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

Before the Country is the story of the adaptability, malleability, and persistence of Canadian romantic nationalist narratives even in the face of significant challenges both from colonized Aboriginal peoples and from colonial descendants disenchanted with the implications of those narratives. Drawing on a wide swath of dominant critical voices from Canadian literary scholarship—of whom Northrup Frye is a key figure in the study—McKenzie depicts Canadian romantic nationalism as a narrative response to a persistent perceived lack of a national-cultural identity, a concerted and immensely complicated effort to free Canada from its colonial history and intellectual dependency on Europe and the United States. McKenzie demonstrates how the effacing impulses of romantic nationalism, rooted in what she terms the "fallacious myth" of an empty, unpopulated land without history, ironically engendered among its adherents consistent and recurrent anxieties over place, purpose, and political and cultural autonomy that were firmly in place as the 1967 centenary of Canadian confederation approached. It is within this context of what Frye characterized as Canada's long-awaited "Day of Atonement"—a ritualized event he believed would finally free Canada from its "[suspense] in colonial traditions" (qtd. in McKenzie 30)—that Aboriginal voices emerging from the Red Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s challenged the authority and legitimacy of Canada's nationalist narrative, "arresting" its teleological development and bringing its inherent tensions and anxieties into sharp relief.

Although, following Kenneth Lincoln, McKenzie refers to this perceived increase of Aboriginal intellectual production as a literary and cultural renaissance, she qualifies the term as implying less of a historical absence of Aboriginal writing than a long "silence" resulting from years of institutional marginalization and aggressively assimilationist policies; less an intellectual "reawakening" of Native communities than a "rediscovery" of Native intellectualism on the part of non-Aboriginal publishers, intellectuals, and readers. Combined with the formation of intertribal political alliances, the assertion of Aboriginal land claims and challenges to court precedent, and widespread public protests and political activism, the Aboriginal challenge forced many Canadians not only to come to terms with their colonial legacy but also to revise the narrative paradigms that had long served to deny, if not erase, colonial violence. Revision is not renunciation, however, and McKenzie spends the second half of the book examining the various ways in which the voices, forms, and conventions of the Native Renaissance were appropriated, reified, and repurposed by non-Aboriginal writers into "a morality play that fit most neatly into a preconceived story" serving a "pre-existing agenda"—Canada's escape from history through myth (53, 45).

Before McKenzie can demonstrate how and to what purposes Native aesthetics were deployed, she first engages in an extended attempt—just under sixty pages—to identify what exactly defines an "Aboriginal aesthetics." McKenzie rejects reductive interpretations of Aboriginal writing as "protest literature," pointing to numerous instances of community affirmation, cultural continuity, and security of self, identity, and place that also characterizes much of the writing of the period, what Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has identified as an aesthetics of affirmation and hope and what Daniel Heath Justice has termed "art for life's sake." Further, McKenzie notes the concern by Native writers to establish "longevity" and "continuity" in their narratives with respect to sacred and historical pasts, homelands, languages, and systems of belief—what Tom Holm and others have identified as components of Indigenous peoplehood.

Rather than pursuing what an aesthetics of peoplehood might look like, however, McKenzie falls back on conventional critical tropes, engaging in extended discussions about Native relationships to land, conceptualizations of time and space, the influence of orality, narrative authority and polyvocality, ceremonial and ritual aspects of language, and aesthetic hybridity, to name a few. In doing so, McKenzie fails to consider some of the most compelling contemporary challenges and reconceptualizations of these interpretive modes in the field. The text could have greatly benefited, for instance, by taking into account Craig Womack's challenge to the intellectual and...