Massacre Street by Paul Zits (review)

Paul Zits’s remarkable debut volume of poetry concerns the Frog Lake Massacre, which occurred during the Northwest Rebellion of 1885 – an event of crucial importance in Canadian history. The present-day master narrative of the event holds that several Cree, impelled by a desperate food situation and maltreatment by the Canadian government, took hostage a number of settlers, killing nine. After the uprising was quelled by the Canadian government, six of the Cree warriors were hanged in what John Chaput has referred to as ‘the largest mass execution in Canadian history’, and Cree chief Big Bear was sentenced to three years in prison for treason, despite testimony of his opposition to the attack. The book’s title references the name of a road located near Fort Pitt that archaeologists believe to be the site of the bloodshed.

Massacre Street is the poet’s attempt to display the complex history of the events and their aftermath. Instead of a neat narrative that aims to structure the occurrences chronologically or by causality, his work mirrors the chaos of the historical events it describes. Positioning himself in the tradition of Walter Benjamin, whom he references in the epigraph (‘Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show it’), Zits employs a collage approach that merges poems with archival records. Historical records include unaltered, full-page photographs of archival material from the Glenbow Archives, as well as appropriated primary sources. The latter include a text entitled ‘And the official twenty-three words of Big Bear leftover from his trial (translated from Cree)’, which lists 23 words from his defence before court in alphabetical order, and a transcribed oral history interview with Sam Pritchard, in which he speaks about his memories of the Frog Lake Massacre and which can only be understood with the help of footnotes that reveal the questions of the interviewer. Zits’s poems set the tone for the volume – one of pondering and eeriness that brings the landscape, artefacts and atmosphere of the locale to life – and give voice to various participants in the historical events, both Indigenous and European. Perhaps most interestingly, they include several self-reflections of the poet on his role as a (hi)story-teller. Zits seems to position himself as a collector rather than a composer and alludes in several instances to the felt responsibility to make his work available to the readership: ‘I am to write a book / I never undertook to compose / I look upon the writing of these pages / I have but caught a glimpse through its folds / I might not have the story to tell that you / kind reader, will find in this short work’ (from ‘A most unmelodious’, p. 39).

This experimental volume brilliantly merges literature with history and draws attention to the similarities these disciplines share, given that historiography is based on the construction of narratives – this, at least, seems to be the author’s position when he entitles his bibliography of historiographical works and primary sources from which he draws ‘literary sources’ (p. 105). This work will be of interest to scholars of literature and history alike, and it has the potential to spark and enrich lively debates on narrative techniques, perspectivity, the reliability of sources, the meaning of the Northwest Rebellion and the role of Indigenous–settler relations in national narratives.