Canada

Introduction

The year 2017 was Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation, and it elicited a spectrum of responses from celebration to critique. Even the mainstream news called attention to the use of the word “birthday”, for instance, as synonymous with “anniversary”. Its use implied that Canada did not exist before Confederation, though the diverse First Nations and Inuit peoples were here for thousands of years before first contact with Europe, and though its very name – “Canada” – comes from a Huron-Iroquoian word, Kanata (“village”), which gained its national usage in the 16^th century. Questions of justice that were re-started with the Idle No More movement in late 2012, renewed with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 (given the historic TRC Report) and continued with the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in 2016, helped many Canadians to recognize that Indigenous peoples throughout the country remain marginalized and sometimes invisible. The main trend in publishing in 2017 is to highlight Indigenous voices and scholarship that might change our understanding of how Indigeneity can be respected and how Indigenous nationality can help to make Canada a better place.

The most significant publication related to this topic was to be a posthumous book of poetry by Louis Riel, the Métis leader instrumental in the establishment of the province of Manitoba and one of the earliest Indigenous influences on Canadian confederation. His book, Flat Willow Creek: Poems of Louis Riel 1878-1883, was withdrawn by the publisher. Other Riel-related books were published, however. In the historical novel Song of Batoche, which names the small settlement in what is now known as Saskatchewan where Riel went in 1884 to mobilize a resistance to the federal government and its armed forces, Maia Caron fictionalizes Riel’s encounters with Gabriel Dumont and other figures. Similarly, Lorri Neilsen Glenn researches her Cree-Métis roots in Following the River: Traces of Red River Women (Poetry). Reflecting on her own ancestors, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson in the prose and poetry of This Accident of Being Lost explores Anishinaabe storytelling and the experiences of Indigenous women in Canada, a book that was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Trillium Award. In the context of raising awareness, also consider Tenille K. Campbell’s #IndianLovePoems, whose hashtag suggests both currency and publicity. Meanwhile, award-winning Eden Robinson is back with Son of a Trickster (Fiction). These examples show that Indigenous voices are now being heard widely, giving a new confidence to Indigenous people and settlers who hope for improved and mutually beneficial relationships.

Readers interested in a broader introduction to Indigenous literature from Canada at the turning point of 2017 might benefit from collections such as the one from acclaimed playwright, novelist, and pianist Tomson Highway: From Oral to Written: A Celebration of Indigenous Literature in Canada, 1980-2010 (see Criticism: General Studies). There is also the collaboratively edited anthology Read, Listen, Tell: Indigenous Stories from Turtle Island, “Turtle Island” being a name that acknowledges one of the cross-cultural creation stories of Indigenous North America. For anthologies of work by other significant but often marginalized populations, consider Althea Prince’s Black Notes: Young Black Voices and Moynan King’s Queer/Play: An Anthology of Queer Women’s Performance and Plays.

Scholarship on Indigeneity and colonialism is a related trend. In terms of Indigenous literature, and for British and European readers interested in examples in closest proximity to the UK, there is Rachel Bryant’s The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic (Criticism: General Studies). (For a history of early Indigenous voyages to Britain, see Cecilia Morgan’s Travellers through Empire.) More specifically, Manina Jones and Neal Ferris consider the work of E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), one of the earliest Indigenous writers to gain prominence here and abroad, in their essay “Flint, Feather, and Other Material Selves: Negotiating the Performance Poetics of E. Pauline Johnson”. In another focused study, Rebekah Ludolph examines the autobiography of conservationist and early animal-rights advocate Anahareo (Gertrude Bernard), who greatly influenced her husband Archibald Belaney (better known as Grey Owl), in “Humour, Intersubjectivity, and Indigenous Female Intellectual Tradition in Anahareo’s Devil in Deerskins”. A more contemporary, prominent, and outspoken figure, Lee Maracle is under consideration in “A Politics of Meeting: Reading Intersectional Indigenous Feminist Praxis in Lee Maracle’s Sojourners and Sundogs” by Janey Lew (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). Maracle’s own My Conversations with Canadians also appeared in 2017, and she had a keynote role in the final TransCanadas literary-cultural conference to be principally organized by Smaro Kamboureli.

