{"id":73,"date":"2016-11-03T19:59:48","date_gmt":"2016-11-04T02:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/?p=73"},"modified":"2016-11-03T19:59:48","modified_gmt":"2016-11-04T02:59:48","slug":"3-5-canadas-colonial-imagination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/2016\/11\/03\/3-5-canadas-colonial-imagination\/","title":{"rendered":"3.5 Canada’s Colonial Imagination"},"content":{"rendered":"
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3 ] Frye writes:<\/span><\/h6>\n
A much more complicated cultural tension [more than two languages] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice a versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Dubussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In English literature we have to go back to Anglo-Saxon times to encounter so incongruous a collision of cultures (Bush Garden 221).<\/span><\/h6>\n
It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott\u2019s work, or tension between \u201cprimitive and civilized\u201d representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the \u201cvanishing Indians\u201d and wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people \u2013 as a distinct people, is never brought to light. In 1924, in his role as the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, Scott wrote:<\/span><\/h6>\n
The policy of the Dominion has always been to protect Indians, to guard their identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods, which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population (In Chater, 23).<\/span><\/h6>\n
For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott\u2019s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people\u2019s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye\u2019s discussion on the problem of \u2018historical bias\u2019 (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 \u20135).<\/span><\/h6>\n
\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the closing chapter of Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination<\/i>\u00a0a summation\u00a0of themes central to Canadian literature is delivered. Frye places particular emphasis on his belief\u00a0that is the fact that\u00a0Canadian writing is often\u00a0“literary” only incidentally, and it is, instead, an national awareness of history\u00a0which we should associate more closely with the shaping of Canadian literature. He states:<\/p>\n

“If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting… [Canadian literature] is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature” (216).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Frye is of the opinion\u00a0that the historical conditions of Canadian life, and a corresponding desire to depict those conditions, have proved to be one of the strongest influences upon\u00a0the imagination of Canadian writers. He\u00a0emphasizes that\u00a0this central developmental connection, between the Canadian imagination and the Canadian\u00a0relationship with the land, is inherently colonial, saying:<\/p>\n

“like other forms of history… [cultural history] has its own themes of exploration, settlement, and development, but these themes relate to a social imagination<\/i>\u00a0that explores and settles and develops” (217).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here, Frye seems to indicate\u00a0a\u00a0fundamentally mimetic quality in Canadian literature, in so far as\u00a0the Canadian imagination and its literary expression has the capacity to\u00a0figuratively mirror, in art, the romantic idealization and exploitative\u00a0violations of physical colonization. It is this mimetic colonial quality, so central to Canadian literature, which renders\u00a0the poetic hypocrisy of D.C. Scott irrelevant in the context of Frye’s conclusion.<\/p>\n

From the broader perspective of a critical analysis of colonial violations within\u00a0Canada it certainly is not irrelevant to note that Scott\u00a0idealized and exploited the facets\u00a0of a culture he simultaneously helped destroy.\u00a0However, in this specific context of The Bush Garden<\/i>‘s closing chapter\u00a0Scott is referenced as a literary exemplar of the collision between colonial and First Nations peoples, his hypocrisy not simply as a beaurocrat but as an artist is a prefect illustration of the close connection between Canadian literature and the country’s colonial past. What Frye seeks to underscore\u00a0at this specific<\/i> juncture in his book is the way in which\u00a0Scott’s poetry idealizes, exploits, and ultimately\u00a0overwrites the reality of First Nations lived experience in much the same way as colonial settlements were built atop lands forcibly plundered and taken from the\u00a0First Nations\u00a0inhabitants.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Works Cited:<\/p>\n

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination<\/i>. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

3 ] Frye writes: A much more complicated cultural tension [more than two languages] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice a versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[305210],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-unit-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=73"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73\/revisions\/75"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=73"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=73"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/cellardoor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=73"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}