Settler Nationalism and the Foreign: The Representation of the Exogene in Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

The privilege afforded to anglophone whiteness in English Canada would seem to be at odds with the cliché that Canadian national identity is elusive. As a settler society, English Canada imagines itself relative to the others it defines within a complex process of indigenization. Critical attention has usually focused on the way the indigenous is represented to insist upon the seamless integration of settler cultures into their physical environments and to exonerate them from traumatic colonial histories. Viewing indigenization as a simultaneous abnegation of foreign traits, this essay investigates the signifying process as it relates to ‘exogeneity’, or foreign otherness, in English Canada. A comparative analysis of Ernest Thompson Seton’s Two Little Savages (1903) and Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005) reveals the way in which consistent representations of the foreign – the ‘exogene’ and the ‘exogenous’ – remain integral to the articulation of national identity in English Canada.