The Mythical Indigenous Protagonist

“Moving is the only hope,” a media presence who really should remain nameless recently said of a troubled Northern Ontario community. A predictable settler solution, to which the author and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor provides the best response: “Social malaise doesn’t come with a street address,” he says. “It comes with history.”

How did we come to accept the street-address view, which has an undeniable pedigree in this country? Historically, settler literature, from James Fenimore Cooper to John Richardson, has portrayed pre-contact land as empty, treacherous and hostile toward those who seek to conquer and civilize it. As the scholar and author Margery Fee points out, this narrative of an unforgiving “no man’s land” contributed to and even heroized the settlement of Canada. Stories are powerful and pervasive, and this narrative persists today.

It is not confined to the realm of historical writing. As readers, we are missing the point on a grand scale...