ReReading Catharine Parr Traill: Stranging the Familiar

By Dorothy Lander

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harp People's Press
• Release date: Aug 29, 2023
• ISBN: 9781990137365

Dorothy Lander

Dorothy Lander (MAdEd – StFX; PhD – Nottingham) is co-publisher of the social enterprise publishing house HARP Publishing The People’s Press (www.harppublishing.ca), a multi-media publishing house established in 2018 and dedicated to the healing arts and arts for health equity. Dorothy is retired from two careers at St. Francis Xavier University (StFX): Manager of Service Operations (1976 to 1995) and Professor in the Department of Adult Education (1997-2007), serving as MAdEd thesis advisor. Dorothy can be found on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Book preview

Cover: ReReading Catharine Parr Traill: Stranging The Familiar by Dorothy Lander. Foreword by Maurice Switzer, Citizen of the Mississaugas of Alderville First Nation. Author of, We Are All Treaty People.

Re-Reading Catharine Parr Traill

Stranging the Familiar

Dorothy Lander

A harp, which is the logo of HARP Publishing, The People's Press Clydesdale, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Harp Publishing: The People’s Press

Clydesdale, Nova Scotia, Canada

HARP Publishing: The People’s Press,

216 Clydesdale Road,

Clydesdale, Nova Scotia,

Canada B2G 2K9

www.harppublishing.ca

Re-Reading Catharine Parr Traill ©2022 Dorothy Lander

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publishers. Information about purchasing copies of this book can be obtained from the publishers

A harp, which is the logo of HARP Publishing, The People's Press Clydesdale, Nova Scotia, Canada.

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Catalogue-in-Publication data is on file with the Library & Archives Canada

ISBN: 978-1-990137-13-6

Book Layout: Jeanious Design | [e-mail]

Front Cover Art: Dorothy Lander, [e-mail]

Back Cover Art and Illustrations: Koren Smoke, Alderville First Nation, https://www.avinkart45.com/

Also available as an ebook

The Circle of Abundance Indigenous Program, Coady International Institute, St. Francis Xavier University: https://coady.stfx.ca/circle-of-abundance; and David Suzuki Foundation (one nature): https://davidsuzuki.org receive 20% of all sales, distributed equally.

Logo: Proudly Supporting David Suzuki Foundation, davidsuzuki.org, Fier De Soutenir Fondation David Suzuki, fr.davidsuzuki.org.Logo: Coady International Institute, St. Francis Xavier University.

Foreword

It’s never too late to speak one’s truth

By Maurice Switzer

In grade school I recall having to memorize poems by Duncan Campbell Scott, oblivious to the fact that the author was responsible for devising a network of residential schools that caused irrevocable damage to the lives of thousands of Indigenous kids like me.

We were assigned to read the rhymes of venerated Canadian authors like Bliss Carman, Pauline Johnson, and—nearing Remembrance Day—Col. John McCrae, then stand and recite them to our less-than enthusiastic classmates. Scott’s poems were often included in our English literature curriculum.

I can’t recall which ones, but most teacher selections were usually of a bucolic nature. I’m pretty sure I would have remembered if we had been asked to memorize The Half-Breed Girl in which Scott describes his subject’s savage life, undiscovered dreams, and troubled breast or The Onondaga Madonna about a tragic savage…of a weird and waning race whose pagan passion burns and glows.

His artistic pursuits notwithstanding, Scott published nine volumes of poetry, as well as fiction and non-fiction titles and short stories, was president of the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra and a founder of the Dominion Drama Festival and hung around with legendary painters like Lawren Harris and Clarence Gagnon—his biographers tend to euphemistically refer to his complicated legacy.

This was the same single-minded civil servant who, as deputy-superintendent of the federal Department of Indian Affairs for 19 years, doggedly pursued his goal to get rid of the Indian problem. His primary assimilationist tool was the notorious network of Indian Residential Schools, for which Canada and the church denominations that operated the schools have issued abject apologies and paid out some $7 billion to settle lawsuits representing the interests of the 150,000 students forced to attend the institutions. Those children suffered abuses that no less an esteemed personage than Pope Francis has characterized as genocide.

Records show that Scott was clearly aware of the extent of the problems at the schools, ignoring the advice of Canada’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Peter Bryce, who in 1907 submitted a report noting that unsanitary conditions and overcrowding were spreading disease, primarily tuberculosis, and that students were dying as a result. Scott disregarded the report and Dr. Bryce was subsequently dismissed. In the face of such troubling evidence, Scott’s response was to push for changes to the Indian Act in 1920 that made attendance at the schools mandatory for Indigenous children aged 7 to 15.

A century later, Canadians are still trying to come to grips with the harm caused to Indigenous communities and the country’s reputation as a global human rights champion.

