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    The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic
    The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic
    The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic
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    The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic

    By Rachel Bryant

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    About this ebook

    Can literary criticism help transform entrenched Settler Canadian understandings of history and place? How are nationalist historiographies, insular regionalisms, established knowledge systems, state borders, and narrow definitions continuing to hinder the transfer of information across epistemological divides in the twenty-first century? What might nation-to-nation literary relations look like? Through readings of a wide range of northeastern texts – including Puritan captivity narratives, Wabanaki wampum belts, and contemporary Innu poetry – Rachel Bryant explores how colonized and Indigenous environments occupy the same given geographical coordinates even while existing in distinct epistemological worlds. Her analyses call for a vital and unprecedented process of listening to the stories that Indigenous peoples have been telling about this continent for centuries. At the same time, she performs this process herself, creating a model for listening and for incorporating those stories throughout.

    This commitment to listening is analogous to homing – the sophisticated skill that turtles, insects, lobsters, birds, and countless other beings use to return to sites of familiarity. Bryant adopts the homing process as a reading strategy that continuously seeks to transcend the distortions and distractions that were intentionally built into Settler Canadian culture across centuries.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateOct 7, 2017
    ISBN9781771122894
    The Homing Place: Indigenous and Settler Literary Legacies of the Atlantic
    Author

    Rachel Bryant

    Rachel Bryant is a mother, educator, and writer who has witnessed the emotional and physical turmoil of domestic violence. She is fully aware of the long-term consequences of its traumatizing and toxic effects on the mind, body, and soul of victims young and old from all walks of life. She hopes this book will provide the insight and inspiration needed for those involved in abusive relationships to escape their persecutors not only to survive but, perhaps, even thrive in the absence of oppression.

    Read more from Rachel Bryant

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      Book preview

      The Homing Place - Rachel Bryant

      The

      Homing

      Place

      INDIGENOUS STUDIES SERIES

      THE INDIGENOUS STUDIES SERIES builds on the successes of the past and is inspired by recent critical conversations about Indigenous epistemological frameworks. Recognizing the need to encourage burgeoning scholarship, the series welcomes manuscripts drawing upon Indigenous intellectual traditions and philosophies, particularly in discussions situated within the Humanities.

      Series Editor

      Dr. Deanna Reder (Cree-Metis),

      Associate Professor, First Nations Studies and English,

      Simon Fraser University

      Advisory Board

      Dr. Jo-ann Archibald (Sto:lō),

      Professor of Educational Studies, Faculty of Education,

      University of British Columbia

      Dr. Kristina Bidwell (NunatuKavut),

      Associate Dean of Aboriginal Affairs, College of Arts and Science,

      Professor of English, University of Saskatchewan

      Dr. Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation),

      Professor, First Nations and Indigenous Studies/English,

      Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture,

      University of British Columbia

      Dr. Eldon Yellowhorn (Piikani),

      Associate Professor, Archaeology, Director of First Nations Studies,

      Simon Fraser University

      RACHEL BRYANT

      The

      Homing

      Place

      Indigenous and Settler

      Literary Legacies

      of the Atlantic

      This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Bryant, Rachel, 1983–, author

               The homing place : indigenous and settler literary legacies of the Atlantic / Rachel Bryant.

      (Indigenous studies series)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      Issued in print and electronic formats.

      ISBN 978-1-77112-286-3 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-77112-288-7 (PDF).—

      ISBN 978-1-77112-289-4 (EPUB)

               1. Canadian literature—History and criticism. 2. Canadian literature—Indian authors—History and criticism.  3. Pioneers in literature.  4. Colonization in literature.  5. Indians in literature.  I. Title.  II. Series: Indigenous studies series

      PS8061.B79 2017                                    C810.9                                    C2017-901908-2

                                                                                                                         C2017-901909-0

      Cover photo by Rachel Bryant. Cover image shows a detail of an address to Murray MacLaren, written on birchbark in English and Maliseet, Kingsclear First Nation, Pilick, 1939. Courtesy the New Brunswick Museum – Musée du Nouveau-Brunswick, www.nbm-mnb.ca / S 44A–6.S. The exhibit as a whole appears in this volume as Figure 4 (page 13). Cover and text design by Lime Design Inc.

