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In this chapter, I wish to consider three works by non-Native writers, specifically those by Sheila Watson, Mordecai Richler, and Gail AndersonDargatz , who have shown themselves to be fascinated by specific incarnations of Indigenous tricksters. In so doing, I would like to examine some of the secondary criticism that has proliferated around their respective literary works, particularly the kind of attention that has been paid to their use of the trickster, as I also tentatively suggest some other possible critical avenues. When I began to recognize the sheer number of authors who have employed the trickster within the evolving corpus referred to as “Canadian literature”— or, to put it in terms set by Daniel David Moses, when I rather pathetically engaged in the game of “Spot the Trickster”—I began to wonder not only why these writers had made use of that figure, but also how faithful they remained to the original trickster’s characteristics and how closely allied their narratives were with the tales from which they had borrowed. I also wanted to know if I might track some changes temporally in terms of their respective approaches—why I finally selected Watson, Richler, and Anderson-Dargatz, who were largely writing in different decades—and of the criticism that has evolved in response. Part of the challenge for me, as a non-Native, Euro-Canadian female academic is that, quite simply, I do not have sufficient nationally specific knowledge about each of the Indigenous trickster figures under scrutiny—Coyote (Nlaka’pamux) and Raven (Haida)—nor about the specific contexts from which they emerged in order to determine the extent to which these writers have drifted from the original tales; future critical engagement, I hope, will 77 linda morra The Anti-Trickster in the Work of Sheila Watson, Mordecai Richler, and Gail Anderson-Dargatz 78 looking back to the “trickster moment” be able to redress this lack of information better than I am able to do here. I have read, for example, Robin Bringhurst and Bill Reid’s largely disparaged collection of stories, The Raven Steals the Light (1984), which informed Richler’s own book. It was therefore easy to determine how far Richler drifted from his original text (insofar as one can refer to Bringhurst and Reid’s text as an “appropriate source”) because there is so little about his use of the Raven that resembles its counterpart; in the case of both Watson and Anderson -Dargatz, it was considerably more difficult. The focus of my discussion below, limited by my lack of authority on the subject, will therefore focus on what the authors seem to be doing with the figures, as I also, at least, call attention to some of the currents in writing and in literary criticism. Although it would be a form of considerable hypocrisy on my part to impugn the writers whom I have chosen for their employment of the trickster when I am not altogether familiar with the Indigenous epistemologies from which these figures arise, and although there is no need to re-enter the “appropriation debate” of the 1980s, since so much has been said on the subject, I would still like to draw attention to what James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson refers to as “the anti-trickster” for the purposes of my discussion: Among colonized peoples, the cognitive legacy of colonization is labelled “Eurocentrism.” Among some Indigenous peoples, Eurocentrism is known as the twin of the trickster or imitator, or the “anti-trickster.” Similar to the trickster who emphasizes Aboriginal thought and dramatizes human behaviour in a world of flux, the “anti-trickster” appears in many guises and is the essence of paradoxical transformation. The “anti-trickster” presents a cognitive force of artificial European thought, a differentiated consciousness, ever changing in its creativity to justify the oppression and domination of contemporary Indigenous peoples and their spiritual guardians. (58) Henderson here highlights how the “anti-trickster” may take on similarities or likenesses to its original Indigenous counterpart, but ultimately embodies Eurocentric ideas. As Homi Bhabha observes of colonized subjects who “mimic” their colonizers, the colonizing subjects and the objects they render are, in this instance, the “almost the same, but not quite” (86) in a manner that belies that “differentiated consciousness.” So, in the case of Richler, Watson , and Anderson-Dargatz, it is not the colonized who mimic, but rather the colonizers; as Youngblood would suggest, these three authors are thus implicated in the process of creating anti-tricksters. When I began to consider...

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