In terms somewhat beyond Indigenous literature and into politics and related culture, Indigenous feminism gains further traction in Joyce Green’s edited collection, Making Space for Indigenous Feminism. Similarly, the aforementioned Leanne Betasamosake Simpson also released As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Radical resistance has momentum in Canada partly because of the historical context leading to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. See Alison Hargreaves’ Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance. Notable too is Cheryl Suzack’s Indigenous Women’s Writing and the Critical Study of Law. Studying attempts to achieve justice after generations of legislated assimilation and associated abuse of Indigenous children in government- and church-sponsored schools, Anne-Marie Reynaud published Emotions, Remembering and Feeling Better: Dealing with the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in Canada. Not unrelated is Gary Geddes’ book on Indigenous health crises resulting from colonialism, Medicine Unbundled. These texts (all under Criticism: General Studies) usually recommend that settlers should learn to listen to Indigenous peoples and better understand the harms caused by colonization, so that Indigenous peoples and allies can be empowered to solve problems, whether independently or together.

Indigenous peoples survive and often thrive in all parts of Canada, but the North – the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Nunavik, and Nunatsiavut – is special, more remote and thus less attractive to settlers, but of growing concern as climate change increases access for colonists and transforms the landscapes and seascapes on which traditional Indigenous knowledge depends. Seeking to preserve Inuit knowledge kept by elders in the North, there is the collaboratively edited Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: What Inuit Have Always Known to Be True. (In a primarily non-Indigenous but also pressured regional and significantly Northern culture, see a similar effort toward preservation of Newfoundland traditions in Pam Hall’s Towards an Encyclopedia of Local Knowledge.) Zebedee Nungak articulates the problem vividly in Wrestling with Colonialism on Steroids: Quebec Inuit Fight for Their Homeland. As demonstrated by Nungak’s book and Valerie Henitiuk’s “‘Memory Is So Different Now’: The Translation and Circulation of Inuit-Canadian Literature in English and French,” both federally official languages are implicated in Inuit knowledge; crucially, parts of the North also have territorially specific official languages that are neither English nor French, such as Inuktitut.

Of course, the oft-mentioned cultural mosaic is far more diverse and possibly more integrated than these examples may seem to suggest. 2017 was the year of Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers, a book of poetry so successful that it proves again that new media and style can draw readers to the form en masse. Drawing partly on media theory, Gillian Sze’s Panicle (Poetry) juxtaposes moving images and translations, revealing the multimodal and multilingual experiences of so many of us today. With further emphasis on the image, and in one of the most visually stunning and highly anticipated theatrical events of the past few years, Tetsuro Shigematsu’s Empire of the Son (Drama) reflects autobiographically on the author’s relationship with his father, who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Durga Chew-Bose also sometimes echoes the theme of growing up racialized in Canada in Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays (Non-fiction), which has also gained international acclaim. Carolyn Marie Souaid, a Montrealer of Lebanese descent, situates related cross-cultural encounters in Yasmeen Haddad Loves Joanasi Maqaittik (Fiction).

These diversities are still not always accepted or promoted even though they have long been recognized as integral to Canadian identity. Various books appeared in 2017 that attempted, to different degrees, to explain the significance of literature and publishing to the mainstream idea of “nation” that emerged in the 1960s-1980s – the CanLit era. Nick Mount’s Arrival: The Story of CanLit offers an account of the prominent influences. Monica Gattinger focuses on one of those influences in The Roots of Culture, the Power of Art: The First Sixty Years of the Canada Council for the Arts. Elaine Dewar laments that some of the results of the cultural nation-building projects are not sufficiently protected from richer interests in The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada’s Best Publisher and the Best Part of Our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational. See also Heather Murray’s “The CANLIT Project (1973-1981): In Search of a National Reader” (all under Criticism: General Studies).

