Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen (review)

In the late 1880s two sisters from rural Nova Scotia travelled west on the newly completed Canadian Pacific Railway. Their destination was the interior of British Columbia, where they intended to teach school for three years, and then return home. Their sojourn, however, lasted much longer than they initially anticipated. In fact, one sister remained there for the bulk of her life while the other travelled between BC and 'home' for fifteen years. At first glance, theirs might seem an unexceptional tale, one like countless others that unfolded in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Yet, as Jean Barman demonstrates in this rich and fascinating study, the journey these two young women undertook, their experiences, and their endeavours on the frontier were absolutely central to the formation and development of the modern Canadian nation.

In Sojourning Sisters: The Lives and Letters of Jessie and Annie McQueen, Barman sets out both to tell the story of these two women, and to show how that story intersects with the social, economic, and political history of their times. She grounds Jessie and Annie's biography in the more than five hundred letters they either wrote to or received from each other and other family members, together with a larger collection of missives exchanged between those left back home. Skilfully interweaving the personal with the political, Barman augments this rich resource with meticulous and exhaustive research, and bases her analysis in a sensitive and insightful reading of current historical scholarship. The result is a compelling portrait of the sisters themselves and of turn-of-the-century Canada.

Extending over the lifetimes of the two women, the correspondence reveals the details of daily life on the BC frontier, and with that, some unique insights into Canadian history. Most accounts written by non-native newcomers to early British Columbian frontier settlements were written in old age, Barman notes, and have tended to obscure and reshape events to suit later sensibilities. In contrast, Jessie and Annie's letters, written 'on the spot' by observant women long accustomed to recording experiences for family back home, reflect the world in which the two lived with unusual immediacy and candour.

The McQueen sisters, says Barman, brought to British Columbia a taken-for-granted set of values, ideas, and patterns of life. Raised according to a strict Scots Presbyterian ethic that framed the lives of many Nova Scotians, they both exemplified that ethic and actively worked to inculcate it in others through the everyday practices of teaching school, attending church, and interacting in their communities. Shared traditions, language, beliefs, stories, and education: all these are fundamental components of nation building, says Barman. So by embodying, enacting, and communicating, through everyday living, the practices and values of home, Jessie, Annie, and thousands of others like them cultivated a sense of nation and helped to transform British Columbia into a modern urban entity. Their very ordinariness was the key to their effectiveness as nation builders and as agents of social change.

Indeed, Barman argues, women like the McQueen sisters were absolutely central to developing the idea and reality of Canada. Through their domestic occupations, particularly teaching and homesteading, Jessie and Annie engaged in internal colonialism simply by replicating, as much as possible, Nova Scotian practices and values. But as Barman points out, the 'imagined community' they sought to recreate was not an inclusive one. Fundamentally divided along lines of race and gender, Jessie and Annie's society was fundamentally colonized and colonizing. Thus while the two sisters differed in their responses to 'otherness,' their letters demonstrate that they, like many others in the dominant community, accepted without much question the prevailing assumptions regarding the superiority of the Anglo-Canadian way of life over that of the Asian, First Nations, and 'hybrid' peoples whom they encountered on the frontier.

All in all, Sojourning Sisters is well written and thought provoking. It offers new insights into state formation, the nature of colonialism, and the...