Divided Highways

Road Narrative and Nationhood in Canada

Heather Macfarlane

• Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780776627755
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The road trip genre, well established in the literatures ofCanada, is a natural outcome of the nation's obsession with geography. Divided Highways examines roadnarratives by Anglo-Canadian, Québécois and Indigenous authors and the sense ofplace and nationhood in these communities.

Geography describes the land, and history peoples it, justas memories connect us to place. This is why road trips are such a feature ofwriting in Canada, allowing the travellers to claim, at least symbolically, theterrain they have traversed. Macfarlane examines works by a variety of writersfrom each of these communities, including Gilles Archambault, JeannetteArmstrong, Jill Frayne, Tomson Highway, Claude Jasmin, Robert Kroetsch, JacquesPoulin, Aritha van Herk and Paul Villeneuve, to name but a few.

Studying a diversity of road narratives from Anglo-Canadian, Québécois and Indigenous populations not only demonstrates the existence of a veryspecific road genre, but is also revelatory of very diverse and often conflictingperceptions of nationhood. It is these expressions of sovereignty that areintegral to ongoing discussions of reconciliation and decolonization.

This book is published in English.

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Cet ouvrage étudie l'existence et la tradition du roman de la route au Canada. La géographie décrit le territoire et l'histoire lui insuffle vie, tout comme les souvenirs sont des points d'attache à un lieu donné. Voilà pourquoi les road trips ont une place privilégiée dans l'écriture d'expression anglaise, française et autochtone du Canada: ils permettent aux voyageurs de revendiquer, du moins symboliquement, le terrain qu'ils ont couvert. C'est l'intersection de l'histoire et de la géographie qui confère toute sa signification à un voyage, qui alimente cet esprit des lieux, ou qui permet d'en constater l'absence.

Les voyages sont révélateurs des intérêts propres aux trois groupes examinés dans le cadre de cette étude. Le désir, et parfois la nécessité, d'entreprendre un voyage, les compagnons de voyage ainsi que les destinations, de même que l'histoire qui s'écrit au fil des distances parcourues sont autant d'indicateurs de cette notion de l'espace et du concept de nation au sein du pays.

Pour illustrer ce phénomène, ce livre examine des oeuvres littéraires d'une gamme d'écrivains anglophones, québécois et autochtones, dont Gilles Archambault, Jeannette Armstrong, Jill Frayne, Tomson Highway, Linda Hogan, Scott Gardiner, Claude Jasmin, Robert Kroetsch, Lee Maracle, Jacques Poulin, Aritha van Herk et Paul Villeneuve. L'approche comparative aux littératures du Canada est le prolongement logique aux études postcoloniales dans la mesure où elle révèle les complexités de même que les spécificités de diverses communautés, contribuant ainsi à une meilleure compréhension de collectivités nationales. Elle propose, en outre, des histoires qui font le contrepoids aux études transnationales.

Ce livre est publié en anglais.

1

The Road Narrative and National Literatures

DEFINING NATIONAL LITERATURES

Canadian literary studies have long been preoccupied with identifying a distinct national literature. The forever-evolving characteristics of what defines Canadian literature is testament to the complexities of such a task. However, Benedict Anderson’s famous claim in Imagined Communities (1983) that a community is imagined into being through, among other things, its literature is not as straightforward in a settler-colonial society, as Margery Fee points out. In her book Literary Land Claims (2015), she underlines the challenges of identifying a national literature for populations still tied to the imperial powers that gave them their culture and language (4)—in Canada’s case both France and Britain. As Fee also notes, for Canada these challenges are further complicated by the commanding influence of the United States and by the enduring presence of Indigenous Peoples on the land the colonial powers continue to exploit (4). Add to this the contributions of more recent immigrant populations to Canadian culture, and easily defining a single Canadian literature becomes next to impossible. Based on this observation, one might be tempted to conclude that there are multiple national literatures co-existing within the colonially constructed Canadian nation, but this is a controversial claim on several fronts. If a nation’s self-definition requires a national literature, then suggesting that Canada is home to multiple literatures requires that the nation acknowledge the existence of multiple nationhoods within its borders. This would then require equal consideration of each of the literatures and, by extension, each of those national entities. This is difficult to manoeuvre when nationhood by definition requires a sense of unity. As Canadians are becoming increasingly aware, however, the nation’s progress depends on acknowledging and rectifying its colonial practices.

