A Native Heritage: Images of the Indian in English-Canadian Literature by Leslie Monkman (review)

HUMANITIES 445 Grouping all these disparate writers as 'Yankees: Doyle emphasizes subtly our own tendency to stereotype. Canadians, and their British visitors, have always used this generic term for Americans. In fact, as Doyle's brisk headnotes show, these 'Yankees' came from south and west, as well as from New England. Doyle's useful bibliography reminds us that he has chosen eighteen from a list of seventy American visitors. In the same period over four hundred British travel books on Canada were published. The American travellers are not on the whole as lively or as articulate as the English, Scots, and Irish in the Weld-Dickens-TrollopeButler line. But in the end the 'Yankees' may be more important. 'It is of good profit to us: HenryJames said to his American readers, 'to have near us, and of easy access, an ample something which is not our expansive selves.' James Doyle's book offers to Canadian readers an easy access to American perceptions of our 'otherness: (ELIZABETH WATERSTON) Leslie Monkman, ANative Heritage: Images of the Indian in English-Canadian Literature University of Toronto Press. xiv, 193. $25.00 Images of savage antagonism or admirable reconciliation, of nostalgic primitivism or lamentable degeneration, frame the discussion by Leslie Monkman in his interesting account of the ways in which EnglishCanadian literature has incorporated its indigenous subjects, 'eagerly sucking at the symbols' of Indian life in James Reaney's phrase. Monkman's book is a useful addition to an understanding of the relationships between native people and white society in Canada, providinga reasonably comprehensive, indeed at times relentless, outline of the literary tradition. Where the literature is worth talking about - with someofthe workofDuncanCampbellScott, MargaretLaurence, and Rudy Wiebe, for example - Monkman is good and demonstrates considerable sensitivity to the critical problemsof threshing literary texts. Elsewhere he is less successful, though anyone reading his book will recognize that the problems are formidable. But they are also familiar. Although it is in a sense asking a lot of a book already overloaded with evidence, I think Monkman might have been able to avoid some of the hazards of dealing with fact in fiction by referring to analogous literature in the United States, discussed in books such as Louise K. Barnett's The Ignoble Message or Elemire Zolla's The Writer and the Shaman; and along the way he mightboth recognize typical critical problems and illuminate more of what is characteristically Canadian about the literature which he analyses. Even fairly straightforward writers such as Ernest Thompson Seton, whose Gospel of the Redman (1937) Monkman mentions, could be put into clearer 446 LETTERS IN CANADA 1981 focus by acknowledging that he was almost exactly contemporary with John Collier, whose image ofa Red Atlantis and whose ideal of the pueblo culture had so much influence on Indian affairs in the United States in the 1930s. In addition, some of Monkman's comments would benefit generally from a broader historical perspective and more particularly from taking into account contemporary aesthetic criteria. This is especially so in his discussion of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century texts, where notions of the picturesque might apply; but I suspect it would be even more interesting (though also more difficult) with late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Monkman does not make much use of such inviting structures as that of the 'double: or of the 'other: and in both cases I think they would provide him with a more exact insight into the implications of the work under his consideration. He has what is perhaps an inevitable inclination to confuse the structural energies of mirroring and making, and to ignoresomeinterestingdistinctions betweenimaginative acts of invention and of discovery. Finally, I think he might have found use for some of the critical paraphernalia of romanticism - the importance of borderlands and shores, for example - in discussing the literature of intermediacy which is such an important part of his subject. There is much that is engaging about Monkman's subject; and eventually, despite its shortcomings, this is true of his book as well. He tries to fashion his analysis of Canadian literature out of a notion of encounters, while I suspect that the less heroic image of hoarding or composting would...