Once in the winter
Out on a lake
In the heart of the north-land,
Far from the Fort
And far from the hunters,
A Chippewa woman
With her sick baby,
Crouched in the last hours
Of a great storm.

So starts Frye’s piece ‘Bush Garden’, which offers a general background on both the barriers and magnetic attraction to cultural diffusion and creation in Canadian literary history. His work throughout the 1950’s and 60’s on myth’s and archetype’s were highly influential and he became known as the “center of critical activity as one of the major critics of our age, whose work represents one of the most impressive achievements in the recent history of criticism.”
When discussing Duncan Campbell Scott, Frye is quick to allude to the vast polarization between his works among the literary spectrum. Yet, it was his writings of Native stories that raises the question of Agency on the part of Scott in writing these stories. As occupier of perhaps the most important seat in the Department of Indian Affairs, Scott himself 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 cited in Instructor Blog).
In ‘The Bush Garden’ Frye offers reasons as to why it is irrelevant for Scott to be credited with both the interpreter of native stories and the harbinger of cultural destruction on the communities themselves—or why he can outright ignore it. Frye proposed throughout his work that literature and myths should both be studied as a whole to observe the individual stories/myths. The first of Frye’s reasons is the historical bias created in Canadian literature.
Frye believes that To Brown et al. the Indian Act seems as if the just response, caused by a lack of understanding of cultures and/or the acceptance of. Just as writers have tried (yet failed in the individual production) of identity creation, so too did the governments. The Indian Act served to strip any and all cultural heritage from Aboriginal groups; traditions or artifacts, kinship, in hopes of stripping away one further layer of the Canadian identity.
As Frye states, Canadians desire for works that encapsulate its many faceted identity, but often fail in their delivery. What he proposes is in a way a message that coincides with Canadian media theorist Marshall Mcluhan’s idea that the ‘Medium (itself) is the message’—it is not the end result that matters much, it was the purpose of the literature itself. This comparison between the two celebrated Canadian theorists can be taken further, as Frye’s concept of the social imagination of Canada is a product of the medium of collective literature. For both McCluhan and Frye, the very act of the work being disseminated alters the underlying cultural current that creates a place we have come to know as Canada. As noted by Frye, “Canada’s identity is to be found in some via media or via mediocris”.
Canada’s cultural identity traits are not uniquely derived, they are culminations of the broader contextual existences of North America, France, Great Britain–and its geographic isolation. Furthermore, Canada’s identity itself was self-fulfilled by endless manifest destiny unto the west. The obstacles–whether human (Aboriginal, French) or natural—exist merely as encroaching upon the expected seizure of opportunity. Researchers such as Tina Loo at UBC have also discussed how the Canadian identity of ‘oneness of nature and man’ is lost in the exploitation of both.
Yet, what Frye also proposes is a closed system of literature writing based upon recall of values, subjects, and locations that are known to him/her. Frye refers to nearly all of 19th century Canadian literature as this ‘formula writing’. There is both the literature of conquest and the literature of propaganda both at play with Scott’s work. Either way, system of mythology at play with Scott’s ‘The Forsaken’ seems to offer a one sided perspective from the point of view of a man with an agenda.  While Frye might easily dismiss the writings due to the inadequacy of studying a single myth, or literature in the context of the exposed historical bias, the true bias that was exposed was that of Scott’s