Many of the writers who defined CanLit in its beginnings were represented in 2017. The poet and painter PK Page (a.k.a. PK Irwin) published a book of short fiction, Triptych. In another move between art forms, a little known but now re-published play by Mavis Gallant, What Is to Be Done?, shows off the brilliant characterization that we have come to admire and anticipate in her short fiction. Similarly, we have a reissue of Hugh Hood’s first book of short fiction, Flying a Red Kite, originally from the early 1960s. From the Maritimes through Toronto and Montreal to the West Coast, collected or selected editions have renewed attention to Alden Nowlan, Dennis Lee, Michael Harris, and Daphne Marlatt (Poetry). Marlatt read not long ago in Montreal with Erín Moure, who crafted a memoir in only seven days, Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (Letters and Autobiography). The novel Crying for the Moon, by satirist and television star Mary Walsh, is set in ‘60s Newfoundland and is a departure from the nationally televised comedies for which she is well known.

And then there is Margaret Atwood. She returned to the CanLit era and her classic critical positions and metaphors with The Burgess Shale: The Canadian Writing Landscape of the 1960s (Criticism: General Studies) and, as usual, generated plenty of scholarship by others (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). Atwood supported Joseph Boyden’s attempt to protect a fellow writer from dismissal from his university, an attempt that brought scrutiny to bear on them, including that of the #MeToo movement. Although they are not yet in the journals in 2017, expect the controversies that Atwood amplified on Twitter, and the discourse questioning her feminism, to enter into peer review in 2018-2019.

Although Leonard Cohen died in late 2016, only a couple of essays in the journals (but many more in the popular press) were devoted to his work, and so beyond Atwood and Cohen was a greater balance of scholarly attention to culturally significant writers of their era, including Bharati Mukherjee (who died in 2017), Austin Clarke, Alice Munro, Fred Wah, Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Michael Ondaatje, Eli Mandel, and Robert Kroetsch. There is also a new biography of the internationally celebrated pianist but neglected writer Glenn Gould: Peter Goddard’s The Great Gould (Criticism: Studies on Individual Writers). Of the following and more contemporary generations, we have individual studies of Marilyn Dumont, Hiromi Goto, Tomson Highway, Ruth Ozeki, and many more.

Returning to creative writing, we have selections from, for examples, Robyn Sarah and Margaret Christakos (Poetry). (Look to “Canadian Poetry’s Next Wave,” too, by Jim Johnstone under Criticism: General Studies.) Barbara Gowdy released a new novel, Little Sister, and from David Chariandy there is Brother. If a theme of family is developing, Michael Kaan’s The Water Beetles tells the story of the Leung family during and after the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941. Researching the same time, the daughter in After the Bloom by Leslie Shimotakahara uncovers some of the secrets of her mother’s internment in a wartime camp. Robert Everett-Green’s In a Wide Country imagines a young man obsessed with his mother. Lesley Trites’ A Three-Tiered Pastel Dream examines motherhood and marriage, work and children, themes shared with Shannon Bramer’s Precious Energy (all in Fiction).

When I look for a theme, however, that has even more universal significance than family, it is the concern for the natural environment, a concern that belies Canada’s persistent and environmentally destructive investments in dirty fuels, such as the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion that instigated protests and legal challenges throughout 2017. If themes of family require fiction and its intergenerational scope, perhaps themes of the natural environment require poetry and its condensation into mind-altering metaphor. Mary Dalton published a folkloric paean to “weeds” and other overlooked plants in Waste Ground. In Better Nature, Fenn Stewart selected from a diary of Walt Whitman, which Whitman wrote while visiting Canada, to critique notions of pioneering and wilderness. Hardly in the clouds, Karen Enns’ Cloud Physics is described as grounded, rooted in ecological eschatology—the study of ends (all in Poetry).

Circling back to the Indigeneity that began this bibliography, I foresee that many of the leaders who will emerge to shift Canada from its unsustainable path will be Indigenous leaders and allies. Canada’s oil/tar sands, its pipelines, its offshore drilling, and even its less damaging energy megaprojects are unresponsive to local needs, often in Indigenous communities or on Indigenous lands. If Canadians want the next 150 years to be more just and more promising, we will need to work for and with Indigenous peoples in a concerted effort to avoid a fossil future.