28 - Literature of the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis

Summary

BEFORE THE 1960S, published writing by Aboriginal authors in Canada was sparse and virtually unknown. The English and French missionaries had introduced writing into the numerous originally oral Aboriginal cultures, and Aboriginal-authored written histories, travel accounts, and autobiographies by authors such as George Copway (1818–1869) and Peter Jones (1802–1856; both Ojibway) exist from the nineteenth century onwards. Yet with the notable exception of Mohawk-English poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson (1861–1913; Tekahionwake), whose work received widespread attention at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century and continues to inspire contemporary Aboriginal writers such as Joan Crate and Beth Brant, what was perceived as Aboriginal literature in Canada were mostly Aboriginal stories collected and published by non-Aboriginal ethnographers as “folklore,” “myths,” and tales. Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong recounts a telling childhood experience from as late as a “day in 1965 when a cousin of mine pointed to the road from our one-room school on the reserve and said, ‘There's the Indian guy who wrote a book!’ All of us rushed to the window to look at him, awestruck.… That experience exemplifies how remote the idea of a real live ‘Native’ person writing a ‘book’ was at that time” (Armstrong 2001, xv). While there were indeed few Aboriginal writers at the time, the scarcity of Aboriginal writing available in print was also the result of Aboriginal authors being excluded from the Canadian publishing industry and book market, a situation that was to change only slowly in the decades to come.