Myth, Symbol, and Colonial Encounter

CONTENTS

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INTRODUCTION

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pp. 1-7

THIS book is unabashedly concerned with the well-trod issue of native-white relations in Canada. I admit that the theme may be at best fashionable, at worst overworked; yet it remains that a great deal has yet to be said on the subject. My hope is that there might be some constructive value in approaching the issue from what will no doubt appear to...

CHAPTER 1 – RELIGION AND THE COLONIAL WORLD

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pp. 9-25

THE Oxford Dictionary defines the word stranger as a "foreigner, a person in a country or town or company that he does not belong to." Rita Joe is Mi'kmaq, a poet born of a community of people who have lived in the region of Acadia² for at least five thousand years. ...

CHAPTER 2 – LET NOT THY LEFT HAND KNOW WHAT THY RIGHT HAND DOETH

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pp. 27-52

THE question of thinking and living in the New World began, for the British in Acadia, with a problem of continuity of place. Fundamentally, theirs was the problem of imagining continuity where there was none. Complicating the issue, however, was the fact that a great many British settlers were possessed of a sense of identity that had been in...

CHAPTER 3 – THE SHROUDING OF AMBIGUITY

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pp. 53-71

WHY is it that the British colonial language of inclusion (paternalistic and morally degrading though it was) was at such variance with colonial practice? The answer may lie in the British assertion of cultural purity that sought to create the colonial human being and Acadia itself, and that, paradoxically, constituted the foundation of calls for...

CHAPTER 4 – THE BOUNDARIES OF PURITY

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pp. 73-96

COLONIAL Acadia posed a different problematic for the Mi'kmaq. The influx of peoples of British ancestry that began around the turn of the eighteenth century threatened, first, the native community's claim to be rightfully at home on the land desired by colonials and, subsequently, its liberty to exist at all in Acadia. ...

CHAPTER 5 – AT HOME IN COLONIAL ACADIA

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pp. 97-107

WITHIN both British and Mi'kmaq communities, the need for a sense of rootedness and continuity of place fuelled religious imaginations, giving rise to religious symbols that confronted the necessities of place while accounting for particular experiences. The lives that revolved around these were encrusted with myths that articulated specific...

CONCLUSION – STILL STRANGERS

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pp. 109-115

I BEGAN this inquiry by noting that one or another form of alienation appears to have been the experience of all Acadia's peoples. The bulk of this work has concerned itself with a search for the historical roots of alienation, but it may not have constituted a historical analysis in any familiar sense of the term, since it has consciously focussed upon...

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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pp. 117-129

INDEX OF NAMES

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pp. 131-133