Susanna Moodie’s introduction to the third edition of her work, Roughing it in the Bush, is a unique and interesting start to a ‘pioneering’ book. It is reflective of the book itself, focusing not on a romanticized idea of the Canadian settler experience, but on the hardships and disillusionment of such a life.
But that is not to say that Moodie’s story is the complete reality because she abstained from romanticizing it. Rather it is part of the reality because it tells only part of the story…it tells the story of the European dream. But more importantly, it tells the story of the falsity of that dream.
The intersection of indigenous and settler stories is one that only happens when we each choose to listen to all the stories. Moodie’s work does not do this; she did not hear the indigenous stories and her work does not include their accounts of the land she lived upon. But what her work does is play a role in laying the groundwork for that intersection by exposing the fallacies of the settler stories. She recreates the stories that the European settlers brought across the ocean in all their glory and optimism. And then she shows her readers how these stories fall apart.
-We can hear echoes of the spiritual stories that the settlers arrived with: the stories of the land being their gift from God,being like the Garden of Eden.
She “told of lands yielding forty bushels to the acre” and of ” log houses to be raised in a single day, by the generous exertions of friends and neighbours.” This was the story of the “El Dorados” that the settlers had been told and expected to find, where farming was easy and bore in abundance.
She says that it is God’s Will that they come here,that “He chooses such, to send forth into the forest to hew out the rough paths for the advance of civilization.”
-Moodie also echoes the story of an empty, unused land that colonizers used to attract settlers and justify their push into the ‘wild’.
She writes of how people came to “reclaim the waste places of the earth.”
-The ‘vanishing Indian’ is not just vanishing in her introduction; he is already vanished.
In her intro, she makes not a single mention of the indigenous peoples that the settlers encountered on their arrival. It is as though the land was empty, in need of being tamed and “civilized.”
Moodie’s book was published after the fact, and the intro likewise written after. The stories of this land being an Eden are ones that she retells and rewrites, but those of the vanishing Indian and the Terra Nullius are ones that still have heavy resonance in her work. It is almost blatantly obvious in its exclusion; the need to justify the pushing back of so many civilizations is one that Moodie holds firm to and reflects in her writings.
In her pulling at the threads of the European settler stories and her unraveling their stoic truthfulness, Moodie sets the stage for readers to doubt that these are the only stories. If the settler stories that they brought were not the full truth, then maybe there are more stories to make up the truth out there. I don’t think Moodie intended or endorsed this course, but she unknowingly did by revealing a world unlike the one that had been told.
Works Cited
Lockwood, Brett. “They’re Giving Away Land.” O’ Canada. WordPress. 11 April 2015. Web. Accessed on 2 March,
2016.
Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush. London: Richard Bentley, 1852.
“Tales on the Trails.” Le Canada: A People’s History. CBC, 2001. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.
Hi Maryam!
I agree with many of your assertions about Moodie’s texts of not necessarily perpetuating the romanticized narrative of settler life, but still presents problematic elements as a text. I found the poster you linked to interesting—I remember in first year in one of my classes we went to the archives under IKB and looked at many similar posters advertising Canada to new immigrants—we considered these posters as a type of propaganda, as they though they weren’t necessarily untruthful, they presented a very idealized sense of Canada.
One question that sticks in my mind is why Moodie chose to exclude indigenous peoples in her account of Canada if she seemed to be attempting to portray settler life in Canada in a faithful way?
Hi Maryam,
Very interesting post! I’d like to attempt to answer Natalie’s question stated in the comment above.
I believe Moodie’s exclusion of Indigenous peoples in her account of Canada most likely comes down to a case of strong cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is “the mental stress or discomfort experienced by an individual who holds two or more contradictory beliefs, ideas, or values at the same time” (definition from Wikipedia). Usually, a person faced with cognitive dissonance will either deny the new belief that challenges their old one, or change their old belief to reflect the new one. It’s very uncomfortable, as Thomas King has wrote about, to believe more than one truth.
As a person who had put in a lot of effort and energy into conquering the land and being part of its transition to “civilization”, I think it was too uncomfortable for Moodie to acknowledge that this narrative she wrote as such a large part of her identity was, in reality, based on a false assumption that the land had been desolate and full of savages.
Cheers,
Caitlin
Hi Caitlyn! Thanks for your amazing comment on a possible explanation for Moodie’s exclusion of the ‘vanishing Indian’ concept. As someone majoring in psychology,it is always interesting to see the intersection of that field with another!
Hi Natalie! The posters as propaganda is one that is very true…the surveyors and advertisers no doubt knew the promises they were making were not reflective of the reality. The question of the exclusion of the ‘vanishing Indian’ is also the one that puzzled me the most.
Maryam,
Your closing comment regarding Moodie’s unravelling of European stories, and the opportunity she has provided for readers to question the stories they hear, caught my attention. I hadn’t thought about this before, but for me, this might be one of the most important takeaways from Moodie’s writing.
Her honest exposure of the misleading elements of stories told to her about Canada before her arrival serves as a signal to us as readers to begin actively looking for misleading elements in all of the stories we hear. I believe that everyone has some kind of reason for telling a story, whether it is to convince an audience of something for personal gain, to entertain or create an emotional response or connection with another, or simply to transmit information. The stories Moodie heard were, I assume, strongly motivated by the desire to convince people to settle in Canada, that seems fairly obvious. However, as you’ve pointed out, her disillusionment and exposure of this motivation provides an opportunity for learning. Maybe the trick is to develop an eye and ear for understanding even the subtlest motivation behind the telling of a story. If we can understand why a story is being told, it might be easier to hear that story with an objective ear. If we can listen to the stories we are being told with an objective ear, perhaps we will be able to be more responsible with those stories. I’ve gone on a bit of tangent now, but does that resonate with you at all?
Hi Sierra. I really like your comment on understanding the motivation for telling a story. It is very true…then we can pick p the subtle things in the writing. If Moodie had written this intro while at the beginning of her life in Canada vs. many years after, I no doubt think it would have had a different tone from her writing it afterwards.
Hi Maryam, great post! I really liked how you highlighted something that stuck out to me when I read Moodie’s introduction: her ability to tell a story of settlement in Canada that is entirely void of First Nations people. Like you aptly pointed to, this act of ignoring those who were already there—and asserting the space as an empty and wasted land—suggests that “The ‘vanishing Indian’ is not just vanishing in her introduction; he is already vanished.” There is a story being told here, but it fails to offer the full picture. Which makes wonder: how much did the Europeans know about the First Nations people already living in and laying claim to these territories? It strikes me as odd that she gets into such specifics about the contents of the advertising pamphlets, such as the estimated number of crops returns per season and tax incentives, but ignores any mention of her hesitancy of encountering these people, or her shock upon finding them. I wonder how aware was the general European of First Nations people in the nineteenth century, and how did that fit into—or further shatter—their romantic notions of pioneering an “unknown” land?
Hi! Yeah, the fact that her intro presented a vanished and not a vanishing Indian was intriguing. I think that Europeans were very aware of the presence of indigenous peoples on this land. They told stories to their children and regular encountered them as their economic lives often crossed paths. But it was an uneasy awareness; one that was hypocritical as it challenged their justification for being on the land. Caitlyn made a really nice comment on this above. I think in her silence and its absence, the existence of the indigenous peoples is even more conspicuous