      © 2017 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

      www.wlupress.wlu.ca

      Mihku Paul, Echo of Multitudes, 20th Century PowWow Playland Cheryl Savageau, Harsh Words, Dirt Road Home Josephine Bacon, excerpts from the poetry collection Message Sticks (Tshissinuatshitakana) (Mawenzi House Publishers, 2013). Printed with permission from Mawenzi House.

      This book is printed on FSC® certified paper and is certified Ecologo. It contains post-consumer fibre, is processed chlorine free, and is manufactured using biogas energy.

      Printed in Canada

      Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

      Lillie-Mae Corey,

      Pearl Steeves,

      and Ruth Colley

      Contents

      List of Figures

      Preface: Engaging in Literary Diplomacy, or Speaking from a Clear Subject Position

      Acknowledgements

      INTRODUCTION

      The Homing Place

      one / CULTURAL ICONOCLASM

      John Gyles’s Atlantic Canadian Captivity Narrative

      two / CANADIAN EXCEPTIONALISM

      Finding Anna Brownell Jameson in an Anglo-Atlantic World

      three / IMAGINARY LINES

      Cultural Storytelling in Peskotomuhkatik

      four / MAKING WORDS WALK

      Joséphine Bacon’s Poetic Tshissinuatshitakana

      five / RITA JOE’S WIGWAM ON A HILL

      Reading and Writing in the Contact Zone

      six / CARTOGRAPHIC DISSONANCE

      Between Narrative Geographies in Douglas Glover’s Elle

      CONCLUSION

      Reforming Northeastern Literary Relations

      Notes

      Bibliography

      Index

      List of Figures

      Figure 1 / A Map of the Great River St. John & Waters

      Figures 2 to 5 / Thank-you address written on birchbark in English and Maliseet

      Figure 6 / First Church of Deerfield

      Figure 7 / Model wigwam from Tobique

      Figure 8 / Dish with One Spoon wampum belt

      Figure 9 / Louis Rémy Mignot, Niagara

      Figure 10 / A Chart of Some of the Principal Islands in Passamaquoddy Bay

      Figure 11 / Wabanaki wampum belts

      Figure 12 / Plan of the Canoose Indian Reserve

      Figures 13 and 14 / Newfoundland to Boston integrated rail line

      Preface

      Engaging in Literary Diplomacy, or Speaking from a Clear Subject Position

      I AM A SETTLER CANADIAN ANGLOPHONE WOMAN who was born in what my family calls Fredericton, New Brunswick, a city on the Wolastoq River, which flows through the heart of unceded Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) territory. Thanks in part to extensive genealogical work done by my grandmother, the late Lillie-Mae Corey, I can trace my North American roots to the Anglo-Protestant people of what my maternal ancestors called Plymouth Colony and the Mayflower

      Acknowledgements

      MANY PEOPLE DESERVE RECOGNITION for the encouragement and insight they lent to this project at various times over the last six years. By introducing me to early American and Indigenous literatures, Drew Lopenzina put me on this path, fundamentally changing the way I think about Canada, Atlantic Canada, and the northeast. April Shemak supported me through my own messy experience of cartographic dissonance, which played out in what was otherwise perhaps the most unsuitable environment possible: the small east-Texas prison town of Huntsville.

      Jennifer Andrews humoured and supported me from the beginning of our relationship, encouraging me to pursue my interests with impunity while simultaneously (and sagely) advising me to use fewer soil metaphors in my grant proposals. Thank you, Jen, for always looking out for me and for showing me that it is possible to balance this kind of all-consuming work with a robust family life. Elizabeth Mancke has made innumerable contributions to everything I have published since meeting her; without our weekly coffee dates at the library, this book would not be near finished. Elizabeth, thank you for showing me how to map ideas out loud and on paper. Your brilliance, kindness, and generosity make the scholars around you immeasurably better, and I aspire to someday mentor and support others in a similar way.

