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This astounding novel fully deserves to be called a saga. It begins a thousand years ago in the time of the Vikings in Newfoundland. It is crammed with incidents of war and peace, with fights to the death and long nights of lovemaking, and with accounts of the rise of local clan chiefs and the silent fall of great distant empires. Out of the mists of the past it sweeps forward eight hundred years, to the lonely death of the last of the Beothuk. The Beothuk, of course, were the original native people of Newfoundland, and thus the first North American natives encountered by European sailors. Noticing the red ochre they used as protection against mosquitoes, the sailors called them "Red-skins," a name that was to affect an entire continent. As a people, they were never understood. Until now. By adding his novelist's imagination to his knowledge as an anthropologist and a historian, Bernard Assiniwi has written a convincing account of the Beothuk people through the ages. To do so he has given us a mirror image of the history rendered by Europeans. For example, we know from the Norse Sagas that four slaves escaped from the Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows. What happened to them? Bernard Assiniwi supplies a plausible answer, just as he perhaps solves the mystery of the Portuguese ships that sailed west in 1501 to catch more Beothuk, and disappeared from the paper records forever. The story of the Beothuk people is told in three parts. "The Initiate" tells of Anin, who made a voyage by canoe around the entire island a thousand years ago, encountering the strange Vikings with their "cutting sticks" and their hair "the colour of dried grass." His encounters with whales, bears, raiding Inuit and other dangers, and his survival skills on this epic journey make for fascinating reading, as does his eventual return to his home where, with the help of his strong and active wives, he becomes a legendary chief, the father of his people.
Canada is packed with intriguing destinations where heritage and landscape interact. Bob Henderson captures our living history and its relationship to the land.
“Speaking in the Past Tense participates in an expanding critical dialogue on the writing of historical fiction, providing a series of reflections on the process from the perspective of those souls intrepid enough to step onto what is, practically by definition, contested territory.” — Herb Wyile, from the Introduction The extermination of the Beothuk ... the exploration of the Arctic ... the experiences of soldiers in the trenches during World War I ... the foibles of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister ... the Ojibway sniper who is credited with 378 wartime kills—these are just some of the people and events discussed in these candid and wide-ranging interviews with eleven authors whose novels are based on events in Canadian history. These sometimes startling conversations take the reader behind the scenes of the novels and into the minds of their authors. Through them we explore the writers’ motives for writing, the challenges they faced in gathering information and presenting it in fictional form, the sometimes hostile reaction they faced after publication, and, perhaps most interestingly, the stories that didn’t make it into their novels. Speaking in the Past Tense provides fascinating insights into the construction of national historical narratives and myths, both those familiar to us and those that are still being written.
The supposed extinction of the Indigenous Beothuk people of Newfoundland in the first half of the nineteenth century is a foundational moment in Canadian history. In Tracing Ochre, Fiona Polack and a diverse group of contributors interrogate and expand upon changing perceptions of the Beothuk.
In Most of What Follows Is True, Michael Crummey examines the complex relationship between fact and fiction, between the “real world” and the stories we tell to explain it. Drawing on his own experience appropriating historical characters to fictional ends, he brings forward important questions about how writers use history and real-life figures to animate fictional stories. Is there a limit to the liberties a writer can take? Is there a point at which a fictionalized history becomes a false history? What responsibilities do writers have to their readers, and to the historical and cultural materials they exploit as sources? Crummey offers thoughtful, witty views on the deep and timely conversation around appropriation.
While John Cabot's landfall may be in dispute, what he discovered is not: cod-and lots of them... Historic accounts say that Cabot lowered a basket weighted with stones into the North Atlantic, then hauled it back up brimming with cod. The discovery of these fertile fishing grounds set of a centuries-long struggle among Basque, Portuguese, French, and English fishermen, and established a pattern of far-flung coastal settlements, called outports by Newfoundlanders, that ring the island. And so the legend fits today: the Grand Banks became Valhalla, a miraculous, self-sustaining Eight Wonder of the world, feeding the known world for 500 years. The catastrophic collapse of the fisheries, circa 1992, was unprecedente4d. An ecological disaster to rival any other-the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest notwithstanding-in modern history. This made-in-Canada plunder was part human greed, part stupidity, and part rapacity. Tarnishing Canada's standing within the international community, it holds the reputation of Canada's once-vaunted fisheries scientists up to ridicule. Sixteen years later, no one has taken accountability or apologized for the ruination of a centuries-old way of life and, taken accountability or apologized for the ruination of a centuries-old way of life and, more shocking, a stock recovery plan has yet to be produced... There can be no forgetting-or forgiving-such catastrophic pillaging, Sparked by a second wave of environmentalism focusing on the state of the world's oceans, the Grand Banks cod collapse became a talking point, a sujet noir, now studied at universities and fisheries research centres, wherein students from around the world repeat this mantra: we must never allow our fisheries to go the way of the Grand Banks cod.
Hit the trails with naturalist and raconteur Bob Henderson in this four-book bundle! From folklore to heritage, with a hefty dose of the Scandinavian outdoor-living ethos of friluftsliv, Henderson fires the imagination, urging Ontarians to reignite their relationship with nature. Includes: Every Trail Has a Story More Trails More Tales Nature First Pike’s Portage
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Human remains and society presents a groundbreaking account of the treatment and commemoration of dead bodies resulting from incidents of genocide and mass violence. Whether reburied, concealed, stored, abandoned or publically displayed, human remains raise a vast number of questions regarding social, legal and ethical uses by communities, public institutions and civil society organisations. Through a diverse range of international case studies, across multiple continents, this highly innovative book explores the effect of dead bodies or body parts, either desired or unintended, on various political, cultural or religious practices. How, for instance, do issues of confiscation, concealment or the destruction of human remains in mass crime impact on transitional processes, commemoration or judicial procedures? Multidisciplinary in scope, Human remains and society will appeal to readers interested in the crucial phase of post-conflict reconciliation. This includes students and researchers of history, anthropology, sociology, archaeology, law, politics and modern warfare.
This book explores accounts in the Sagas of Icelanders of encounters with foreign peoples, both abroad and in Iceland, who are portrayed according to stereotypes which vary depending on their origins. Notably, inhabitants of the places identified in the sagas as Írland, Skotland and Vínland are portrayed as being less civilized than the Icelanders themselves. This book explores the ways in which the Íslendingasögur emphasize this relative barbarity through descriptions of diet, material culture, style of warfare and character. These characteristics are discussed in relation to parallel descriptions of Icelandic characters and lifestyle within the Íslendingasögur, and also in the context of a tradition in contemporary European literature, which portrayed the Icelanders themselves as barbaric. Comparisons are made with descriptions of barbarians in classical Roman texts, primarily Sallust, but also Caesar and Tacitus, showing striking similarities between Roman and Icelandic ideas about barbarians.