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Historical Fiction

Retrieved from: http://www.mysterescanadiens.ca/blooden.html. Historical Fiction. ‘Making and Remaking the Past’ Dr. Wendy Donawa Reading Canada Dr. Leah C. Fowler. SECTION III. Personal and National Identity in the 19 th Century.

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Historical Fiction

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  1. Retrieved from: http://www.mysterescanadiens.ca/blooden.html Historical Fiction ‘Making and Remaking the Past’ Dr. Wendy Donawa Reading Canada Dr. Leah C. Fowler

  2. SECTION III Personal and National Identity in the 19th Century

  3. Retrieved from: http://thebarking.com/2010/02/scribbling-mapmaking-drifting/ III.A. The ‘psycho-geography’ emerges: American and British Cultural templates

  4. Both Britain and the United States shared strong historical ties of language and culture with the colony (not-yet-country) of Canada. These connections, allegiances, divided loyalties, and antagonisms were repeatedly strained and tested from the late eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century.

  5. The Hollow Tree (Janet Lunn, 1997) • This text explores conflicted themes of identity and belonging, against an American Revolution background. Retrieved from: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/read-up-on-it/015020-8005-e.html

  6. Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (Janet Lunn, 1986) • This text explores questions of personal and national identity, comparing two sets of cultural beliefs in a psychologically gripping, somewhat Gothic narrative. Attuned to spirits and gifted with second sight, Mairi, travels from Scotland to Canada in 1815, responding to a call for help from her cousin Duncan. Retrieved from: http://childrensbookshop.com/book.php?cno=45598

  7. The Root Cellar (Janet Lunn, 1985) • Rose Larkin, an American orphan who has been sent to live with Canadian relatives, enters an abandoned root cellar, and finds herself transported into the American Civil war era. Disguised as a boy, she sets off to find Will, a Canadian who has gone to fight on the Union side. Retrieved from: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/128219867

  8. The Youngest Spy (Barry McDivitt, 2007) • This text shows how the convulsions of the American Civil War reverberated across the border. The resulting disputes and shifting alliances play out in 1863 Toronto, where 14-year-old George’s father has joined the Union army. He is recruited as ‘the youngest spy’ for the Crown, and helps uncover a southern plot to incite an armed rebellion north of the 49th parallel. Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL9866916W/The_Youngest_Spy

  9. Retrieved from: http://www.robinsonlibrary.com/america/canada/northwest/hudsonsbay.htm III.B. The company store: Unpacking ‘heroic’ myths

  10. The Hudson Bay Company was virtually a country within a country: its vast territories made it the largest landowner in what would become the Dominion of Canada. Its far-flung networks of trading posts and First Nations alliances formed the nucleus for later bureaucratic and official authority and its power and influence gave it a mythic dimension that is countered by the following fiction examined.

  11. A Discovery of Strangers (Rudy Wiebe, 1994) • Wiebe addresses moral and social questions through focus on specific, rigorously researched historical moments, in this case Franklin’s map-making expeditions of 1819-1821. Wiebe charts the first encounter between the English explorers and the nomadic Dene cultures, and the disastrous 1820 through the territory of the Tesot’ine to the Arctic coast. Retrieved from: http://49thshelf.com/Books/A/A-Discovery-Of-Strangers

  12. Isobel Gunn (Audrey Thomas, 1999) • This text is based on an 1807 event in the early Canadian fur trade. It paints a compelling portrait of a harsh land and of the Company policies’ impact on the lives of the powerless. Gender and identity, and their relation to power, are at the heart of this novel. Isobel has the agency and opportunities of a man until she is discovered and punished for her presumption, ‘reduced’ to being a woman again, deprived of work or a place in the social order, deprived even of her child. Retrieved from: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1840109.Isobel_Gunn

  13. Retrieved from: http://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1303138100962 III.C. Drawing boundaries: From colony to nation

  14. Retrieved from: http://ernest-valeton-de-boissiere.blogspot.com/2008/08/silkville-monument-inscrit-en-1972.html III.C.1. Nineteenth century settlement and the Imperial ideal

  15. As the colony moved toward nationhood, considerations of identity and boundaries grew more complex. • What and who was to be included or excluded in this new nation? The narratives of nation-making are evident in the: • hardscrabble tenacity of the Maritime settlements; • in the resistance of Loyalists and Rebels of White, Black and Aboriginal origin, and; • in the influx of Asian labour that made a nation-building railway possible.

  16. Retrieved from: http://www.cbc.ca/whodoyouthinkyouare/stories/ext_mary2.php III.C.2. Maritime tenacity

  17. Ann and Seamus (Kevin Major, 2003) • Based on a true story of heroism, this novel explores the 1828 rescue by Ann Harvey’s family of 163 people shipwrecked off Newfoundland’s barren and south coast. Seventeen-year-old Ann and her father perform a heroic rescue of those aboard the ship Dispatch, including a young Irishman with whom Ann falls in love. A poignant choice must be made between a life with Seamus and ‘the solid rock of home’. Retrieved from: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/read-up-on-it/015020-043000-e.html

  18. The Gravesavers (Sheree Fitch, 2004) • This tale blends a contemporary coming-of-age story with the historical wreck of the S.S. Atlantic in 1873. Twelve-year-old Mim unwillingly spends the summer with her crotchety grandmother in the Maritimes. Discovering a tiny skulls on the beach, she dives into solving a ghostly mystery around the century-old shipwreck and its surviving 12-year-old immigrant. Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL2128853W/The_Gravesavers

  19. Retrieved from: http://revolutions.pbworks.com/w/page/11328639/9FrIM%20AM%20Philosophy%20or%20Ideology%20of%20groups III.C.3. Loyalists and rebels: White, Black, Aboriginal

  20. Retrieved from: http://www.grandriveruel.ca/2008_conference.htm III.C.3.a. United Empire Loyalists and Rebels

  21. Following the American Revolution, the migration of Loyalists to Canada guaranteed social and political tensions in both Upper and Lower Canada. These frustrations found expression in the armed Rebellions of 1837 and 1838, opposing the ‘Family Compact’ oligarchy that controlled patronage throughout Upper Canada, and blocked attempts at reform.

