Literary Land Claims: The "Indian Land Question" from Pontiac's War to Attawapiskat by Margery Fee (review)

At the open of Literary Land Claim: The "Indian Land Question" from Pontiac's War to Attawapiskat, Margery Fee asks "[H]ow does literature claim land?" (1) and postulates that a national literary narrative constitutes Canadian nationalism. Land is claimed, she writes, through historical narratives that function as evidence for the existence of a nation and formulations of national character; moreover, such land is settled through labour—including the labour of storytelling. In framing her argument, Fee draws on thinkers ranging from Northrop Frye and John Locke to Margaret Atwood and Thomas King. She reads the mythos of terra nullius¹ as making space for "heroic explorers . . . [to] claim land imaginatively rather than literally" (6), in part through the vanishing Indian stereotype.² "The heroic author," she argues, "takes over from the vanishing Indians to form a new [I]ndigenous mythology for the newcomers, who thus become [I]ndigenous themselves" (6). Fee reads terra nullius as a catalyst that allowed the canon of Canadian literature to form and then problematizes this formation by reading John Richardson (1796–1852), Louis Riel (1844–85), E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake (1861–1913), Archibald Belaney/Grey Owl (1888–1938), and Harry Robinson (1900–90) as (re)claiming land and literature through Indigenous rhetoric and decolonial storytelling.

As such, Fee encourages scholars, academics, writers, and those interested in decolonization and Indigeneity to further consider terra nullius and its various ramifications on bodies of Indigenous peoples and bodies of literature (which it may be apt to term filius nullius and fabula nullius, respectively). Fee's insightful readings of Grey Owl, Riel, and Johnson—writers whose claims to Indigeneity are complicated and at times problematic—as propagators of this decolonial and reclamational work encourage us to reflect on how we may decolonize the representation of Indigeneity and think of Indigenous identities and literatures as heterogeneous, complicated, inclusive, and intersectional.

Fee discusses Richardson's Wacousta and its sequel, The Canadian Brothers, in order to explore Richardson's use of gothic conventions. She suggests that we (re)read him not simply as a founder of Canadian literature and purveyor of savage Indigeneity but as someone who simultaneously "hoped that his writing would move Canadians to resume earlier practices of treating Indigenous people as equals under the British Crown" (44). Furthermore, Fee notes that Richardson's novels "not only describe the power of a curse, they also can be seen as laying one on those who settled Canada" (87; emphasis in original). She understands Richardson's texts as perpetuating savage stereotypes and asks us to register how Canadian cultural nationalism depends on North American settler colonialism and its relationship with Indigeneity.

Fee explores Riel's complicated identity and reads him as a visionary Métis political leader, a thinker of Indigenous sovereignty, and a man whose loyalty to the Crown sometimes aided settler colonialism. She critically analyses his two addresses during his trial for high treason in 1885 and argues that "Riel marks the limits of Canadian sovereignty itself, which explains why he lives on in Canadian discourse" (91). Her literary analysis of his speeches and documents reveal a contradictory Riel, who cannot be easily assimilated to Canadian nationalism. Riel's inconsistencies "ha[ve] been connected to the difficulties Canadians have found in producing a coherent national narrative," says Fee, reading Riel's oration through Taiaiake Alfred's notions of Indigenous theorization and Neal McLeod's notes on "Cree narrative memory" (115). Through Fee's readings we are asked to remember that incoherence within nationalism can stem from the inability to "agree on its primary defining events" (116). These sections offer valuable insight into our conceptualizations of genealogy and canonization and offer us alternative ways of thinking about story. As King reminds us, everything is story, and Indigenous storytelling allows us to reconsider the curation of our national history. Literature, like this country's treaties, is sustained...