      Stephen Schryer has been an unflagging source of advice and support over the past four years, and many of his responses to my work (especially his ideas about John Locke) have made their way into my thought and this book. Stephen, thank you for being there for me, but I cannot believe that I still haven’t met Rowan. Andrea Bear Nicholas sat with me for the better part of an afternoon shortly after my arrival at UNB in 2011, and I have always appreciated the materials, information, and direction that she provided me. Lisa Brooks came onboard this project relatively late in the game as my external examiner, but her invaluable notes have shaped and/or informed many sections of this book, as well as my thoughts on the northeast more generally. Lisa’s own work has been a source of continuous inspiration and education for me, and the strength of my own scholarship seems to correlate more or less directly with my yet incomplete understanding of The Common Pot. Thank you, Lisa, for producing a book that so many return to again and again.

      Many others have provided support and encouragement at key moments. In no particular order, love and thanks go to Marilyn and Elliott Gayle, Charles and Evy Bryant, Walter and Pearl Steeves, my delightful penpal Britt Lauton, the lovely Faye Bellavance, Colin and Jordan Bryant, Chris and Audrey Trevino, Isaac and Madeline, Carolyn and Gene, Grampy Patricia, the Faietas, the Sadlers, Rick and Sue Taylor, Jim and Sharon Murray, Leon and Annie Carter, Randall Martin, Mihku Paul (who helpfully identified every species in the garden I inherited), Edie Snook, Michael Demson, Bill Bridges, Vicky Simpson, Verlé Harrop, David Creelman, Bill Parenteau, Travis Wysote (who generously shared unpublished work with me), Ann Compton, Richard Kemick, Douglas Glover, John Ball, Sara Dunton, Svetlana Ehtee, Claire and Rob, Lisa Jodoin (who introduced me to Joséphine Bacon’s poems), Ashlee Joyce, Tom Swanky (who traded Facebook messages with me about invisible walls), Theresa Keenan, Janet Noiles, the board of trustees at the Saint John Free Public Library, and Amy, Lena, and Harper Stewart.

      Siobhan McMenemy championed this project at WLU Press, protecting me from what are surely all of the most stressful elements involved in the production of a book. Thanks are also due to Rob Kohlmeier, who graciously guided this book through to print. The anonymous readers provided excellent and extensive feedback from the perspectives of multiple fields of expertise, strengthening the interdisciplinary nature of this work immeasurably. Please let me know who you are someday so that I can buy you lunch.

      Thanks are also due to Brian Carpenter at the American Philosophical Society; the staff of the Woodland Cultural Centre; Nancy Fay at Library and Archives Canada; Yvonne Thomas at the Jake Thomas Learning Centre; Monica Park at the Brooklyn Museum; John Fadden at the Six Nations Indian Museum; Erin Gurski and Vincent Lafond at the Canadian Museum of History; Jennifer Longon at the New Brunswick Museum Archives; David Ross, Kathy Allaby, and Cora Higgins at the Hans W. Klohn Commons; Cheryl Savageau; and to the incredibly patient, responsive, and accommodating Darren Bonaparte, creator of The Wampum Chronicles, an invaluable resource.

      The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council generously floated my physical existence during three crucial years of this project. Sections from this book were presented at conferences, including the Irish Association for American Studies/British Association for American Studies meeting in Belfast, the American Studies Association meeting in Toronto, the Modern Language Association meeting in Chicago, the Culture and the Canada–US Border meeting in Sault Ste. Marie, and the New England American Studies Association meeting in Plymouth. Thanks to all of my co-panelists and to our audiences. Three chapters from this study have appeared (in modified forms) in journals: Chapters 1, 3, and 6 appeared in University of Toronto Quarterly, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and Canadian Literature, respectively, and I owe thanks to the editors and anonymous readers who contributed to the development of these pieces. At each juncture, I have deeply appreciated any and all feedback and interest in my work.

