Canada

Abstract

depicts a nineteenth-century West, The Pemmican Eaters by established poet Marilyn Dumont, reclaims John A. Macdonald's derogatory word for the Métis and evokes the years of Louis Riel's resistance to the federal government. Also exploring the so-called Indian question is the weighty Broadview collection of nineteenth-century race-related writings by internationally renowned poet and performer E. Pauline Johnson/ Tekahionwake, entitled simply Tekahionwake. Although the latter three Indigenous writers focus on the past for their materials, the present search for identity inspires poet Shannon Webb-Campbell's Still No Word, while Drew Hayden Taylor's play Cerulean Blue focuses on a contemporary blues band that is blockaded into a First Nations community, hilarity ensuing. In contrast with Cerulean Blue, Richard Wagamese's novel Medicine Walk is more tragic, addressing as it does a father's dying wish and the cost of alcoholism to First Nations and Canadian society. Lee Maracle is especially direct in teaching lessons from the strength of tradition in the poems and close-up images of nature in Talking to the Diaspora, suggesting that the trauma of the past can be healed by other remnants -nay, living memories -of earlier times (See also Maracle's Memory Serves, Non-Fiction).Debates about race and racialization more generally are ongoing, inspired partly by how Justin Trudeau's government, elected 2015, renewed the country's official policy of multiculturalism (which was developed partly through the leadership of his father, Pierre Trudeau, when he was prime minister) through actions such as the plan to welcome up to 25,000 Syrian refugees in 2015 and 2016. A contesting inspiration is the belief that this multiculturalism does not do enough to address racism, to systematize anti-racism, or to acknowledge the diversity of cultures and racializations -hence an article such as "Make-Believing White Civility: Historical Re-Enactments at Fort Langley, British Columbia" by Megan Davies (in Criticism: General Studies). Farther east, one of Canada's most public poets and scholars (and playfully critical counterpoint to Trudeau) is George Elliott Clarke, whose Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature offers his most recent work on what he calls Africadian identity (a compound of African, Canadian, and Acadian), including a highly regarded bibliography. Another bibliographer and critic, Winfried Siemerling, engages with Clarke's literary territory in The Black Atlantic Reconsidered and its accompanying website, www.blackatlantic.ca, arguing that African Canadian cultures of literature and music are inseparable from African American cultures and vice versa.