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175 TRANSLOCAL REPRESENTATION Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Nello “Tex” Vernon-Wood, and CanLit Julie Rak Like most Indians I have always been a great user of canvas rubbersoled shoes. When my old schoolmate, Chief Long Lance, and I were running with and against one another on the track team of the Carlisle Indian school, I remember how we used to kick out the rubber-soled shoes we had to wear in our athletics … little did I think then that Long Lance himself would some day design this shoe. —Attributed to Jim Thorpe, advertisement for the Chief Long Lance Shoe (1930)1 Does beat hell how complicated life’s getting up here in the hills. Take this pilgrim [tourist] wrangling, fr’instance. Used to be, a man could bust out for a month on the trail, with a few plugs of spitting tobacco, and his other socks. As long as you had plenty sow belly, beans, flour, tea and sugar, with the odd fish hook, that’s all anybody looked for. Try and get away with that now. We got to have grapefruit for breakfast , and a table to eat it off. —Nello “Tex” Vernon-Wood, “Us Winter Sports,” Sportsman (1931; rpt. in Mountain Masculinity, Vernon-Wood 71) Jim Thorpe, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance, Tex Wood: these are not names associated with any literary canon, and certainly not with CanLit, “the informal shorthand which establishes it [Canadian Literature] as an established formation” (Brydon 2). However, the content of these quotations illustrates 176 Julie Rak problems of identity and representation that are, or could be, central to considering what CanLit is and what scholars might make of it now. Although the subject of the first quotation is authenticity, little is authentic about the ad copy supposedly by Jim Thorpe, a mixed-race athlete and celebrity raised on the Sac and Fox Nation in the United States, including its endorsement of Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance as an American Indian man and a designer of shoes: technically, he was neither. The second quotation is about the transition of wilderness travel in the Canadian Rocky Mountains from a simpler (and manlier) style that relied on hunting and fishing as methods of provision, to a fancier mode of travel that is not “of” its place because it evokes capitalism’s ceaseless movement of goods and services to where they do not belong. Like the rich, urbanized travellers who consume it, grapefruit should never be found in the Rocky Mountains. Ironically, the writer of these observations is Nello Vernon-Wood, who represented himself as a former member of the English aristocracy and invented a persona as a working-class wilderness guide “Tex Wood,” a clever, well-read social commentator who understood what “real” life in the mountains was. In fact, Nello Vernon-Wood was Nello Wood, an illegitimate son of a working-class dressmaker from Birmingham, England. Just as Sylvester Long, a mixed-race North Carolina man with Native ancestry classed as “coloured,” successfully passed for a time as a full-blooded Blackfoot chief from a Blood reserve in Canada, so Vernon-Wood, a working-class man with a difficult past, was able to pass as another kind of working-class man: a tough mountain guide who was as authentic as the Canadian West he wrote about. When we look at the lives and writings of Long Lance and Vernon-Wood within the national frame of Canadian literature, neither fits. Both of these men depended on a certain idea of Canada to construct their identities, but Long Lance—a journalist who worked for Canadian newspapers—was born in and ended his life in the United States, and Wood—who lived the latter half of his life in Banff, Alberta—wrote about Canada for American magazines . When we look at either of them as writers, their status as journalists means that their writing does not qualify as literary, either. When we look at them as impostors—as many have at Grey Owl—somehow this invalidates them both as people and as writers (Braz 53–55). The position of imposture, however, relies on the very acceptance of secure identities that cannot travel. During the 1930s in Canada, Britain, and the United States, much of the reading public needed to believe that Canada was a frontier where Native people could exist as alternatives to industrialization and where it might be possible to rediscover some kind of primitive connections to that world; this helped create what today look...

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