Decolonizing Canada demands a recognition of Indigenous rights and cultures, which implies the recognition of different culturally based sovereign identities. Anishinaabe scholar and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes, “Building diverse, nation-culture-based resurgences means significantly ­re-investing in our own ways of being” (17).¹ Doing this, she argues, will “provide the ultimate antidote to colonialism” (17). Culture, as Simpson posits, is essential to resurgence, and the celebration of distinct cultural elements highlights distinct national identities. Indigenous subjectivity or sovereignty thus underlines cultural survival and works to counter colonization.

The necessity for recognition of equal sovereign identities is reflected in the literatures produced in Canada. These texts, as Fee suggests with the title of her book, can be read as “literary land claims” and assert the identity of multiple sovereign presences on the land. The enduring but largely unrecognized tradition of road narratives produced in Canada, which seek to map national territory and belonging, thus have considerable significance. Many early maps of what is now Canada show just an outline—the theoretical contours of a country—and explorers and settlers arriving from France and England continually described it as empty or barren: a terra nullius, nobody’s land. Canadians are becoming increasingly aware, however, that that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Indigenous peoples had inhabited the land for millennia and had their own, very different, maps. These maps, often oral, were filled not only with physical landmarks, but also with centuries of personal and collective histories—wars, famines, tornadoes, weddings, funerals, and births—as well as mythologies. The English and French remained ignorant—or dismissive—of these old maps and set about creating their own, embarking on the occupation or colonization of the land they wished to claim. As is suggested by the title of J. Edward Chamberlin’s landmark 2003 book, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, however, belonging to the land means being a part of its history and mythology. Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan) explains how land owns and claims her in her seminal essay “Land Speaking” (1998). She describes how Indigenous languages come from the land, and how speaking your language thus claims you as a part of that land: “It is this N’silxchn [Okanagan language] which embraces me and permeates my experience of the Okanagan land and is a constant voice with me that yearns for human speech. I am claimed and owned by this land, this Okanagan” (174). In Indigenous traditions all knowledge comes from the land, but those who are not familiar with it must fill a physical landscape with stories of a past on that land, in order to make it theirs and to justify their presence on it. If the land has not claimed you, and made you a part of its history, then you must claim the land, making it yours with memories—thus the importance of the road narrative.

In all of the works discussed, since the stories describe real places whose names appear on signs and maps, the different collective national geographies and histories intersect with the characters’ personal history. The process of physically covering ground and telling stories about it thus connects the personal to the collective. The act of writing road trip narratives is therefore also nationalistic, or representative of literary nationalism, since telling stories about real places reflects an exploration and claiming of the land or, conversely, the process of being claimed by the land.

“I wanted to fill in the broad outline of my own map of Canada, to add small but telling details to the cartography I carry inside me,” writes anglo-Canadian author Will Ferguson, explaining the goal of his road trips through Canada (5). This process ultimately ties him more closely to the land, allowing him to bond the physical landscape to his personal experience. His statement makes obvious the connections between sense of place and nationhood. Driving, walking, running, riding, paddling, and cycling all involve a physical passing through land or water, combining geography with the personal or collective memories or histories created on that trip and upon that land. This explains why road narratives are such a feature of writing in Canada, allowing the travellers to claim (or reclaim, in the case of Indigenous peoples), at least symbolically, the land they cover in their travels. The intersection between history and geography makes a trip more significant and nourishes a sense of place and nationhood—or reveals the lack of it. An examination of the road trips undertaken therefore reveals the specific interests of the three broadly defined groups at the centre of this study: Indigenous peoples, anglophone Canadians, and francophone Quebecois.

The groups I am comparing reflect three broad national divisions recognized in the constitution as Canada’s “founding nations.” Franco-Quebecois narratives reflect the national sentiment unique to francophone Quebec, while the Indigenous texts in question demonstrate the existence of a ­pan-Indigenous nationalism—and therefore extend over the Canada-US border. “Anglo-Canadian” does not refer simply to people of Anglo-Saxon origin, but rather groups together English-speakers from all across the country who, in spite of regional differences, identify primarily as “Canadian.” I have grouped the texts by author affiliation, but the protagonists and other characters within the accounts or stories are not always of the same group affiliation as the author; nonetheless the authors’ treatment of characters supports rather than detracts from my arguments.

