Canada´s aboriginal people in the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982.

Growing up in a Métis community in Saskatchewan, Maria Campbell relates how she faced the
community’s poverty and racism, along with the society’s institutional violence and the
destruction of families. Her own childhood was relatively happy until the death of her mother,
but then, after she had failed in her attempts to take care of her younger siblings, her family was
cut apart by the social services, with sisters and brothers being forcefully separated from each
other. Campbell attempted to escape the misery of her situation by marrying an white man, but
he turned out to be abusive, and she ended up addicted to alcohol and drugs, prostituting herself,
and attempting suicide, nearly taking her children to death with her to save them from the misery
of living.
Finally, however, Campbell developed a sense of empowerment. Partly inspired by her strong-
willed Cree great-grandmother Cheechum, who gave her confidence in herself and in her people,
and partly by the 1960s civil rights and Native movements, Campbell gradually channeled her
feelings of anger, frustration and shame into her eventual work as cultural and political activist.
As she writes,
Great Grandma Campbell, whom I always called “Cheechum,” was a niece of Gabriel Dumont
and her whole family fought beside Riel and Dumont during the Rebellion. She often told me
stories of the Rebellion and of the Halfbreed people. She said our people never wanted to fight
because that was not our way. We never wanted anything except to be left alone to live as we
pleased. Cheechum never accepted defeat at Batoche, and she would always say, “Because they

killed Riel they think they have killed us too, but some day, my girl, it will be different.”(1983:
11)
Her reference here is to the humiliating experiences during and after the Métis “Rebellion,” the
battle of Batoche of 1885. Campbell gives voice to the Métis perspective and breaks the
collective silence of the Métis, the silence used for generations as a protection against the shame
of being Métis. At the same time, she documents the oppression of the Métis since the 1885
Métis uprising and the consequent execution of the legendary Métis leader Louis Riel for
treason. By documenting this oppression and the shame that resulted from it, Campbell adopts
the role of a civil rights activist. Indeed, as Browdy de Hernandez points out, for “the
postcolonial autobiographer [….] autobiography is not just an exercise in recapturing the past,
but a future oriented project that seeks to establish a secure home ground where the subject may
reside without fear of displacement or humiliation.” (1983: 21) Through her autobiography,
Campbell thus transforms the feeling of shame and humiliation from collectively debilitating and
destructive feelings into sources of power and faith in the possibility and necessity of change.
Halfbreed is often said to offer an insight into the situation of the Métis people in Canada,
especially the hatred and racism they have experienced, and the resulting bitterness and shame.
As Campbell writes:

I am not bitter. I have passed that stage. I only want to say: this is what it was like; this is what it
is still like. I know that poverty is not ours alone. Your people have it too, but in those earlier
days you at least had dreams, you had a tomorrow. My parents and I never shared any aspirations
for a future. I never saw my father talk back to a white man unless he was drunk. I never saw
him or any of our men walk with their heads held high before white people. (1983: 9)
In Halfbreed, Campbell finally talks back to the white man, on behalf of herself and of other
Métis people, enabling them all to walk with heads held up.
Campbell uses autobiography to forward her political agenda, to improve the conditions of the
Métis by offering insight into the situation of the Métis people. Autobiography is a tool for and a
form of political activism. Autobiography can mediate messages and experiences across cultural
boundaries, improve the possibility for empowering self-presentation, and open up new
perspectives in public discourse. It links the personal and the political through emphatic
processes, by emotionally engaging the reader, challenging and agitating readers for
transformative action, thus making the invisible visible, the forgotten unforgotten, and bringing
attention to the cause.
Campbell’s autobiographical “truth” consists of stories of the horrible realities and conditions of
the Métis that were previously little-known in the wider society. Campbell describes her need to
share her story by writing as follows:

Going home after so long a time, I thought that I might find again the happiness and beauty I had
known as a child. But as I walked down the rough dirt road, poked through the broken old
buildings and thought back over the years, I realized that I could never find that here. Like me
the land had changed, my people were gone, and if I was to know peace I would have to search
within myself. That is when I decided to write about my life. [….] I write this for all of you, to
tell you what it is like to be a Halfbreed woman in our country. I want to tell you about the joys
and sorrows, the oppressing poverty, the frustrations and the dreams. (1983: 2)
Halfbreed can be and, for example in the works of younger Métis writers, has been seen as a
story of self-discovery, an act of ethnic self-definition, or a therapeutic process that transforms
shame and anger into a dialogue that engages both the writer and the reader in a healing act of
remembering. Indeed, the practice of remembering and rewriting can, as Jennifer Browdy de
Hernandez puts it, lead “to the formation of politicized consciousness and self-identity.” (1997:
21)
Campbell’s autobiography brings forward the Métis perspective to the historical events and thus
proposes an alternative history, challenging hegemonic ways of knowing and looking at history
and the way in which history is written. This culture contact that takes place when a Native
woman writes to non-Native audiences in her own words and terms does not necessarily reveal
an overwhelming sense of “victimization of the individual from the less powerful culture”, but as

Mullen Sands points out, the processes of writing and reading autobiography “can lead to mutual
respect and harmonious interaction and fair representation” (1997: 49)
As Julia V. Emberley writes, Halfbreed is an important example of “how Métis women writers
reclaim the derogatory connotations their cultural positions evoke’”. (1993: 152) By telling her
story in, Campbell claims her right to self-definition and begins a process of detaching herself
from the shame associated with being half-breed. She addresses the way in which the identity
creation of the Métis has largely been based on stereotypical assumptions and historical
representations imposed on them by the dominant society and its authorities. In order to survive,
the Métis have had to accept and assume those hurtful, stereotypical images of “dirty squaws”
and “drunken half-breeds” on welfare. Campbell describes, for example, the advice given to her
by a friend, to help her get assistance from the authorities: “That night Marion scolded me. ‘If
you want help, never tell them the truth. Act ignorant, timid and grateful. They like that.’ [….]
Then she gave me her welfare coat, as she called it, to wear, as it was hardly appropriate to go to
Welfare well dressed.” (1983: 154-5)
The Métis have been pushed to act according to these stereotypical images, thus again re-
enforcing them. It was not enough to quietly accept those prejudices, but Campbell also had to
adjust her own behavior and appearance according to them:

