ReReading Catharine Parr Traill
Stranging the Familiar
- Publisher
- HARP Publishing The People's Press
- Initial publish date
- Sep 2022
- Category
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781990137136
- Publish Date
- Sep 2022
- List Price
- $26.50
Add it to your shelf
Where to buy it
Recommended Age, Grade, and Reading Levels
- Age: 12 to 18
- Grade: 7 to 12
Description
Author and Nature artist Dorothy Lander grew up on the Rice Lake Plains in the 1950s and early 1960s, beginning a lifelong practice of collecting and preserving plant specimens and learning their names, as had pioneer, botanist, and literary powerhouse Catharine Parr Traill (CPT) a century earlier. The land where the Traill family lived in the octagonal Tower (the provenance of Tower Farm, later Tower Manor) and attended Anglican worship services at the Valley of the Big Stone has been part of the Lander family lineage since 1874. The outdoor worship services in 1846 preceded the first service in the wooden chapel of St. George’s in Gore’s Landing, which the Traill family attended in January 1847. The publishers (HARP Publishing The People’s Press) chose St. George’s Chapel to release the book ReReading Catharine Parr Traill to acknowledge this history—and on National Truth and Reconciliation Day (Sept. 30), as an opportunity to strengthen right relationships between Indigenous and Settler Peoples. The grave of CPT’s grandson Henry Strickland Atwood, who died in January 1864 aged three, is in the churchyard and was the site for a symbolic gesture of Every Child Matters on Sept. 30, 2021. When the book is released on Sept. 30. 2022, we will mark the day with a procession of Indigenous and Settler children bearing baskets of orange and white flowers to Baby Henry’s grave.
ReReading Catharine Parr Traill: Stranging the Familiar is a decolonizing memoir and a Truth and Reconciliation project, building on the life jolt Dorothy experienced on re-reading CPT’s 1852 children’s story Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains during the pandemic lockdown. Sixty-five years after last hearing her father read it aloud over several successive Sundays, Dorothy owns the “truth” of her unaware complicity in Canada’s colonization project. She exposes the colonizer messages in Canadian Crusoes—messages that support white supremacy and the Doctrine of Discovery, which must have been “read” into her very cells as a child. Dorothy faces up to the contradictions that her revered “floral godmother” represents. Without missing a beat, CPT moves from racialized stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples as stupid, uneducable, dirty, bloodthirsty, and uninventive to her positive portrayals of the Mohawk maid Indiana whose Indigenous knowledge carries the three Settler Canadian Crusoes through three winters on the Rice Lake Plains.
Dorothy’s singular effort of producing a “settler accountability narrative” blossomed into a Truth and Reconciliation project when several citizens of Alderville First Nation added their contributions. Notably, Maurice Switzer, whose grandfather Moses Muscrat Marsden was chief of Alderville 1905-1909, wrote the Foreword to ReReading Catharine Parr Traill.
Could Catharine Parr Traill be time-transported into modern-day Canada, I believe she might well support the need for Reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and her immigrant descendants.…The Dorothy Landers of this country are the real “allies” required by Indigenous peoples if Reconciliation is to succeed. As citizens in a country of which they want to be proud, they want to learn everything they can about its past – warts and all – so they can have a baseline against which to measure improvement over past practices.
Koren Smoke operates a tattoo and art studio at Alderville First Nation. Artist and ecologist Rick Beaver recommended Koren to Dorothy, which led to Koren contributing five spectacular illustrations to ReReading Catharine Parr Traill. The All My Relations image re-casts the Mohawk girl Indiana and re-imagines the Canadian Crusoes narrative.
ALL MY RELATIONS
About the authors
Contributor Notes
Dorothy lives in Antigonish, Nova Scotia with her husband John Graham-Pole, where they co-founded HARP: The People’s Press (www.harppublishing.ca), a social enterprise, multi-media publishing house dedicated to the healing arts and arts for health equity.
Dorothy’s two careers at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX), first in Operations Management and then on Adult Education faculty, informs her “retirement” career as a writer, nature artist, and co-publisher of HARP.
