This is the dust jacket of a ‘must own’ book for Canadian historians. Well, historians who live in Canada? Or just historians who study the history of that part of North America north of the lower 48 U.S. states? It is a 1997 2nd edition of what is labelled a magisterial overview of indigenous peoples in Canada from before contact to after contact, up to the late 1990s. I have always thought that James Axtell’s book title ‘Natives and Newcomers‘ was one of the better book titles on this general topic.
These days, of course, European expansion is vilified and not much studied except to detail the ill effects. A number of new forms of linguistic denigration have emerged in very recent times: colonization, settler society etc. Olive Patricia Dickason avoided this by writing a solidly researched history. I might add that Prof. Dickason had a hard scrabble personal history and Métis ancestry through her mother. This article tells her story.
But what drew me to this book is the artwork on the dust jacket. It is by Daphne Odjig. Dickason notes that she herself was drawn to indigenous art and I can understand that – she cited ‘racial memory’. I can make no such claim. I like the vibrant colours and especially the soft curves of people, mountains, drums – I can hardly make out what is in the painting but I do not care.We live in a culture that adopted straight lines and linear thinking beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries. I have trained my brain to think in a linear fashion but live most vibrantly in a culture of wild curves and sprouting tree branches and grass blades.
Shades of blue
and wisdom of birds
mountains dancing in the distance
smiling faces and questions asked
rolling rocks on an earth that moves
surely this is heaven itself
the joy of wisdom unassailed
no straight lines live here
no beginnings and endings
just life a joyous panoply
Bookstory 