First Drafts: Eyewitness Accounts from Canada's Past (review)

This book consists of 247 documents represented as among the most engaging 'eyewitness' accounts of events in Canada's history. Beginning with the Viking settlement of Vineland a millennium ago and ending with Roy MacGregor's National Post report of the Canadian men's team winning gold at the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002, the compilers offer a rich selection from the vast archives of the nation's past. The list of contributors includes the well-known - Jacques Cartier, Marie de l'Incarnation, Lord Durham, Nellie McClung, W.L. Mackenzie King - as well as the ordinary and sometimes anonymous observer with a keen eye for detail. Most of the excerpts make compelling reading and most, though not all, are brief enough to engage even the shortest attention span.

While it is not clear what inspired Professors Granatstein and Hillmer to undertake such an ambitious task, they have a model in the Faber Book of Reportage edited by John Carey (Boston 1987). Carey's book gives the compilers permission to publish the documents with little comment - at most there is a sentence or two to introduce each entry - and without footnotes. Since there is no dull-as-dust academic interface between author and reader, the documents are allowed, as they say, to speak for themselves. And speak they do, not only of the conditions that the 'eyewitnesses' describe but also of the template that structured the choice of document to include in such a volume.

Granatstein and Hillmer acknowledge in particular their debt to the Champlain series, Prentice Hall's Canadian Historical Document Series, and the National Press Club's Century of Reporting/Un Siècle de Reportage (1967), but not to more recent documentary collections that have been published as textbooks for introductory Canadian history courses. Whether they are loath to follow the torturous academic trail any further along the twentieth-century continuum or are simply unaware of the riches embodied in such collections as the Documents in Canadian Women's History series published by New Hogtown Press is difficult to say. What is clear is that, unlike the texts developed for the classroom, this volume is less driven by pedagogical outcomes than by narrative engagement. 'When we began this volume of reportage by Canadians and about Canada, we were looking for good, even eloquent writing,' the compilers inform us in the introduction. 'We ended with a preoccupation with immediacy.' They were also drawn to highly personal accounts, letting emotion prompt readers to turn the page. In this respect the compilers share the organizing principles that informed the cbc's Canada: A People's History. They also share with this series a preoccupation with military and political events and with central Canada.

Although the compilers include diaries and letters among their sources, they draw more heavily on published memoirs and reportage in the narrow journalistic sense. This reliance helps, in part, to explain the emphasis on the twentieth century. Fully two-thirds of the book covers events since 1900. The period from 1000 to 1763 is dispatched in twenty-one pages, and another fifty-one pages sews up Confederation. Meanwhile, the First World War and Second World War consume thirty-seven and fifty-five pages, respectively. Given this temporal bias, there is no opportunity to engage the accounts of such eloquent eighteenth-century observers as F.X. Charlevoix, Peter Kalm, Madame Bégone, or Simeon Perkins; nor are the journalists of the nineteenth century as well represented as they might be.

For my liking, the balance is off in other ways as well. Only thirty-three entries were written by women, plus at least one of the anonymous entries ('A Home Helper on an Alberta Ranch, 1911'). Women have long been steely-eyed observers of events and surely deserve better representation. So, too, do francophones. Three accounts are published in French - an anonymous...