Description
Native Writers and Canadian Writing is a co-publication with Canadian Literature – Canada’s foremost literary journal – of a special double issue which focuses on literature by and about Canada’s Native peoples and contains original articles and poems by both Native and non-Native writers. These not only reflect the growing prominence of contemporary Native writing but also direct the reader to the traditional literature from which it springs and which has been largely misunderstood by the non-Native community – myths, rituals, and songs having been interpreted more often as artistic “curiosities” rather than the masterworks of a different culture. Essays examining the conventional portrayals of Native people in literature touch on works which range from the eighteenth-century journals of explorer Alexander Mackenzie, to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, and to early writers in Canada such as historian-humourist Thomas Chandler Haliburton.
Reviews
English professor W.H. New has compiled an impressive collection of current perspectives on native writers who have assumed some measure of prominence ... as well as some fresh looks at voices from the past.
- Daniel Ray
Its commentary and essays are well selected and organized to give context and meaning to the native writing presented.
- Suzanne Fournier
Native Writers and Canadian Writing is so sweeping in its scope and ambition that it creates a kind of spiritual universe of its own, an enchanting place that a reader does not want to leave. Each piece in this breathtaking anthology leads to another ... With the rising at Oka last summer, and what seems the continuing deafness of both Ottawa and Quebec to native concerns, this exhortation to listen is timely. But Native Writers and Canadian Writing is not about immediate political concerns. It provides a context that goes beyond the nightmare of history to timeless human values ... The question of non-natives writing about native subjects is dealt with but on the level of the deep sub-conscious, where many qualities of humanity are the same. The native spirit informs the Americas, and these essays and poems allow us to touch all who once walked the land we all walk ... The spirit of both the men and women in this anthology, the living and the dead, has a transformational magic that can touch us all.
- M.T. Kelly