Once upon a time, there was a little girl, in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC. At 21… I can’t quite finish this reference properly, but let’s just say she made a lot of judgement errors that led to a very, very unwieldy sleep schedule. So where has Hannia been for three weeks while the course went on without her? Doing battle with her circadian rhythm, basically. Darlings, at one point I was sleeping during the day, and I’m not even a party animal. When you can’t stay awake long enough to do the required reading every time you make an attempt, you gotta prioritize making a change, especially when you also have a 9 a.m Biology class to contend with. Add a bit of mental constipation and… well… I’ll let Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes vocalize it for me. Still haven’t fixed it, but I actually find myself feeling awake and alive for once, so I’m going to press on and write.

Anyway, let’s face off against Northrop Frye. I say it this way because I, personally, feel like I’ve been doing battle with this post for a week and am trying to place the blame somewhere that isn’t on me and my terrible decisions. Babble aside, let’s talk about Duncan Campbell Scott and Frye’s writing. Without swords.

In searching for the answers to why Scott’s involvement in the destruction of Indigenous culture is not relevant to Frye’s insight on the duality of his work, I found a rather interesting remark: “Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions” (Frye 235). In order to concern oneself with the well-being of a group of people, an important step is to see them as human beings. If I am interpreting this correctly, Indigenous people were more akin to a genre convention or trope than breathing human beings to Scott and his contemporaries in literature. The duality in his writing, then, may have little to do with the people involved, as the people are not considered as such. The “starving squaw” is not based upon a flesh and blood woman, but rather an archetype in literature, much like I might use the trickster fairy in my personal writings.

Frye only needed to reflect on the contrasting images in the literature itself, as that was all that was presented to him. As rich as the analysis would be taking into account how there is a duality in Scott’s opinions on the Indigenous people’s place according to the Dominion, Scott was not writing about them, but rather the idea of the Indigenous people. I find Frye’s comment on how the Canadian writer tends to form his expression “from what he has read, not from what he has experience” (234) quite pertinent to this idea of how Scott actually treats the Indigenous people in his writing. He may have an idea of how to write about them that originates not so much from the work he does with them, but from the way the mythological Indian appear in other literary works.

It may seem, then, that rather than build off of the existing mythology of the Indigenous people, Canadian literature as described by Frye swallowed them up into itself. Although there was much to work with, colonial writers deigned to use them more as the “sun-gods and the like” that populate mythology. In essence, rather than contributing to Canadian literary mythology, the Indigenous people simply became a part of it. I wish I could find where to look for the precise place where I found these remarks, and I suspect they’re peppered all over Tumblr, but I have read in places where young Native Americans discuss their people’s treatment in the modern world, commenting on how their image is that of a dead people, of a group that exists only in the past and maybe Disney’s Pocahontas. It can be all too easy to forget that for all that Indigenous culture was deeply harmed, for all that Indigenous people, including entire groups, were eliminated in many cases, they are not a dead people that only populate the land of fiction.

Works Cited

Charles, RuPaul. “Supermodel (Of the World).” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, Apr.  27, 2012. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.

Higgins, Jenny. “Disappearance of the Beothuk.” Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage. Memorial University of Newfoundland, n.d. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.

Medley, Bill and Jennifer Warnes. “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, Feb.  24, 2014. Web. Jul. 18, 2014.