Lesson 3.1

Topics

  • Instructor’s blog review
  • Nationalism and literature
  • Fictive ethnicity and the Canadian identity
  • Northrop Frye and the Canadian imagination
  • Lee Maracle and First Nations nationalism

Learning Objectives

At the end of this lesson students will be able to:

  • Identify and discuss the changing nature of nationalism in Canada in the context of literary production and discuss ideas about First Nations nationalism in context with literary production and Canadian nationalism(s).
  • Recognize the connections between nationalism and ideologies of race and ethnicity
  • Discuss Frye’s key literary theories in context with a reading of Green Grass Running Water.

3:1 Lesson Description

The title of this lesson; “A Canon to build a Nation” is playing with aurality– I want you to read the words out loud and be prompted to imagine a cannon – a big iron cannon, the type you see around colonial forts, like the Citadel in Halifax, Fort York in Toronto, and other garrisons of the day. While cannons work to claim territory with brute power, a literary canon works to defend those claims with imaginative power. There is an intimate relationship between constructing a literary canon and building a nation. With this lesson we are going to examine that relationship in a historical context — and, in this process we will encounter more of the characters in King’s novel Green Grass Running Water: Northrop Frye, Duncan Campbell Scott, Pauline Johnston, Clifford Sifton, Samuel Hearne and others. So, please pay special attention when these names appear in your readings for this unit.

3:1 Assignments

Assignment 3: 1 / Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

Students are required to read two student blogs and post a significant and relevant observation or question in the comment box of each blog.

Assignment 3: 2 Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

At the end of this lesson, you will find a list of questions. Read each of the questions and select one that you would like to answer for your blog assignment.

Assignments 3: 3 /Please see due dates on the Course Schedule

It is time to find working partners for your research projects. You need to find 3 people to collaborate with for the end of term online conference.  Ideally a research group will have four members. To find your group members, read through the blogs that interest you the most and study the comments as well. Connect via your comment boxes and discuss your common interests. Equally important is a discussion on your working habits; procrastinators and over-organizers should self-identify. So, be clear with each other on your schedules and working habits before committing to a group. One member of the group should post a list with your names on the Instructor’s blog.

3:1 Required Readings

  • Instructor’s Blog
  • CanLit Guides. “Reading and Writing in Canada, A Classroom Guide to Nationalism.” Canadian Literature. Web. April 4th 2013.
    • Read the sections that deal with nationalism.
  • Flick Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. April 4th 2013. Here is link to a pdf file: Reading Notes pdf file
    • This is a reference article that you should study along with your reading of Green Grass Running Water.
  • Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.
    • Read Linda Hutcheon’s “Introduction”, Frye’s “Author’s Preface”, and the final chapter: “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada.”
  • King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.
  • Maracle, Lee. “Toward a National Literature: A Body of Writing.” Across Cultures/Across Borders: Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literature. Ed. Paul DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, and Emma LaRocque. Toronto: Broadview, 2010. Print.

Nationalism and Literature

“No nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations included within them, divided up among them or dominated by them are ethnicized – that is, represented in the past or in the future as if they formed a natural community, possessing of itself an identity of origins, culture, and interests which transcends individuals and social conditions”  Etienne Balibar (qtd. in Coleman 7).

“A nation exists when people believe it exists. People begin to learn certain national narratives and recognize particular symbols, which they then take to be inviolable; in the process, the narratives become self-constituting.” Cynthia Sugars and Laura Moss (qtd. in “Introduction to Nationalism”, canlitguides.ca)

In Unit Two, we looked at how Susanna Moodie’s life and work was re-created by critics, teachers and anthologists in “the attempt to construct a canon based on the putative uniqueness of the Canadian relationship with the land” ( JohnThurston 8). According to that story, Moodie’s destiny was to overcome the hardships of settlement in an empty wasteland, to transform the savage bush into a civilized garden and in the process transform her identity as well — from settler to Canadian. Moodie’s destiny than, is meant to mirror the destiny of a new nation. And indeed, the final chapter of Roughing it in the Bush, describes in detail the character building experience that the settler experiences through her relationship to the land, and goes on to list a number of nation-building attributes and attitudes that Moodie considers to be distinct to the new Canadian.

