Memory Against History: Figuring the Past in Cloud of Bone

In Tasmanian writer richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide (1996) there is fleeting mention of an Aboriginal woman named Lallah. Friend to the contemporary indigenous protagonist’s ancestor, Black Pearl, Lallah rates no more than a sentence. In a novel so focused on Tasmania’s brutal past, and the way that past continues to derail the present, the brevity of the reference to Truganini is striking, as is the obscuring of her identity.¹ Repeatedly constructed as “last of her race” in Australian settlerculture narratives ranging from Alpha Crucis’s “Trucanini’s Dirge” (1876) to Midnight Oil’s popular song “Truganini” (1993), Death of a River Guide resituates the figure as one among many Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestors. Such a move respects the campaign waged by the indigenous community since the 1970s against the persistent myth that Truganini’s death in 1876 marked her people’s extinction.

Notwithstanding a chorus of critical disapproval,² literary renditions of a similar history of dispossession in another former British settler-invader colony still take a very different approach to Richard Flanagan’s. Bernice Morgan’s Cloud of Bone, on which this paper focuses, is one of the latest in a long succession of texts in a problematic vein. Like Truganini, Shanawdithit, who died in 1829 in St John’s, became and, to a much greater extent, remains emblematic of the supposed disappearance of indigenous people from Newfoundland. The cultural weight given to Shanawdithit’s death has historically proven a particular problem for the Mi’kmaq population on the island.³ The obsession with her designation as “last” has also, arguably, caused a lack of interest in archaeological research suggesting the Beothuk may have been part of the Innu nation.⁴ As Robin McGrath wryly notes “Should [Innu leader] Elizabeth Penashue turn out to be first-cousin to Shanawdithit, Newfoundlanders are going to have a hard time ignoring her vociferous protest against the Lower Churchill Development project” (90).

Appraising depictions of Shanawdithit and the Beothuk, Terry Goldie bluntly claims that Newfoundlanders believe “We had natives. We killed them off. Now we are natives” (157). Historical fictions by Newfoundland writers published since the 1980s repeatedly express white guilt about the fate of the Beothuk but also persist in highlighting Shanawdithit’s status as “last” of the ndigenes. In addition, these texts assume her perspective on the world is accessible to contemporary white Newfoundlanders and, moreover, that her sympathies lie with them. As Mary Dalton suggests, writing taking the Beothuk as its subject is characterized by “the repetition of certain inter-related tropes” (135) to the exclusion of the indigenes. In Kevin Major’s Blood Red Ochre (1984), Shanawdithit helps a troubled adolescent come to terms with his situation. At the conclusion of Wayne Johnston’s epic Colony of Unrequited Dreams (1998), the central female character, Fielding, draws comfort from likening herself to the Beothuk woman. In Kate Story’s locally published Blasted (2008), the misfit Ruby is obsessed with her. Contemporary fiction from Newfoundland repeatedly gives Shanawdithit the role Rayna Green identifies as typical for Indian women in American national mythologies. In “The Pocahontas Perplex,” Green suggests Native women are frequently depicted as sympathetic characters who help and heal white people. This role requires, however, that “they keep their exotic distance or die” (710) and so do not ultimately threaten white dominion.

In the context of these persistent patterns of representation, Michael Crummey’s historical fiction River Thieves (2001) has been one of the few to attempt innovations. Crummey’s departures include introducing Mi’kmaq characters into the text (and depicting the union between an Irish settler and a Mi’kmaq healer as resulting in an ongoing generational line) and, most strikingly, refraining from interpolating Beothuk perspectives. In an interview on his publisher’s website, Crummey states:

I felt it would be wrong to write a novel about the Beothuk— to write as if we know more about them than we do, or to try to given them a voice that is absent from the historical record. Their absence, to my mind, is the point...