  22. Crook’s trilogy (Connie Brummel Crook) • Flight (1991) • Meyer’s Creek (1995) • Meyer’s Rebellion (2008) • This family saga offers adventure, romance, and intrigue against an authentic political background. Meyer’s Rebellion finds the grandson of the original settler caught between Loyalist and Reformer sympathies. Retrieved from: http://www.tower.com/meyers-rebellion-connie-brummel-crook-paperback/wapi/112116870

  23. The Rebel’s Daughter: The 1837 Rebellion Diary of Arabella Stevenson (Janet Lunn, 2006) • This tale is told in diary form by 12-year-old Arabella, whose comfortable upper class life falls apart when her father is imprisoned for his part in the Upper Canada rebellions. Retrieved from: http://www.scholastic.ca/dearcanada/books/arebelsdaughter.htm

  24. Retrieved from: http://www.bccns.com/history/loyalists/ III.C.3.b. The African diaspora

  25. Other narratives, such as those of the African diaspora, are less well-known. The Loyalist exodus from the United States around 1783, brought an influx of both free and enslaved Blacks. • Many Canadians remain unaware that slavery existed in Canada, and that French, English, and Native communities owned African slaves, a practice that continued in some form until the 1833 abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire.

  26. The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada (Benjamin Drew, 1856; reprinted in 2000) • Teachers interested in understanding the place of slavery and Black history in Canada will appreciate this text. It includes first-hand accounts by Black people of their experience in slavery and their flight to Canada. Retrieved from: http://books.google.ca/books/about/Narratives_of_fugitive_slaves_in_Canada.html?id=S2279qZIURwC&redir_esc=y

  27. I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land: A Lost Tale of the Underground Railroad (Karolyn Smardz Frost, 2007) • This account was unearthed through the archeological excavation of the Toronto home of Lucie and Thornton Blackburn, ex-slaves who had fled the United States and found their way to Canada. Their tale reminds the reader that the real heroes of the Underground Railroad were slaves themselves. Retrieved from: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50045.I_ve_Got_a_Home_in_Glory_Land

  28. Stones (William Bell, 2003) • This text evokes the fate of ex-slaves who chose a life in Canada. Two contemporary teens put to rest the unquiet ghost of a persecuted slave who once farmed in Ontario. Retrieved from: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/read-up-on-it/015020-025002-e.html

  29. Elijah of Buxton (Christopher Paul Curtis, 2007) • Eleven-year-old Elijah is the first freeborn African-Canadian child in Buxton, Ontario, a settlement for runaway slaves. Elijah lives a secure and comfortable life in this community with a loving and protective family. But when his friend Mr. Leroy has his savings stolen, savings intended to buy his family out of slavery, Elijah is drawn into a dangerous salvage mission across the border amid the horrors his parents had fled. Retrieved from: http://www.storysnoops.com/detail.php?id=10

  30. Retrieved from: http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/settlement/kids/021013-2161.4-e.html III.C.3.c. Métis resistance

  31. The political impact of Loyalists’ descendants and of American slavery were not the only revolutionary forces shaping the huge land that would become Canada. • To the West, one outcome of the previous century’s fur trading empire was a Métis culture, comprising of largely Catholic, Francophone, and Michif-speaking offspring of French fur traders and their Aboriginal wives.

  32. Louis Riel: A Comic Strip Biography (Chester Brown, 2003) • This text revisits the critical years of Riel’s life and the development of the Canadian west as a political entity. Retrieved from: http://torontopubliclibrary.typepad.com/north-york-central-blog/2011/12/louis-riel-is-one-of-canadas-most-controversial-figures-celebrated-by-some-scorned-by-others-december-8th-marks-the-142.html

  33. Retrieved from: http://asia-canada.ca/changing-perspectives/chinese/chinese-labour-builds-cpr III.C.4. Asian labour and a national railway

  34. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) could not have been completed without the labour of 17, 000 Chinese workers who toiled, including many who died, in its making. • Asian immigration was determined by economic pressures, by Canadian immigration policies, and by the railroad’s need for labour. The levels of racism, hostility, and violence that met the workers varied, on the one hand with the urgency of the need for their labour, or on the other, the perception that they were to be blamed for lower wages.

  35. White Jade Tiger (Julie Lawson, 1993) • This time-slip novel is based on the railroad period and real events in the 1880s. Jasmine, a Canadian teen, is transported through time by a talismanic jade tiger from Victoria’s present-day Chinatown into the past, and adventures up the CPR line through the Fraser Canyon. She accompanies Keung, a 15-year-old immigrant searching for his vanished father who had earlier left their village to make his fortune at Gold Mountain. Retrieved from: http://www.tradebit.com/filedetail.php/131954233-white-jade-tiger-julie-lawson

  36. Tales from Gold Mountain (Paul Yee, 1989) • Anchored in the railway-building era, these novels bring the reader into the twentieth century and toward a flowering of Asian writing, especially that of the multi-generation family saga often charting the family’s identity shifting from alien to immigrant to contemporary citizen. Retrieved from: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL726658W/Tales_from_Gold_Mountain

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