In lesson 2:3, Thurston provides a fair description of how the canon and the nation are built at the same time when he outlines how Susanna Moodie, the author and character, is inscribed with shaping the “destiny of a nation” and “helping us to form a correct notion of our national identity” (5). The process of canonization – and by that I mean the whole wide range of activities: selecting, publishing, marketing, incorporating into the curriculum, and all the economic as well as ideological forces that act to include or exclude certain authors or texts. This entire process is part of nation-building. You could say that literature and nationalism have a symbiotic relationship: one nourishes the other.

The colonial identity, with its layered duality and implied complicity that we also discussed in lesson 2:3, lies at the foundation for the desire to create a new identity: a Canadian identity. However, what Susanna Moodie and her early canon-building critics considered to be in the interest of nation-building holds little resemblance to the cultural nationalism of the 1960s, which rejected British (and American) cultural influences as colonial and inauthentic. In turn, by the end of the 20 th century the desire to articulate or create a national identity that had preoccupied writers and critics for so very long, became in itself questionable and ideas about “post-nationalism” enter the discourse. The CanLit Guides provide a brief introduction to ideas about post-nationalism concluding with an excellent quote that describes one vision of a post-national state as:

—a state invisible to its citizens, indistinguishable from its fellow, maintained by invisible political forces, and significant mainly through its position within the grid of world-class postcard cities…. Specific novels may argue for a humanist Canada, a more feminist Canada, a more sophisticated and worldly Canada, an individualist Canada, a Canada more responsive to the values of its [A]boriginal citizens, but collectively they suggest a world and a nation in which social structures no longer link regions or communities, political process is doubted, and individual alienation has become normal.

— Frank Davey, Post-National Arguments: The Politics of the Anglophone-Canadian Novel Since 1967 (266).

Your reading of the Canlit Guide on nationalism provides a succinct historical over view of the historical relationships between literature, criticism and shifting ideologies of nationalism in Canada. You should complete that reading before moving on with this lesson. You should study the “Reading and Writing Canada” chapters with a focus on gaining an understanding of the overall historical perspective and pay particular attention to the sections on Duncan Campbell Scott and E. Pauline Johnson. The guide offers you readings and sample lessons, which are interesting to study– but you are NOT required to work on these lessons. Instead, use the guide to gain a historical perspective on the shifting ideologies of nationalism in Canada and the relationships between literature and nationalism.

It should become clear as you read through the CanLit Guide that the discourse on nationalism is also about ethnicity and ideologies of “race.” Accepting the notion of a symbiotic relationship between nationalism and literature, or nation-building and canon-building, this observation leads to questions about how much of the process of canon-building is equally informed by ethnicity and/or ideologies of “race”? In his introduction to White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, Daniel Coleman argues that beginning with the colonials and early nation-builders there has been a “literary endeavor” to “formulate and elaborate a specific form of [Canadian] whiteness based on the British model of civility” (5). Coleman traces the entrenchment of white civility as definitive of Canadian identity through readings of “regularly repeated literary personifications for the Canadian nation” (1830s-1950s), which he argues have “mediated and gradually reified the privileged, normative status of British whiteness in English Canada” (6-7). This British whiteness is, Coleman says, a “fictive ethnicity,” that “still occupies the position of normalcy and privilege in Canada” (7). “Fictive ethnicity” describes, “how nations of diverse peoples are represented, both in the past and future, as if they are a “natural community” (7).

