Bloodsucking Colonizers and the Undead Anishinabe: History, Cultural Continuity, and Identity in Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer

IN THE NIGHT WANDERER: A NATIVE GOTHIC NOVEL, Drew Hayden Taylor uses the genre of young adult vampire novel to explore the ways in which different practices and understandings of history shape both national and personal identities. The novel has two intersecting protagonists: Pierre L’Errant and Tiffany Hunter. L’Errant is a centuries-old vampire who was born as Owl, an Anishinabe (Ojibwa). He is taken from his home by Europeans at a moment of first contact and transformed into a vampire in France just before he dies from measles. Centuries later Pierre returns to his home community to finally end his life, and meets Tiffany, an adolescent Anishinabekwe who is attempting to come to terms with her identity and her culture in the twenty-first century. Pierre/Owl simultaneously represents a link to the precolonial past—as the only living Anishinabe person to remember life before Europeans—and the ways in which colonial history has ossified Indigenous cultures, since he is an undead and unchanging vampire. Whereas Pierre illustrates the complexities of competing historical narratives, Tiffany is a reluctant consumer of history, a young person whose present is shaped not only by the past but also by how settler society constructs that past. Through an investigation of Pierre and Tiffany we will demonstrate not only that a colonial project lies at the heart of the writing and teaching of Canadian history, but also that history can be reclaimed by transforming its practice to include Indigenous voices and Indigenous understandings of the content and purpose of history.¹ Through The Night Wanderer, Taylor acknowledges academic history’s colonial legacies, but draws on Anishinabe historical practice as an act of decolonization.

Using a novel to explore history is appropriate from an Anishinabe perspective, in which story is “a kind of methodology or center point” that provides “theoretical frameworks guiding questions in law, history, anthropology, environmental studies, and other fields.”² Indeed, much Indigenous history is presented in the form of story. For example, Anishinabe historian Basil Johnston argues against an understanding of Indigenous people based on physical artifacts, saying that “unless scholars and writers know the literature of the peoples that they are studying or writing about they cannot provide what their students and readers are seeking,” which he sees as a relevant understanding of Indigenous people.³ Similarly, Mohawk writer Beth Brant argues that “as a poet, rather than a historian,” she has “a freedom of sorts to explore and imagine” the truths about the historical figures of Pocahontas and Nancy Ward.⁴ More recently, Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada’s Past attempts “to step out of preconceived notions of not only what constitutes our history but how our history is constituted” by having Indigenous authors—including Taylor—tell fictional stories about historical events in Canada’s history; the collection thus provides “a new vantage point not just on how First Nations perceive their place in Canadian history but a different approach to recounting the past and making it come alive in the present.”⁵ As an Anishinabe creative writer, Drew Hayden Taylor has the freedom to question history in ways that are difficult for insiders to the historical discipline but appropriate to his own cultural context. Using the young adult novel as his genre is doubly appropriate, not only because the current popularity of young adult vampire novels enables him to reach an audience that might other wise be as disinclined as Tiffany to pick up a history book, but more important because adolescence is traditionally a time of identity formation and exploration. Taylor’s implied audience is, like Tiffany, developing the ideas and perceptions that will shape their understanding of themselves and the nation(s) they inhabit. Reading history through a young adult novel allows us to suggest ways of transforming how historians and teachers convey Canadian history, so that it foregrounds Indigenous histories, knowledges, world-views, and methodologies, and provides new possibilities of doing and knowing history for the next generation. First, we (Judith and Kristin...