      My parents, Brian and Gail Steeves, have been excited and supportive of this project (and of me) for as long as it (and I) has (have) existed. Extra-special love and thanks go to them for their tireless help with the many moves and crises (deadlines, back injuries, car accidents, facial paralyses, etc.) that have arisen in my life over the course of the past few years.

      INTRODUCTION

      The Homing Place

      Before our People could write, there was a visual language that was shared and understood by neighboring tribes and those who participated in intermarriage or trade.

      —JEANNE MORNINGSTAR KENT, The Visual Language of Wabanaki Art

      Colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverse logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts it, disfigures and destroys it.

      —FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth

      We know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on.

      —VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthouse

      THE YEAR-ROUND INHABITANTS of the Wolastoq watershed ( Figure 1 ) are by now well acquainted with the phenomenon of seasonal flooding, but comparably few are aware of a related transfigurative process that is performed by nature each spring. ¹ Throughout the months of April and May, as the winter snows melt and the river waters swell, alluvial soil deposits are pared from banks, bends, and islands by accelerated currents only to be washed ashore perpetually downstream. This natural process has, over time, changed the region’s geography—it has physically altered the course of the river through the land. And though this slow but continuous system of land redistribution is now mostly ignored or forgotten by the region’s human population, it once inspired a minor crisis among newly settled Loyalist landowners; as Peter Fisher noted in his 1825 history of New Brunswick, it created a situation where, depending on one’s position relative to the river’s bends and islands, a man may have a growing estate, or he may see his land diminishing from year to year without the power to prevent it. ² In other words, despite their best efforts to acquire and secure property under the natural authority of English law, Loyalist Settlers remained subject to the land’s innate indifference to their rigidly defined cultural conceptions of space and ownership. ³

      This specific conception of personal property—the identification of the land as an inanimate entity that exists to be controlled, defined, and competitively distributed for profit by and among human beings—is a key component of the cultural vision that has shaped the policies and behaviours of non-Indigenous peoples since their first arrival in what some now call North America. In The Sand County Almanac (1949), a landmark work of environmental ethics, the US ecologist Aldo Leopold used Homer’s The Odyssey to model how Western perceptions of property have changed across time.⁴ Referring to a gruesome passage from the epic poem in which Odysseus hangs a dozen of his slave-girls after returning home from Troy, Leopold notes that this hanging involved no question of propriety, for the girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong.⁵ When Western readers find this scene problematic, they are demonstrating the degree to which, over time, their collective or agreed upon ethical structure has been extended in such a way as to preclude their ownership of other human beings. Today, negative reactions to Odysseus’s violence are rooted in the fact that most Western peoples no longer conceive of humans as literal units of property to be bought and sold. Importantly, however, and as Leopold goes on to argue, the same cultural imaginary that now takes offence at Odysseus’s brutality towards his slaves contains as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’s slave-girls, is still property.⁶ And for as long as the land, the seas, and the non-humans who inhabit these spheres are imagined only as potential or actual units of human property, as opposed to fully animate and autonomous beings, Western peoples will continue to owe the physical world nothing—neither their collective goodwill, nor their sincere consideration, nor their respect. The world will remain theirs to define, exploit, or ignore as they see fit.