While Coleman’s analysis of civility as a marker of Canadian fictive ethnicity is complex, at the heart of his concerns is an examination of how the normative concept of English Canadianness as white and civil came to be constructed in the first place, how this fictive ethnicity requires a forgetting of the very uncivil acts of colonialism and nation-building, and finally a recognition that creating a Canadian identity that is white and civil is a project that began with colonialism and continues in the present (45). I give you this brief and simplified summary of Coleman’s discussion to supplement your reading of the CanLit Guide and to emphasize two things: 1) the fictive element of nation building, and 2) the necessary forgetfulness required to hold that fiction together. As Coleman puts it, Canadians need to “be reminded of the brutal histories that our fictive ethnicity would disavow” (9).

Coleman ends his study of literary personifications of the nation in the 1950’s, in part, because official state sponsorship and funding for cultural production began at that time, and in turn, the Canadian literary canon emerges through state sponsored academic and publishing activities. While the recommendations of the Massey Commission (1949) on arts letters and sciences (which resulted in the establishment of funding agencies like the Canada Council and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council), are clearly inspired by nineteenth-century romantic notions of nationalism founded on British civility as described by Coleman, the 1950s are also a transitional time when the cultural nationalism that characterized the 1960s and 1970s begins to take shape – and the fiction of white civility begins to be contested.

Introducing Northrop Frye (aka: Dr. Joe Hovaugh)

“Green Grass, Running Water also provides a thorough-going critique of the literary theories of Northrop Frye, literary theories that dominated Canadian and Anglo-American literary criticism between the publication of Anatomy of Criticism in 1957 to Frye’s death in 1991.” Blanca Chester .“Green Grass Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature, 161-62. 44.

The art of a Canadian remains … the art of the country of his forebears and the old world heritage of myth and legend remains his heritage … though the desk on which he writes be Canadian. John Coulter qtd. in Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden 240, emphasis added).

Northrop Frye’s career as an academic, critic, and author of literary theories that captured the imagination of academics and writers internationally as well as in Canada, spanned a remarkably transitional period in the cultural history of Canada. The nineteenth-century romantic notion of nationalism with its loyalty to British cultural models that had held on for so long — begins to unravel in the 1950s and 1960s. In part this unraveling was prompted by the flurry of Royal Commissions established in the post-war period and primarily concerned with protecting, promoting and funding Canadian cultural production: literature, arts, television, radio, publishing and biculturalism (concerns for multiculturalism do not surface until the 1970’s). Coinciding with Canada’s centennial in 1967, what surfaces during this era, and at height of Frye’s writing career, is a form of cultural nationalism that while continuing to privilege whiteness and civility, at the same time rejects British (and American) cultural influences as colonial and paternalistic. The cultural nationalism that emerges in the 1960s seeks a national identity that is free of of the past and especially free of the colonial mind-set; a nationalism that demanded support, recognition and preservation of cultural production by and for Canadians. Coupled with a quest for articulating a uniquely and definitively Canadian national identity, is the influence of a nationalist criticism that works hard to “discover” the essence of Canadianness (that is, to construct it). Northrop Frye was one of those critics, but much more. As the quote that begins these lesson indicates, Frye formulated and wrote critical theories that dominated Canadian and Anglo-American literary criticism for the first half of the 20th century. Frye, through his reputation as a critic and academic, had a significant impact on the formation of the “CanLit canon” as it entered into the university and school curriculum in the 1970s. Along with his impact on the study of Canadian literature, his ideas are of particular interest to us for a number of reasons.

