Deconstructing the Colonial Historiography: The New Historicist Reading of Canadian Métis Fiction

Abstract

The pre-1980s historiographical tradition in Canada had, indeed, forgotten the Métis by confining them to a secondary role in Canada's national story. If we were to take our cue from this historiography, the Métis did not survive very long into the twentieth century, and had no history outside the political and economic contributions they made to Canada's founding--particularly through their involvement in the fur trade and in the creation of Manitoba. The Riel-centrism which subsequently dominated in the literature, at least up to the 1980s, only confirmed the illusion that Métis history was one-dimensional and event-based. Consequently, so many of the stories, histories, and cultural practices of the Métis remained relatively unknown in academic literature. However, more recent changes in both focus and methodology have resulted in a new approach to Métis history.   The denial of Native women hood is the reduction of the whole people to a sub human level. Animals beget animals. The dictates of patriarchy demand that beneath the Native male comes the native female. The dictates of racism are that native men are beneath white women and native females are not fit to be referred to as women. Lee Maracle suggests that the native women have to make the native men understand that they are with their men to fight the national oppression; They want their men to be again strong and lively in spirit. Maracle envisages a relationship not of conflict but of mutual support among the genders.   

It is unquestionable that New Historicism is part of the post modern trend in literary history and Culture studies. It welcomes the breakdown of genre and analysis of discontinuities linking anecdotes to the disruption of understanding history. Finding no boundaries between the text and history, and between fiction and reality, New Historicism eventually and inevitably, has now come to terms with the decision to set up its priority in a place between textualism and contextualism. The Colonial dominant power stereotyping used to consider the Native Canadian people as the howling one and positioning themselves as the noble one. Similarly John F Kennedy declared a Great American society instead of a Just society   In Search of April Raintree vehemently interrogates the colonial myth of assimilation. "Assimilate or get lost” was the arrogant attitude of Euro centrism Initially conceived as a story about alcoholism, the novel In Search of April Raintree became a much more essentialist work, exploring the experience of living as a Métis, a person whose heritage is mixed Native and European  Jeannette Armstrong's novel Slash presents the fictional biography of   a Native man, describing his personal development from  childhood to father-hood. In the process, it depicts the discourses employed by the education system, Christianity, and organizations such as AIM during the 1960s and 1970s. Critics have repeatedly argued that due to the accuracy of the historic events – all the occurrences are verifiable through government records – and the realistic manner in which the novel is written, Slash is more fact than fiction At the end of Lee Maracle's Ravensong, Her mother, carrying her daughter's   suitcase, insists that she and Stacey "walk over the bridge together -- alone" (Ravensong p.194-95) . Standing on the bridge with Momma, Stacey has a view of both her destination. The politics of crossing the bridge is fundamentally a representation and assertion. "Too much Raven" (p.179) echoes through the novel as a promise of continued resistance to assaults on the Native spirit, even in the face of great oppression and difficulty .

The relationship between history and text remains in the centre of the New Historicist arguments. Literary texts are constituted within historically specific institutions and related to other texts produced within other historically specific institutions. Similarly, society is constructed as a text of interrelated institutions. Different New Historicists may have different inclinations to historicity and textuality, Montrose for instance is said to emphasize the historical dimension whereas Greenblatt is more interested in documents as textual systems. However, a New Hisotricist position never privileges "historicity” or "textuality” to the exclusion of either. This is because they need the correspondences between "the aesthetic conventions inscribed in the text”