Falling within each of one of these broadly defined groups, the protagonists’ desire (and in some cases, obligation) to travel, the travelling companions they choose, and the histories they create (or revive) on the land they are covering all indicate a particular sense of place and nationhood within the country. Far from creating one united Canada, the trips of these peoples reveal numerous Canadas—and in many cases deconstruct the idea of the “Canadian” nation altogether. Comparing the narratives permits a kind of literary nation-to-nation dialogue that invites a shift of interpretive lens to include not only cultural and linguistic diversity, but national diversity as well. Nation-to-nation dialogue is key if the country is to honour its commitment to reconciliation between settler and Indigenous populations. The 2015 Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada lists as one of its calls to action the reaffirmation of “the nation-to-nation relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Crown” (“Calls to Action” 8).

I use the term “nation” loosely here because it is my goal that its definition remains fluid in order to permit alternate perceptions of belonging and nationhood. Having said that, definitions of nation inform Western perceptions of the country and unavoidably influence each of the arguments presented in this study. While more often than not I use the term “nation” in the sense of “community,” there is an element of sovereignty implied in my use of the term. I share the beliefs of the Indigenous literary nationalists in Canada and America, who celebrate sovereignty as an important assertion of cultural renewal, and I return continually to the idea of nation-to-nation dialogue as the purpose behind a comparative approach to the road narrative in Canada, since dialogue promotes equity and reciprocity.² Definitions of nation are also relevant in that they demonstrate the extent to which the intersection of history and geography examined above fosters a sense of community and belonging.

French theorist Ernest Renan’s 1882 definition of nation, which formed the basis for subsequent studies of Western nationhood and is still applicable and the subject of considerable discussion today, is significant in its allusions to both history and geography. In his celebrated lecture at the Sorbonne, entitled “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?,” he outlines five possible contributions to nation building: race, language, religion, common interests, and geography. While his definition is rooted in Romantic and Eurocentric thought, it is nonetheless useful in that it reflects the dominant Western beliefs informing perceptions of nation. Renan identifies geography as one of the principal defining features of nation, but also signals the importance of a shared history as a basis for common interests: “To have shared glories of the past, a shared will in the present, to have performed great deeds together, to wish to perform still more—these are the essential conditions for the making of a people” (47). This is where the intersections between time and space become especially important. That road trips are tied to landscape is clear, but they are equally tied to past, present, and future. The travellers cover physical space, making it part of their personal history while at the same time being aware of the collective experiences of their community on the land they are covering. In adding their personal histories to the collective national awareness of both geography and a larger history, they connect their experience to that of the people who both preceded and will follow them. The personal acts are enhanced by the travellers’ experience of three states that are simultaneously temporal and geographic: they are physically travelling in the present, leaving both a physical place and temporal past behind them, and looking ahead to a future represented by the road in front of them.

Land and history are also included in the four elements in what Tom Holm (Cherokee/Creek), Diane Pearson, and Ben Chavis (Lumbee) describe as an Indigenous “peoplehood” rather than nationhood.³ This concept is a valuable frame of reference, which I return to in more detail in my conclusion: in many ways the concept of “a people” is less problematic than the term “nation,” since it doesn’t carry with it the same historical baggage of racism, patriarchy, and colonialism evoked, for example, by “nationalism.” Holm, Pearson, and Chavis argue that four elements—language, land, sacred history, and ceremonial cycle—have an “organic interrelationship” in Indigenous cultures and that none can exist without the others. “Sacred history” differs from traditional or secular history in that it includes information on kinship structures, ceremonies, cultural distinctions, political economy, and laws. “Ceremonial cycle” contains some of the elements of religion, but is explicitly linked to the land by language and sacred history. Imperial powers have sought to remove each of these elements from the balance through assimilationist policies, land theft, the imposition of Christianity, the banning of Indigenous languages, and actual annihilation—all blows in the attempt to destroy Indigenous peoplehoods. If just one of the four elements is missing from the balance, then the health of that community—their peoplehood—is adversely affected.