The Bush Garden

The Bush Garden is a collection of essays written over a period of 20 years: 1950s – 1970s, and while Frye’s literary theorizing was mainly concerned with world literature, he insisted that his work had “always been rooted in Canada and has drawn its essential characteristic from there” (xxi). In her introduction, written twenty-five years later, Linda Hutcheon points out that all the essays speak to “Frye’s conception of what has made the Canadian imagination distinctive” (vii), and she points to a “major contradiction in Frye’s work – between theories of general mythic patterns in literature and assertions of a specifically Canadian culture” (xv). At the heart of this contradiction lies Frye’s theory of forms of literature as autonomous: “they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside of literature” (xiv). The contradiction arises because for this theory to work, there must exist a mythic tradition from which literature derives its symbols, images and metaphors and whose patterns create the forms that distinguish that literature as autonomous. Canada pre-1970s, according to Frye, was devoid of the necessary mythic tradition from which to create a distinctly Canadian literature. However, he noted, it is possible that after “a period of certain magnitude […] a social imagination can take root and establish a tradition” (221). We will return to Frye’s theoretical ideas about literature as “conscious mythology,” for now we focus on what Frye finds when he probes the Canadian imagination in an effort to discover clues of a national consciousness embedded in early Canadian poetry and fiction.

In his preface, Frye writes: “But it is with human beings as with birds: the creative instinct has a great deal to do with territory and assertion of territorial rights” (xxi). For Frye also, there is a palpable connection between environment and imagination, or put another way — between land and stories. In Frye’s analysis, the environment inspires the imagination and the imagination transforms “unknowable” nature into meaningful form.

But, in his readings he finds a Canadian environment that has been “obliterated:”

Canada, with its empty spaces, its largely unknown lakes and rivers and islands, its division of language […], has had this peculiar problem of an obliterated environment throughout most of its history (xxxiii).

The effects of this, Frye says, “are clear in the curiously abortive cultural developments of Canada. (xxiii). When Frye looks back over the literary history of Canada, hunting for themes that will illuminate the essence of the “Canadian imagination,” what he finds is a tone of deep-rooted terror of nature: nature envisioned as vast, empty, unconscious, menacing and most significant, as a denial of human morals. “To feel Canadian,” Frye wrote, “was to feel part of no-man’s-land […] one wonders if any other national consciousness has had so large an amount of the unknown, the unrealized, the humanly undigested, so built into it” (222). Here he notes that, in Canada, the writer is surrounded by the frontier, it is “a condition of ones whole imaginative being” (222). Isolating, the frontier, Frye says, physically and mentally separates Canada from Britain and the United States, and it separates communities from each other. (222-3). Interestingly, Frye does not extend the frontier to include the space between settlers and Natives. Rather, he comments on the absence of “Indian wars” in Canada as contrasted with the United States; “there is,” he says, “much less of the ‘another redskin bites the dust’ feeling in our historical imagination” (226). Instead, Frye says, “the conquest for the last two centuries” has been against the “unconscious forces of nature” (227). Surrounded by frontier, isolated, separated, and confronted with unthinking, menacing nature, “with a great respect for law and order” (read civility) – such communities, writes Frye, “are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality” (227). Frye’s vision of the Canadian imagination as garrisoned against an endless frontier and a terrifying nature – and indeed, as Hutcheon puts it, “frostbitten by a colonial history” (ix), laid a foundational theme for entering into discussions on Canadian literature for a very long time. Take note that what Frye envisions as menacing is the same land the Indigenous peoples called home.

Northrop Frye is a major character in Green Grass Running Water. Dr. Joe Hovaugh is not only Jehovah he is also Northrop Frye. This is a fitting allusion because Frye worked extensively with the bible. The best way to begin to examine why Dr. Joe Hovaugh is also Northrop Frye, is to examine Frye’s key literary theory alongside some of his ideas about the place of “Indians” in literature, history, and in context with his ideas about mythology. Just as we examined the stories Susanna Moodie resurrects with her appearance in the Dead Dog Café, we need to ask what are the stories that Frye brings to the pages of Green Grass Running Water in the guise of Dr. Joe Hovaugh?