Dorothy’s writing and artwork published by HARP are featured in the intergenerational storybook Hmmm – M the Humdinger along with art cards drawn from the botanical collages for Hmmm. Elder John R. Prosper and Dorothy Lander’s joint memoir, Mi’kmaw Fiddler Joe Marble Plays to St. Anne: A Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing Pilgrimage, was published in July 2022. Dorothy’s Rice Lake memoir, ReReading Catharine Parr Traill: Stranging the Familiar (Introduction by Elder Maurice Switzer) will be released on September 30, 2022, National Truth and Reconciliation Day, at St. George’s Chapel, Gore’s Landing, Ontario.
Dorothy can be found on Facebook, Linked-In, and Twitter.
Excerpt: ReReading Catharine Parr Traill: Stranging the Familiar (by (author) Dorothy Lander; illustrated by Koren Smoke; preface by Maurice Switzer)
CPT's story about three children who get lost on the Rice Lake Plains when they wander from their
homes in Cold Springs points to her deep-seated cognitive dissonance. CPT keeps a deft hold on her
conflicting beliefs and remains seemingly free of mental discomfort, making no effort to seek
consistency between the words and actions of her characters. Through the children, she expresses
deep concern for species loss (flora and fauna) and for the changes to the Indigenous way oflife
that cultivation of the land and building of cultural institutions have wrought on this once
pristine wilderness. Yet all the while her Canadian Crusoes laud the industry, courage, and
determination of the settlers who clear-cut their way to law and order and a Christian
civilization.
Each tum of the page sent a cold shiver through me, as I heard and understood for the first time
that the Doctrine of Discovery unfolds throughout CPT's narration and the dialogue of her Canadian
Crusoes. Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie has properly renamed it the Doctrine of Domination.²⁴
Embedded in Canadian and international law, this Doctrine gave license to European explorers to
claim vacant land (terra nullius) in the name of their sovereign. Vacant land was defined as not
occupied by Christians, allowing explorers to "discover" and claim sovereignty, dominion, title and
jurisdiction. When Christopher Columbus arrived in North America in 1492, and John Cabot in Canada
in 1497, the so-called terra nullius was inhabited by millions of Indigenous Peoples.
50
and possesse" the lands of "heathens and infidels," landed in Newfoundland on June 24, 1497, and
later on the northern shore of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. He returned to England on August
6, 1497 and took three Mi'kmaq with him thereby introducing the enslavement of human persons into
North America.
Any inhabitants who did not fit into the new religions that the settler-discoverers adhered to were
deemed less than human. Three times I have heard Buffy Sainte-Marie speak about the Doctrine of
Discovery/ Domination-at StanFest in Canso, Nova Scotia in 2008, at a public address entitled
"Power in the Blood, Justice in the Soul" at St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia
in 2017, and at the Climate Tour 2019 in Toronto in September 2019 with Stephen Lewis and David
Suzuki. How strange that not once had it occurred to me that this Doctrine had infused my formative
years. And just as this book was going to press in June 2022, Buffy Sainte-Marie responded to Pope
Francis's apology in an interview with Adrienne Arsenault on CBC, The National. She stated that an
apology for the church's involvement in the residential school system won't mean a thing if he
doesn't call for the dissolution of the Doctrine of Discovery. The doctrine based on a series of
decrees from the Pope, called "papal bulls," which were released in the 1400s and 1500s essentially
says, in Saint-Marie's words, "it's okay if you're a [Christian] European explorer
... to go anywhere in the world and either convert people and enslave, or you've got to kill them."
Editorial Reviews
The Dorothy Landers of this country are the real "allies" required by Indigenous peoples if
Reconciliation is to succeed. As citizens in a country of which they want to be proud, they want to
learn everything they can about its past-warts and all-so they can have a baseline against which to
measure improvement over past practices.
Today's students are learning many things in school that their parents and grandparents did not:
how many more elements there are in the Periodic Table than there used to be; what it's like to
walk on the surface of the Moon; the contributions Indigenous peoples have made-and continue
to make-to Canada's success.
It may have happened later in her life than she would have liked.
But whereas she was once a mere listener, now we can hear her voice.
Maurice Switzer is a citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. He lives in North Bay,
Ontario, where he serves on the boards of Nipissing University and the North Bay Indigenous
Friendship Centre. He is the author of We Are All Treaty People, published by the Union of Ontario
Indians in 2011. He has not read a single poem by Duncan Campbell Scott since he was in Grade 4.
