Native Literature in Canada
By Penny Petrone
Oxford University Press
In Native Literature in Canada Penny Petrone, a Professor Emeritus at Lakehead University, writes a history of Native literature from the oral tradition through its evolutions and adaptations into written culture, with reference to Native cultures as they face and survive the crushing impact of colonialism.
Petrone rejects Western approaches to Native literature, and projects a field of study that would recognize the importance of the historical and cultural background of Native writing, and would develop a terminology for a sophisticated and thoughtful application of criticism that evolves as much from that background as from Western critical traditions. She also provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of Native writers and writings of the last two centuries.
One of the book’s aims is to trace the effect of political necessity on Native literature, from the great oratorical traditions of the pre-contact days to the need to use oratory in the losing battle against the whites — first in challenging and then in attempts to protect the Native peoples during the different treaties and negotiations. This theme is manifested again in the protest literature of the 1960s and the contemporary essays on current conditions.
After trying to define the original oral literature of the Natives, and after defending its right to be considered as literature, Petrone describes how oral themes and traditions evolved into the first explorations of writing. From 1820 to 1850 the first Native writings in English were sermons, letters and missionary tracts, mostly due to the efforts of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society who converted Natives, training them to become teachers and missionaries. Out of this training arose a proliferation of written work — sermons, histories, accounts of travel and autobiographies, letters and diaries — that brought a certain amount of fame for such missionaries and teachers as John Sunday, George Copway, Peter Jones, George Henry and Henry Steinhauer.
Petrone details some of the divided positions of the Natives who used the styles and religion of Western literature to express Native concerns. She also demonstrates the uniqueness of many writings that combine Western forms such as the essay or sermon with the complex figurative imagery of traditional Native oral culture. She details this intertwining of forms and style through the development of Native writing as it changed in response to the steadily worsening situation of the Natives throughout the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century.
The last two chapters of the book deal with the explosion of Native literature in the last two decades — an explosion that uses both Western literary forms and oral and written traditions for its inspirations. Petrone lists and briefly describes a great many works and writers, as well as summarizing styles that have developed from historical and political backgrounds. Current writers are tied in with themes and movements delineated in the book. Works that renew old legends, those that continue a tradition of writing aimed at protest, and works about contemporary experiences of Native life are shown to have an established place within Native literary history.
The Author points out how current autobiographies evoke older Native approaches to autobiography that incorporate community traditions and history into personal accounts. She demonstrates a continuity with earlier styles of storytelling in modern short stories, drama and novels, depicting a particular Native way of experiencing life as the basis for rambling, episodic narratives that mix fiction, autobiography, didactic asides and poetry. She examines suggestions of historical Native reverence for figurative language and poetic imagery that permeate the work of contemporary poets. In a survey of the latest Indian voices, Daniel David Moses, Rita Joe, Tomson Highway, Duke Redbird, Thomas King, Maria Campbell, Basil H. Johnston, Beatrice Culleton, Jeannette C. Armstrong and numerous others of varying fame and ability, Petrone explores the florescence of a field of literature that has started to demand recognition of its own terms in critical and cultural approaches.
The many projects of the book, still pretty much the only one of its kind, are fascinating, although occasionally awkward syntax and poor organization obscure the point Petrone is trying to make, as when she uses some specific example to fit in with all her theses at the same time without explicitly pointing out what she is doing. This is especially noticeable in the chapter on oral literature, in which she attempts to define it, while rejecting Western definitions, and simultaneously putting it in a historical context.
Though the book is too short and too full to really explore any single one of the complex issues raised in a very satisfying way, it makes a good introduction to the vast amount of material and themes that await critical, cultural, political and historical exploration. It also provides a loving, well-researched look at the individual writers who make up this dynamic literature.