As you read through your assigned sections of The Bush Garden, there are three threads of thought I would like you to focus on connecting. First is Frye’s understanding of the forms of literature as autonomous and his explanation of literature as conscious mythology. Pay particular attention to the distinctions made between great literature and its necessary detachment from its social and historical context (xv –xvi). The second thread of thought to follow carefully contains Frye’s ideas about nature and the impacts of nature on the Canadian imagination. And finally, take careful note of the comments Frye makes about “Indians” (234 -35, 240, 245). Your task is to construct links between Frye’s theory of literature as a closed system, nature as unknowable and “not morally explicable” (245) – and “Indians” as “literary conventions” symbolizing a “rapport with nature” (240). If you do this work, you might begin to be able to see Northrop Frye in Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s place, sitting behind his big oak desk in Florida contemplating his garden as he searches for meaning in the forms of patterns, draws circles on the map — and puzzles over the continuing disappearance of the four missing Indians.

There is one last part of Frye’s conclusions that needs attention, and that is his description of the “second phase of Canadian social development” and his designation of Duncan Campbell Scott as “one of the ancestral voices of the Canadian imagination” (247). The second phase of development arises when “the conflict of man and nature” expands and becomes a “triangular conflict” that includes the individual, nature and society. When the poet allies himself “with nature against society” a new theme emerges and Frye says that “[i]t is the appearance of this theme in D.C Scott which makes him one of the ancestral voices of the Canadian imagination” (247). Duncan Campbell Scott was one of the four male poets designated as the Poets of Confederation (the other three were Charles G.D. Roberts, Archibald Lampman, and Bliss Carman) and canonized as such in the 1960s; according to Malcolm Ross, Scott was an “avowed and self conscious prophet of the new Canadian nationalism” (Bush Garden ix). The national cultural significance attached to Scott’s poetry was found in his subjects; “almost all of Scott’s subjects find their roots in Canada; in this respect he is, from a distance, the most nationalistic, the most Canadian of our great poets” ( Ross Roy in Chater 13). But, perhaps more interestingly, is what Mezei called Scott’s ability “to create a sense of mythology through investing space with symbolic significance” (Chater 13 -14). The space in this context is nature.

While not limited to evocations of nature, Scott’s most characteristic poems are associated with the northern landscape: “all the poems for which [Scott] is likely to be remembered are concerned with the northern wilderness, Canada’s Indian territory” (Roy Daniells in Chater). It is Scott’s so called “Indian Poems” that are most recognizable and considered by many to be his best. The majority of literary critics have recognized the Indian Poems as “sensitive,” “humane” and “compassionate” toward their subject (Chater 17). The CanLit guide provides an analysis of The Onondaga Madonna as an example of “racialization.” Other poems in Scott’s Indian collection that you might want to read to get a deeper impression of his treatment of “Indians” are: “Watkwenies,” “The Half-breed Girl,” “ The Forsaken,” “At Gull Lake: August 1810,” and “Powassan’s Drum.”

Duncan Campbell Scott was also the deputy superintendent of the department of Indian Affairs between 1913 and 1932 (the senior civil servant in this department); his duties included travel to the northern parts of Ontario as one of the treaty commissioners whose task it was to arrange the surrender of land from the Ojibway and Cree to the Canadian government in 1905/06. Scott also “oversaw the assimilationist policies which fostered residential schools, suppressed the west coast potlatch and generated many other cultural destructive activities” (Dragland n.pag.). Duncan Campbell Scott is also a character in Green Grass Running Water. He is Lionel’s boss during his brief stint working for the department of Indian Affairs – it was his paper that Lionel went to present—“The History of Cultural Pluralism in Canada’s Boarding Schools” — when he ends up penniless and in jail.

A Last Word on Nationalism

The CanLit guide introduces nationalism by marking the distinction between a nation and a state – Canada, as a colony aspiring to become an independent state, adhered to the governing structures of Europe (France and England) and to European conceptions of emerging nationalism in which the “ideal nation-state was culturally homogeneous” (n.pag.). As the guide explains, this notion of a homogenous national culture, or as it came to be named in the discourse of nationalism in Canada, “a national identity,” is a fiction designed to inspire loyalty to state authority and held together with songs, dances, stories, and literature. In the beginning, there were many nations in this country we call Canada, and while the homogeneity of Indigenous nations and, no doubt, loyalty to authority, was also held together with songs, dances, and stories – it was not until the late 20th century that the reality of Indigenous nationhood creeps into the discourse of nationalism in Canada and writers like Lee Maracle are invited to explore questions about First Nations nationalism and literary production.