      Figure 1 / A Map of the Great River St. John & Waters, (the first ever published) from the Bay of Fundy, up to St. Anns or Frederick’s Town; being little Known by White People, until 1783: Settled by the American Loyalists, then part of Nova Scotia, now called New Brunswick, from an Actual Survey, made in the years 1784, 85, 86, and 87, by Robert Campbell, surveyor. Capt. of the 40th Company of St John’s Loyalists. Courtesy of Neele Sculp. Image courtesy of Library and Archives Canada

      An analogous relational principle holds true when populations view their local environments, or place, as a kind of intellectual property, and in the Atlantic region of Canada, as elsewhere in the colonized world, alphabetic literature has long enabled a dominant Settler populace to mythologize and canonize its own chosen relationship to place.⁷ Since the 1920s, this relationship has been continuously defined and consolidated in east coast writing through what the Canadian literary historian Gwendolyn Davies refers to as the motif of the home place, which emerged in Maritime poetry and prose as a symbol of cultural continuity and psychological identification that could be shored up by groups or individuals in the face of social fragmentation, outmigration, and a continuing hardscrabble economy.⁸ Through the shifting idea of the home place, non-Indigenous Maritime writers and readers have articulated, revised, and ultimately controlled their relationships to the places they inhabit, effectively and continuously claiming and imagining this region, to which they are relative newcomers, as their own intellectual property. Basing her argument on an established canon of Atlantic Canadian writing, Davies argues that for the writer of literature, articulating the nature of Maritime identity is a nebulous and elusive process. Being a Maritimer is something felt in the blood and in the bone. It is knowing, as fiction writer Alistair MacLeod puts it in the title of his first book, the ‘salt’ in your ‘blood.’⁹ For some readers, and especially those versed in the primary theories and concerns of Indigenous Studies, such blood-and-bone claims to the easternmost lands of Canada reflect an insidious appropriation of what the Chickasaw scholar Chadwick Allen refers to as the blood/land/memory complex—the specific set of interrelated tropes and emblematic figures that have been strategically deployed by Indigenous writers across decades, working to counter and, potentially to subvert . . . [the] dominating discourses of the West.¹⁰ At the very least, MacLeod’s claim to genetic knowledge and belonging in the Atlantic region should be read as a troubling attempt to identify as indigenous in a land that has always belonged to someone else.

      But these ideas about how non-Indigenous writers of fiction and poetry have experienced and imagined being a Maritimer are also consistent with key principles from cultural geography—where human processes of place-making, or of imaginatively rendering distinct physical sites or regions comfortably home, are thought to be rooted in what the Canadian geographer Edward Relph calls the largely unselfconscious intentionality that defines places as centres of human existence. Exploring the links between constructions of human identity and the places where people live, Relph insists that

      there is for virtually everyone a deep association with and consciousness of the places where we were born and grew up, where we live now, or where we have had particularly moving experiences. This association seems to constitute a vital source of both individual and cultural identity and security.¹¹

      From this theory of place-identity, it follows that some feelings of spatial confidence and authority—specifically, the feeling of being not necessarily of or rightly Indigenous but rather confident in a given environment as vast as Canada or as small as Cape Breton Island—are conventional by-products of identity creation. As human beings live their lives and develop their subjective (and collective) selves, they cultivate corresponding feelings of belonging, comfort, and certainty. These feelings determine or give rise to a distinct sense of place, and over time, as people age, their feelings of spatial confidence and familiarity are increasingly reinforced through imagination and memory. Davies’s classic essay on Atlantic Canadian writing is beautifully evocative of the way in which such feelings are, for Settler peoples across North America, additionally reinforced through alphabetic literature—and especially through those cultural products that capture, from particular if ultimately limited perspectives, the supposedly shared experience of growing up in or spending time in a given regional environment. Such writings are powerful precisely because they tap into that collective blood-and-bone knowing of place and identity that Davies describes in her work.

