Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology (review)

Stephanie McKenzie’s Before the Country sets out to explore why romantic nationalism has remained a stronghold of literary criticism in Canada, despite the recognition that ‘Canada’s mythological past’ derived from a framework of ‘imported colonial beliefs’ and in spite of the spirit of nationalism that took hold in the late 1960s and 1970s, which fostered a new mythology about the Canadian nation-state. For McKenzie, romantic nationalism exists in tension with the cultural renaissance of this period, which generated an outburst of Aboriginal writing that charted an Aboriginal cultural and literary renaissance and gave rise to ‘a corpus of “postmodern,” mythological texts.’ McKenzie argues that this renaissance ‘storied the nation’ with new voices that ‘arrested the teleological trajectory of what could be called romantic nationalism’ by drawing attention to alternative ancestral pasts and the politics of cultural difference. ‘Collective acts of remembrance,’ McKenzie asserts, fuelled a spirit of ‘pan-Indianism’ that disclosed a ‘sense of confidence about the past and a certainty about tradition not found within the bulk of English-Canadian literature.’

McKenzie’s study proceeds in two directions, looking back to literary debates about Canada’s colonial past revived by Northrop Frye’s claims that Canadian literature could be understood as an autonomous field, and gesturing forward to shifting patterns of literary form ushered in by post-centenary Canadian writing that emphasized Canadian literature’s fictive processes. What underlies both of these periods, according to McKenzie, is the mythological figure of the indigene figured, paradoxically, both as the source of literary difference and as the reality on which national identity depends. Opening chapters discuss these themes through the work of critics such as Edward Hartley Dewart, Archibald Lampman, and Archibald MacMechan – critics who are assessed alongside writers such as Isabella Valency Crawford, with later chapters analyzing writing by Robert Kroetsch and Sky Lee. The focus here is the fleeting figure of the indigene. The central arguments concerned with this image occur in chapter 3, which, on the one hand, undertakes a survey of Aboriginal writing that came to attention in the 1960s and 1970s, with a particular focus on the poetry of Chief Dan George, and on the other, argues that the characterization of this literature as ‘protest writing’ does it a disservice because the idea of protest ignores the epic qualities and cultural heroes introduced during this period. McKenzie proposes instead that this writing be considered as ‘wisdom literature, guided by gentle instruction and honed aesthetics.’

It would be a mistake to assume that this book is about Aboriginal literature or the field of study that constitutes itself under this name. The focus is too wide-ranging in its comparison of distinct literary fields, too vague in its analysis of Aboriginal writing, and too survey-style in its engagement with literary criticism. It offers little by way of analysis of Aboriginal literature’s critical terms, and fails to explain its conceptual focus. One wonders why ‘romantic nationalism’ is the central concept at stake here, or how Aboriginal writing in Canada may be compared to writing from other national locations (Yugoslavia, Australia, and England, for example). The theory of reading is also too speculative in its treatment of Aboriginal writing and political activism, proposing as it does the puzzling claim that Aboriginal authors withheld their stories from the Canadian public because their communities were subjected to ‘assimilationist policies,’ or that Aboriginal authors decided to publish in order to ‘formally acknowledge’ that ‘settlers were here to stay.’ The important insights and theoretical legacies of the appropriation of voice debates are absent here, leading to speculation and stream-of-consciousness analysis. What emerges instead of a focus on Aboriginal literature and criticism is the critical paradigm of ‘romancing the indigene,’ a paradigm that seeks to fuse the ideas of difference and otherness represented by the literary field to an idea of culture that is alien and other. It is a marking of strangeness and wonder that Eli Mandel warned against in ‘Imagining Natives’ as...