The final reading for this lesson, Lee Maracle’s “Toward a National Literature; ‘A Body of Writing’” is a call to action: “We need to systematize our sense of knowledge acquisition in the service of our nations” (95). Maracle is addressing questions of nationalism in the Native literary tradition, a tradition that she situates as beginning, in Canada, with E. Pauline Johnson – who is also a character in Green Grass Running Water, and who has been recognized as “the mother of Indigenous literature north of the 49th parallel” (78). While recognizing that “in the past fifty years of Indigenous history, we have experienced a veritable explosion in the literary arts,” Maracle is seriously concerned about the lack of connection between writing and oracy. She writes,

We are also short of the sort of writing rooted to our oracy. So few First Nations people understand the connection between the oral process of myth-making from oratory and the function of myth-making from our various national perspectives (79).

Describing the extent of knowledge and the range of purposes of First Nations oratory (“history, sociology, political science, medical knowledge, aquaculture, horticultural, law, as well as stories”) Maracle makes a strong argument for the necessity of focusing on recuperation and systematization of Indigenous knowledge. What is most central in her argument is that writers must be enabled to “write from within the culture” (82). This is a point she stresses throughout the essay in numerous ways. And it is a point that, in a strange way, makes me think about Frye’s “autonomous literary forms” and his notions of “literature as conscious mythology.” I say “a stange way” because at first glance, there is an enormous distance between these two authors in terms of critical traditions and ideological eras. Noentheless, here is an example of the connections I see. For example, Maracle writes, “unless we write from within the culture and from our original knowledge, we can not grow culturally,” and she further describes how writers write from within the culture:

… with a broad and solid foundation in their society’s knowledge […] they do so through a careful and connected study of old and recent literary products that clearly arise out of the original story base (84).

Frye is also concerned with “growing culturally” and “abortive cultural developments”; of course the roots of the problems for these two authors are different – nonetheless, compare the above to what Frye has to say about working within a tradition:

What the Canadian writer finds in his experience and environment may be new, but it will be new only as content: the form of his expression of it can take shape only from what he has read. […] In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images. (Bush Garden, 234 – 5).

Both authors are addressing questions of nationalism and literature, and both authors focus on the necessity for a tradition to be written from within. Perhaps this is a tenuous connection to construct considering the distance between these two authors, but still, as I read them side-by-side my marginal notes keep alerting me to this connection; both are concerned with something lost, something missing.

The last note to make on Maracle’s essay is how she takes issue with Thomas King, she writes: “Thomas King’s statement, “We are about story and nothing else,” tends to be simplistic and opens the door to reducing our cultural past to amusing anecdotal stories” (82).

This is a provocative statement that deserves consideration and is most likely correct in identifying what is in the minds of many people who are unfamiliar with First Nations oratory. But, at the same time, there is an argument to make in King’s defense in so much as some would say, King’s novel Green Grass Running Water is indeed deeply rooted in the story-telling tradition of Harry Robinson and in literary imitations of orality. This is a question we should return to after we have completed our work with King’s novel, for now it is well worth reading Maracle’s article with open ears and considering her call to action with respect. You might want to consider some of her ideas for your final “intervention project.”

