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  • A Little History of Canada
  • Ian McKay
A Little History of Canada. H.V. Nelles. Don Mills: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 268, illus. $24.95

Viv Nelles's 268-page 'personal interpretation' of Canadian history aims to introduce visitors and Canadians (both new and old) to the main themes of the country's history. Entertaining, opinionated, accessible, learned, and concise, this book should also find readers among academic historians and their students.

Nelles succeeds partially in describing Canada as a dance of transformations. Despite the author's firm intention not to rewrite Donald Creighton or Arthur Lower, his colonies do become something like a nation, possessing 'the attributes of nationhood' (113). Canadians do become 'a people' (158). Only a few of these people – the genteel Laurier, the tragicomic King, and the philosophical Trudeau – are highlighted. Remarkably, for a book published in 2004, only two Canadian women, apart from the fictional Evangeline, make the cut.

Some regions barely signify. Upset at the very few words given the Hudson's Bay Company, critical Northern historians will not be mollified by two references to a body of water called 'Hudson's Bay' (36, 53). The Northwest Passage and Nunavut go unnoticed. At other times, one particular region – the lower Empire of the St Lawrence – fills in, confusingly, for the whole. Canada was only 'thoroughly French' (55) in 1740 if we accept this trope of synecdoche. Nelles draws attention to the Indian reserve set aside within the terms of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 as 'the first formal recognition in British law of Native rights' (70), yet, as Bill Wicken (Mi'kmaq Treaties on Trial) might remind him, this claim overlooks the 1726 treaty between the Mi'kmaq and the British, thrice-renegotiated down to 1761. Nelles will not find many takers, among Quebec historians who have attended to Gérard Bouchard, for his classically one-dimensional portrait of a 'passively self-absorbed' pre-1960 Quebec (219). [End Page 547]

Equally traditional are many of the volume's political and cultural values. Nelles clearly believes in the inevitability and goodness of Ottawa-defined federalism. So be it. Yet will his uninitiated readers really then understand the force of arguments from those from other positions? In this book, the word terror is applied to the usual suspects – the Iroquois, their French allies, much later the felquistes. We are repeatedly placed in the implied subject-position of the recipient of the wild violence of these terrible Others – glimpsed in their 'terrifying guerilla raids' (55), 'territorial aggressiveness' (55), 'terrorist attacks on civilians' (57), 'treachery, torture, and the massacre of civilians' (69), and later, apropos the felquistes, 'ruthless attacks,' 'fiendish cleverness,' and 'chilling' communications (222, 227, 228). It appears that such terror, treachery, and chilliness are rarely, if ever, associated with British colonizers or Canadian Dominion-builders. True, deporting the Acadians was a 'shameful policy,' but it was – says Nelles – 'brutally but not lethally administered' – although, in the next paragraph, we learn of the 'many lives' lost on the ships of the deportation (60). No emotive words attach themselves to the post-1885 hangings of Natives and Metis, or to the 'aggressive' and 'lethally administered' residential schools for Natives. I do not mean to imply that Nelles approves of everything done in the name of building the Dominion. I do mean to suggest that a reconnaissance of Canada that cannot see the federal government once do anything 'extreme' or 'violent' or 'aggressive' will not fully prepare newcomers to understand the country's major debates.

One of the most surprising omissions of this 'Canada for Beginners' was any substantial discussion – apart from two sentences on p. 256 – of cultural life. This is a Canada without Emily Carr, Alice Munro, Stompin' Tom, Radio-Canada, or Hockey Night in Canada. In the next edition, besides adjusting the emotional temperature of certain passages, Nelles might say more about the cultural figures who, more than the politicians, are noticed in the wider world. (He should also look again at his discussion of honours policy, which is error-ridden [181], clarify his confusing description of the Rebellion as enjoying no popular support in Upper Canada [107], and correct an unintentionally sanguinary...

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