The road trip becomes a narrative recognition of an imbalance and an enactment of the desire to reinstate the missing element or elements. In the works examined in this study, the protagonists undertake their road trips in search of what’s missing. Holm, Pearson, and Chavis address this type of search directly in their article:

Most Indigenous American literature contains this kind of cyclical, or at least nonlinear, structure and recognizes the holistic nature of the societies that these protagonists leave and to which they return. The land, the ceremonies, the language and the stories drawn from the Indigenous group’s history make the protagonist whole and resolve his conflicts. (18)

Furthering this idea, I suggest the literary road trips examined in this book result from a search for the missing element that the protagonists hope will make them whole and reinscribe them in peoplehood. While such a search may clearly be the case for Indigenous peoples enduring the effects of colonization, it is arguably true for anglo-Canadians and franco-Quebecois as well, and a comparison of which elements are missing in each of the communities is extremely revealing, as are the implications of such comparison (discussed in detail in chapter 5). The choice to use the idea of peoplehood as a final basis for comparison is my attempt to shift the critical centre away from the Eurocentric mainstream: I place Indigenous works at the centre of this study and foreground the voices of Indigenous critics whose ideas introduce new frameworks through which to view nationhood and belonging.

The road narrative in Canada is necessarily a nation-building tool, since the goal of the road trip is the reaffirmation of community if it seeks to reinstate the integrity of each of the peoplehoods in question. While a Canada where everyone is equal is certainly the ultimate goal, there is still a long way to go, and until we get there the celebration of Canada as a multicultural mosaic of hybrid identities threatens to undermine the sovereignty of communities that are struggling to survive the effects of colonialism and subjugation—particularly Indigenous communities. Insisting that we are all the same allows us to ignore power imbalances, while recognizing difference brings them to light. Postcolonial theory is often invoked to speak of the situation of Indigenous peoples in Canada, but it is less effective than a comparative approach in examining cultural and national specificities. Theories of postcolonialism and globalization have brought with them the tendency to downplay cultural and national difference in favour of notions of hybridity and multiculturalism, and this is where the arguments of the American Indian literary nationalists, which have proven to be surprisingly controversial, are relevant to this study.

Cherokee scholar Jace Weaver, in the chapter “Splitting the Earth” from his co-authored book American Indian Literary Nationalism (2006), argues that postcolonial theory “prefers ambivalence, hybridity, pastiche and fragmentation” (18). Weaver underlines the danger involved in promoting multiculturalism and hybridity for Indigenous communities, equating it to erasure: “In a new multicultural version of the discarded melting pot hypothesis, some non-Native critics desire Natives to dissolve into a soup of hybridity (in which they too, of course, can share), embracing our mixed-blood identities” (29). Because the measure of normalcy is always based on the experience and beliefs of the dominant culture, promoting hybridity becomes just another attempt to assimilate Indigenous peoples into the mainstream, and can thus be equated to colonialism (Weaver 29). This danger has been repeatedly signalled in discussions of the Canadian reconciliation process, where it has been argued that it is ultimately the interests of the settler population that are being protected as the interests of Indigenous populations continue to be subsumed under the Canadian national umbrella. In order to resist such assimilation, Canadian Indigenous literary nationalists, along with Weaver and his American Indian Literary Nationalism ­co-authors Craig Womack (Creek-Cherokee) and Robert Warrior (Osage), promote a nationalistic approach to literature—one that has as its goal a commitment to act in the best interests of Indigenous peoples. It promotes writing and scholarship from within the Indigenous community in question, rather than imposing Euro-Western theory and criticism on Indigenous literatures. This approach places Indigenous perspectives at the centre, thereby reducing the effects of an ongoing literary and cultural colonialism. In support of this resistance, I have placed Indigenous critical theory and literature at the centre of this study, turning primarily to Indigenous critics to express Indigenous realities while at the same time applying these ideas more broadly to the other communities in question.

To the extent that literary nationalism promotes sovereignty as key to the survival of marginalized peoples, it may be applicable to other subjugated groups as well, including the franco-Quebecois. This is not to suggest, however, that Quebec’s situation is even remotely similar to that of Indigenous peoples—the French founding powers were, after all, colonial powers. As Cherokee scholar Danie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: THE ROAD NARRATIVE AND NATIONAL LITERATURES
• 2: HOME AND AWAY
• 3: SEXUAL CONQUEST ON THE ROAD
• 4: TRAVELLING COMPANIONS
• 5: CONCLUSION: CHANGING LANES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Backcover