BLOG QUESTIONS

1] The Quebec Act of 1774, and the BNA act of 1867 each document the historical ability of Britain, as colonial authority, to accommodate two founding nations in the interest of confederation. Shortly after confederation of the eastern provinces, in 1869, the Metis Nation of Manitoba created a provisional government and attempted to negotiate directly with the new government of the confederationto establish their territories as a province under their leadership. In the end, their leader, Louis Riel was charged with treason – as the CanLit guide puts it, “Canada at the time was not willing to accommodate more than two founding nations.”For this blog assignment, I would like you to outline the reasons why colonial authorities could not conceive of accepting the Metis as a third founding nation. Use the CanLit guide and the summary of Coleman’s argument on the literary project of white civility to substantiate your observations. You might also find part of your answer in The Bush Garden. You should also take into consideration past discussions on ‘the civilizing mission’ of colonialism in Unit 2. Louis Riel also appears in Green Grass Running Water, and accordingly it is worthwhile to do a little outside research around Riel’s provisional government and its attempts to negiciate with the new Canadian government.

2] In this lesson I say that it should be clear that the discourse on nationalism is also about ethnicity and ideologies of “race.” If you trace the historical overview of nationalism in Canada in the CanLit guide, you will find many examples of state legislation and policies that excluded and discriminated against certain peoples based on ideas about racial inferiority and capacities to assimilate. – and in turn, state legislation and policies that worked to try to rectify early policies of exclusion and racial discrimination. As the guide points out, the nation is an imagined community, whereas the state is a “governed group of people.” For this blog assignment, I would like you to research and summarize one of the state or governing activities, such as The Royal Proclamation 1763, the Indian Act 1876, Immigration Act 1910, or the Multiculturalism Act 1989 – you choose the legislation or policy or commission you find most interesting. Write a blog about your findings and in your conclusion comment on whether or not your findings support Coleman’s argument about the project of white civility.

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 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).

It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott’s work, or tension between “primitive and civilized” representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the “vanishing Indians” and wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people – 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:

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).

For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).

4] In her article, “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel,” Blanca Chester focuses on an analysis of Northrop Frye as Dr. Joe Hovaugh. She writes;

In Hovaugh’s carefully constructed world, meaning lies in circular and closed systems. Thus he draws a “deliberate circle around Parliament Lake.” He then draws another, and another (324). King’s narrator then describes Indian “gifts” and white “gifts” for us (327), defining each in a play on paradigmatic opposites (327). Real Indians don’t exist in this system. But in the novel Hovaugh’s organization of the world ultimately reveals itself as petrified and static. His is a world where circles are no longer cycles—where circles construct borders around knowledge. His world, unlike the world of the old Indians, exhibits a garrison mentality. 52

For this blog assignment, I would like you to find and describe other examples of Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s character that reflect aspects of Frye’s literary theories and ideas about the Canadian imagination – or, any element of Frye’s thought that you hear echoed in the pages of Green Grass Running Water.

Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999).Web. April 04/2013.

5]  In her article, “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel,” Blanca Chester observes that “the conversation that King sets up between oral creation story, biblical story, literary story, and historical story resembles the dialogues that Robinson sets up in his storytelling performances (47). She writes:

Robinson’s literary influence on King was, as King himself says, “inspirational.” When one reads King’s earlier novel, Medicine River, and compares it with Green Grass, Running Water, Robinson’s impact is obvious. Changes in the style of the dialogue, including the way King’s narrator seems to address readers and characters directly (using the first person), in the way traditional characters and stories from Native cultures (particularly Coyote) are adapted, and especially in the way that each of the distinct narrative strands in the novel contains and interconnects with every other, reflect Robinson’s storied impact. (46)

For this blog assignment I would like you to make some comparisons between Harry Robson’s writing style in “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England” and King’s style in Green Grass, Running Water. What similarities can you find between the two story-telling voices? Coyote and God are present in both texts, how do they compare in character and voice across the stories?

6] Lee Maracle writes:

In order for criticism to arise naturally from within our culture, discourse must serve the same function it has always served. In Euro-society, literary criticism heightens the competition between writers and limits entry of new writers to preserve the original canon. What will its function be in our societies? (88)

In the following paragraphs in her essay, Maracle answers her question describing what she sees to be the function of literary criticism in Salish society. Summarize her answer and then make some comparisons between Maracle and Frye’s analysis of the role of myth in nation building.