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  • Aboriginality: The Literary Origins of British Columbia
  • Renée Hulan
Alan Twigg. Aboriginality: The Literary Origins of British Columbia. Vol. 2. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2005. 262 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $24.95 sc.

This overview of books by Aboriginal authors is the second volume by Alan Twigg on writing in British Columbia. In First Invaders: The Literary Origins of British Columbia, vol. 1 (2004), Twigg assembled early texts written about British Columbia; here, he sets out to introduce readers to the literary contribution of the Aboriginal people to literature in British Columbia. Alan Twigg is a well-known contributor to the literary community in British Columbia as the author of numerous books and founder of both BC [End Page 206] Bookworld and its public service website www.abcbookworld.com. In the foreword to Aboriginality, he expresses sincere appreciation and deep concern for the First Nations, as well as his intention to "disseminate useful information" to the public.

By bringing attention to the writing of Aboriginal people, Aboriginality accomplishes two important purposes. First, it highlights the work of individual authors and artists. Second, it identifies as authors — rather than as informants — those who have collaborated with non-Aboriginal writers. There are short essays on the major authors from the First Nations including Jeannette Armstrong, Annharte, Lee Maracle, Harry Robinson, and Eden Robinson, authors who are from other places but who have lived in British Columbia such as Howard Adams and Marilyn Dumont, as well as a number of authors whose work has been influential, though their connection to British Columbia may be slight. This selection has the effect of suggesting that "aboriginality" cannot be contained within geographical boundaries.

As Twigg notes in the foreword, this is the first book to assemble the biographies and bibliographies of Aboriginal authors, and as such, it makes a welcome contribution. Yet there are aspects of the volume that call for critical appraisal. On a structural level, though the roughly chronological arrangement of authors by individual entry emphasizes their status as authors, it also separates and isolates each author from the context in which the writing was done, an effect that could have been mitigated by including more about each author's culture and history. The volume would have also benefitted from greater attention to the accuracy of detail. To give one example, The Circle Game, by Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young with Michael Maraun, is dated 2002 in the text (not 1997 when it was originally published), creating the mistaken impression that it was a somewhat belated response to the national conference on residential schools. Such inaccuracies, which are bound to frustrate those with knowledge of the field, should have been caught during editing. An editor might also have questioned whether or not time spent in residential school should be described as a "stint" as it is twice in the volume.

The decision to market to a general, rather than an academic, audience, shows an admirable commitment to a broad community of readers, and commercial publishers such as Ronsdale often do this better than university presses or multinational publishing houses. Twigg writes in the foreword, "Most people know precious little about the literary history of British Columbia and I have always preferred to write for most people" (11). But, I wonder if writing for most people necessarily means abandoning forms of documentation (such as footnotes) that can lead to further reading. Indeed, the bibliography misses the opportunity to point readers to the richness and variety of Native literature. Rather than the "exhaustive" bibliography the foreword claims it to be, it is a list of works referred to in the book. These works cited are not clearly referenced in the individual entries: quotations hang forlornly [End Page 207] at the end of paragraphs; biographical and historical details float free of their sources; and contexts are limited to a collection of documents tacked on at the end of the book. For example, the entry on Pauline Johnson, whose image adorns the book's cover, summarizes details that have received full treatment in works that do not appear in the bibliography, including Betty Keller's Pauline Johnson: First Aboriginal Voice of Canada (1999) and Pauline (1981...

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