      This basic theory of Settler place-identity provides a useful point of departure for the present study in that it emphasizes both the implicit value and the inevitable danger of national or regional literary canons—through which, as I have suggested, non-Indigenous peoples may come to imagine and remember the environments in which they live or spend time as a kind of intellectual (and sometimes even biological) property. To again invoke Aldo Leopold’s concept of land ethics, it is worth scrutinizing the degree to which such proprietary feelings work across majority populations to insulate powerful individuals and communities against any need to listen, compromise, or change. In this selective survey of northeastern North American literatures, I consider some of the specific presumptions of knowledge, origin, and belonging that Settler Canadians have used to suppress or displace Indigenous peoples and structures of meaning throughout the Atlantic region and beyond.¹² In each chapter, I argue that the many and multiple layers of inscription that comprise northeastern North America are culturally specific in both form and content—and that beneath the heavy inscriptions of dominance exists an animate cultural and geographic Indigenous region that is, in fact, and like the mighty river that once so frustrated New Brunswick’s Loyalist population, continuously inscribing itself.

      LONG BEFORE the arrival of Europeans in northeastern North America, Indigenous peoples practised systems of writing that had been developed across centuries for the purposes of historiography and tribal record-keeping.¹³ In 1652 the Jesuit priest and missionary Gabriel Druillettes reported, with some astonishment, sophisticated literary activity among his Abenaki catechism students, relating his observations in the following terms:

      Some would write their lessons after a fashion of their own, using a bit of charcoal for a pen, and a piece of bark instead of paper. Their characters were new, and so peculiar that one could not recognize or understand the writing of another,—that is to say, they used certain signs corresponding to their ideas; as it were, a local reminder, for recalling points and articles and maxims which they had retained. They carried away these papers with them, to study their lessons in the quiet of the night.¹⁴

      Centuries later, after reading this account from Druillettes, J.A. Maurault, author of Histoire des Abenakis, depuis 1605 (1866), compared the described system of writing to wiigwaasabak, which are traditional Ojibwe writings on birchbark. These scrolls were commonly inscribed by groups or individuals in the Great Lakes region to help people remember and convey narrations and to document world views and systems of knowledge for posterity.¹⁵ As Maurault himself noted,

      We have ourselves been witness of a similar fact among the Têtes-de-Boule Indians of the River St. Maurice where we had been missionaries during three years. We often saw during our instructions or explanations of the catechism that the Indians traced on pieces of bark, or other objects very singular hieroglyphs. These Indians afterward passed the larger part of the following night in studying what they had so written, and in teaching it to their children or their brothers. The rapidity with which they by this manner learnt their prayers was very astonishing.¹⁶

      Writing hundreds of years apart, these missionaries describe sophisticated ideographic writing systems through which Wabanaki and Anishnaabe peoples recorded their very singular or local impressions and receptions of Western stories and ideas—stories that could then be studied, shared, embellished, forgotten, burned, or even reinscribed by others through the use of other oral or material representations and ideographic forms.

      The very fact that Indigenous peoples across the northeast engaged the Jesuit teachings in this manner—recording, studying, and disseminating what they had been told by European newcomers among their friends and families—reflects their willingness to entertain and even assimilate new beliefs and traditions.¹⁷ As the early Americanist Drew Lopenzina contends,

      Natives did not immediately tune out the introduction of Christian rhetoric into their worlds. In many cases they attempted to incorporate it into the body of useful knowledge that was already inherent in their belief systems and practices. Unlike Europeans, their cognitive presence in the world was not anchored in doctrine or exclusivity.¹⁸

      In Lopenzina’s work, this distinction between world views reinforces a central premise: that for many early Indigenous peoples, literature was a tool for productively engaging knowledge and environment, whereas for the missionaries and colonists, literature functioned to contain space, limiting the dissemination of information across established cultural boundaries and thereby precluding epistemological transformation. To be sure, these Natives’ styles of intellectual engagement, in which each student took only what he or she personally deemed useful or interesting from a larger pool of established cultural knowledge, posed a significant problem for the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century missionaries, who were spiritually and financially invested in processes of wholesale Christian indoctrination across the colony of New France.¹⁹

      In their respective relations, written many decades apart, the French missionaries Chrestien LeClercq and Pierre Maillard each expressed frustration over the lack of interest shown by their Mi’gmaq students in memorizing and reciting the staid sequences

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