I went to the Office in a ten-year-old threadbare red coat, with old boots and a scarf. I looked like
a Whitefish Lake Squaw, and that’s exactly what the social worker thought. He insisted that I go
to the Department of Indian Affairs, and when I said I was not a Treaty Indian but a Halfbreed,
he said if that was the case I was eligible, but added, “I can’t see the difference – part Indian, all
Indian. You’re all the same.” I nearly bit my tongue off trying to look timid and ignorant. I
answered a hundred questions and finally he gave me a voucher for groceries and bus tickets,
and told me to be sure I found a cheap apartment or house, because government money was not
to be wasted. I left his office feeling more humiliated and dirty and ashamed than I had ever felt
in my life. (Campbell 1983: 155)
This episode also demonstrates the extent to which the notion of race has had an effect on the
lives of individuals belonging to visual minorities in a Canada, where multicultural policies are
applied throughout the legislative and administrative policies. In order to receive assistance,
Campbell had to face and accept the racial prejudices of the social worker, who in that situation
was the representative of the society and had the power given to the society to rule over
individuals.
In this context, Campbell talks about metaphorical “blankets of shame,” blankets that
discriminated people use to protect them from the judging eyes of the society, to protect
themselves from their own shame. As she writes, referring to her strong-minded great-
grandmother Cheechum:

My Cheechum used to tell me that when the government gives you something, they take all that
you have in return – your pride, your dignity, all the things that make you a living soul. When
they are sure they have everything, they give you a blanket to cover your shame. She said that
the churches with their talk about God, the Devil, heaven and hell, and schools that taught
children to be ashamed, were all a part of that government. When I tried to explain to her that our
teacher said governments were made by the people, she told me, “it only looks like that from the
outside, my girl.” (1983: 159)
These metaphorical blankets preserve the shame they cover and prevent change. They cover
shame, and while doing so, they keep people fearfully hiding, unable to take action towards
change. Cheechum, as Campbell writes, “used to say that all our people wore blankets, each in
his own way. [….] Someday though, people would throw them away and the whole world would
change. I understood about the blanket now – I wore one too. I didn’t know where I started to
wear it, but it was there and I didn’t know how to throw it away.” (1983: 159)
In an effort to overcome her personal problems, Campbell joined an AA group where,
incidentally, she met other Native and half-breed people, people who were to play “an important
role in the Native movement in Alberta.” (Campbell 1983: 167) And later on, she met other
political and cultural activists though a woman she befriended. She writes: “I met students from
other countries. I listened to everything they said, and brought home piles of books to read until
late at night.” (1983: 178) However, even in the company of these political activists, she
continued to feel inferior, her sense of inferiority reinforced by the scholarly rhetoric used by

those activists. Finally, she turned to her own books, books on the history of Native people and,
through these, gained confidence in her potential and abilities.
Through her jobs and her friends she then learned more about the present and past conditions of
the Métis, saw the hopelessness of the conditions in the communities people were unable to
escape from, and went through periods of hopelessness herself. Yet, she gradually learned to
accept the slowness of change and the importance of perseverance. Seeing the lessons of history,
of the traumas of unsuccessful uprisings, she worked towards change through minor
improvements and achievements, in small steps rather than by aiming for a complete revolution.
As Campbell writes, “For these past couple of years, I’ve stopped being the idealistically shiny-
eyed young woman I once was. I realize that an armed revolution of Native people will never
come about; even if such a thing were possible what would we achieve? We would only end up
oppressing someone else.” (1983: 184)
Campbell encourages people to take action, to have faith and pride in a unified sense of
Métisness, to persevere: “I believe that one day; very soon, people will set aside their differences
and come together as one. Maybe not because we love one another, but because we will need
each other to survive. Then together we will fight our common enemies. Change will come
because this time we won’t give up.” (1983: 184)

According to a common legend, Louis Riel said in 1885, “My people will sleep for one hundred
years, but when they awake, it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.” Whether or not
Riel actually said these words is not relevant here. The fact that this famous quotation has so
often been repeated and referred to in Native history writing, in the Internet, and even in the
meetings of literary scholars studying Native literatures has made the statement true in its own,
narrative way. It crystallizes the idea that while responding to various forms of oppression, Métis
culture and identity have survived, nurtured by the power of creativity and imagination. Indeed,
even with a history of violence, oppression, bitterness and shame, there is a possibility of a
future, and of finding an alternative history of creative and determined resistance.
In Halfbreed, the shame and anger resulting from the degrading, traumatic experiences
commonly shared by Canada’s Métis population are not portrayed as debilitating feelings.
Instead, shame and anger are revealed as transformative forces that, when managed through the
act of autobiographical storytelling, accommodate a drive to fight back, resulting in both
individual and collective survival and the possibility of political change.
Maria Campbell concludes her story with the following words of faith, victory and
encouragement: “The years of searching, loneliness and pain are over for me. Cheechum said,
‘You’ll find yourself, and you’ll find brothers and sisters.’ I have brothers and sisters, all over
the country. I no longer need my blanket to survive.” (1983: 184) She throws her shame away by
casting her blanket away, making space for change and hope.

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