Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story ed. by Gerald Lynch, Angela Arnold Robbeson (review)

292 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 him exceptional for a nineteenth-century North American. Through the Mackenzie Basin is based on the journal that Mair kept while serving as the English Secretary to the Half-breed Commission. The Ontario-born author of Tecumseh was a fervent Canadian nationalist, a passion B some might even say fanaticism B which led him to clash with Louis Riel and the Métis during the Red River Resistance of 1869B70. Still, this >apostle= of Euro-Canadian expansion shows a remarkable willingness to listen to Aboriginal voices. As he cites the objections by a local leader named Keenooshayo to the Commissioner=s claim that the >Queen owns the country= and thus that both Natives and newcomers are co-citizens: >You say we are brothers. I cannot understand how we are so. I live differently from you. I can only understand that Indians will benefit in a very small degree from your offer.= Throughout the text, Mair also reveals an acute awareness of the history of the land he is crossing, usually providing both the English and Aboriginal names of places. As he says of the Lesser Slave River, >in the classic Cree its name is Iyaghchi Eenu Sepe, or the River of the Blackfeet, literally the ARiver of the Strange People.@= Indeed, what Mair=s writings demonstrate is that he is a rather complex individual. While he may be an >apologist for the British Empire,= he also entertains profound reservations about white settlement, which he fears will almost certainly defile what he considers >a real Utopia.= This anxiety is never more evident than in his taxonomic essay >The American Bison= and his poem >The Last Bison= B not >The Last Buffalo,= as Leonard writes. The new edition of Through the Mackenzie Basin is a welcome addition to early Prairie literature. In addition to Mair=s work, it includes the complete texts of Treaty Number 8 and several other official documents, a map of the territory ceded under the treaty, and a copy of J.L. Coté=s French-language poem about the 1899 expedition B unfortunately, there is no English translation. Nevertheless, what it also underscores, particularly in light of the introductions by Leonard and Calliou, is the need for a fresh reading of Mair, an interpretation that will not evade the author=s politics but will focus less on who he is than on what he writes. (ALBERT BRAZ) Gerald Lynch and Angela Arnold Robbeson, editors. Dominant Impressions: Essays on the Canadian Short Story University of Ottawa Press 1999. vi, 168. $22.00 This is the twenty-second volume of papers presented at the University of Ottawa=s annual conference called Reappraisals: Canadian Writers. Begun (in 1973) at a time when Canadian literature had recently become generally established as a field of study, the conference was intended as an opportunity to reconsider writers, such as Grove, Klein, Lampman, and Pratt, who were already part of the established canon. As the study of Canadian HUMANITIES 293 literature evolved, the conference turned to broader subjects such as literary theory, Canadian-American literary relationships, and (now) the short story. Reflecting this change, fewer than half of the essays in this present volume focus on individual writers: the rest approach their subject in terms of movements, genres, and literary history. Among these, D.M.R. Bentley=s discussion of Symboliste elements in late nineteenth-century Canadian stories (he focuses on Gilbert Parker, Charles G.D. Roberts, and Duncan Campbell Scott) is valuable literary history of the kind we=ve come to expect from Bentley: he usefully contextualizes the transition into modernism in Canada and suggests the way writers at the beginning of the twentieth century expected their work to be read. James Doyle=s treatment of 1930s social realism in Canada is also a work of careful scholarship, though (perhaps inevitably) less exciting in that its conclusions are negative: there wasn=t as much social realism in Canada as has been thought. Jean Stringam=s survey of nineteenth-century short stories for young adults proves thought-provoking partly because of the surprising differences that show up between American and Canadian practices: a >gentry class orientation= in the American examples...