As unaware as I was in elementary school about some troubling aspects of Scott’s poetry, I was similarly uninformed at the time that my maternal grandfather, Moses Muskrat Marsden, had been a 19th-century student at the Alnwick Industrial School in Alderville First Nation, from which he ran away at the age of 8, for reasons that neither he nor wife Nellie Orma Franklin would ever share with their 13 children.

By most realistic standards, Catharine Parr Traill certainly does not belong in the contemptible historic company of people like Duncan Campbell Scott, who deliberately used their authority and influence to create policies that caused irreparable harm to others, including people much like my own grandparents.

When we think of CPT, we imagine a prim and proper Englishwoman transplanted in 1832 from comfortable Suffolk surroundings to what she would call The Backwoods of Canada.

Excerpts from her 24 books—and from the 19 publications authored by younger sister Susanna Roughing It in The Bush Moodie—have routinely been required reading for students in schools across Canada. Their influence has been substantial in how Canadians saw Indigenous peoples for over a century.

The daughters of Elizabeth and Thomas Strickland both married retired soldiers and both set up their Upper Canadian homes in the settlement of Lakefield, a village near Peterborough, Ontario, whose founding fathers included their brother Col. Samuel Strickland.

I grew up in Lakefield and spent my elementary and secondary school years there. The village recently commemorated the establishment of its first Indigenous household by my grandparents after they left Alderville First Nation in the early 1920s.

Boyhood friend Tam Grant lived in a one-and-a-half-storey white clapboard house on the western shore of the Otonabee River. I have eaten sandwiches in the kitchen and slept overnight in the dwelling where Catharine Parr Traill lived from 1862 until her death at 97 in 1899, and where she composed most of her manuscripts.

She called the frame house Westove after her husband’s family home in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. Located at 16 Smith St. in Lakefield, it is still a private residence with a historical plaque in place at the driveway entrance.

Neither Strickland sister had married into wealth, and like many of their fellow countrymen, found themselves living pioneer lifestyles in unfamiliar surroundings by necessity, and hoped that their first-hand experience could dispel some of the rosy fictions being spun by British agents eager to encourage migration to the distant colonies.

In her introduction to Backwoods, Catharine cautioned that the old and the young, the master and the servant, are alike obliged to labour for a livelihood, without respect to former situation or rank!

In addition to chronicling the pioneer lifestyle, the sisters produced children’s books, poetry, and field guides to the flora and fauna they catalogued in their new surroundings. In Sisters in the Wilderness, biographer Charlotte Gray notes that both women had a great influence on England’s understanding of colonial Canada, as well as on Canada’s own vision of its young self. Their writings became essential elements of Canadian studies courses for decades and are still considered classic examples of pioneer memoirs.

As well as cementing her reputation as a reliable chronicler of early European settlement in Canada, Catharine came to be regarded as an accomplished botanist, collecting Canadian flowers and plants and pressing them between the pages of books, while writing detailed notes about each species.

Together with her niece, Susanna’s daughter Agnes Dunbar FitzGibbon—a skilled flower illustrator—Catharine produced Studies of Plant Life in Canada and Canadian Wildflowers, still considered seminal field guides. She created more than 20 bound herbaria (blank books filled with pressed plants and annotations) that now hold treasured places in the Canadian Museum of Nature’s plant collection, along with first editions of her field guides.

It was these works that made Dorothy Lander, the author of the book you are reading, feel like a kindred spirit. She referred to Catharine Parr Traill as her floral godmother, the inspiration for her accumulating and writing about a vast personal collection of dried plant specimens.

Lander is a self-described writer and nature artist who, with husband John Graham-Pole operates a social enterprise publishing house based in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. The epiphany she credits with inspiring her to write Re-Reading Catharine Parr Traill; Stranging the Familiar occurred during the pandemic lockdown, when the couple adopted the daily routine of re-reading aloud to one another passages from Nature books.

One of these books was CPT’s 1852 novel Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains, the first full-length work of children’s fiction by a Canadian author. Lander, now in her eighth decade, recalled last hearing the story read aloud to her by her father 65 years earlier in the family’s farmhouse located on the south shore of Rice Lake.

In addition to feeling a naturalist’s bond to Catharine Parr-Traill’s botanical bent, Lander also felt strong geographic links to CPT’s writings about the area of her own birthplace, a temperance farm community known as Plainville. Some of Lander’s inventory of dried plant specimens were picked in the Rice Lake Plains.

Canadian Crusoes is a fanciful story about three children—an English-Canadian boy and girl and a French-Canadian boy—who become lost in the Canadian wilderness, depicted by the author as the Rice Lake area in south-central Ontario. They must fend for themselves to survive, as did the book’s namesake and central character of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe.

The trio are immeasurably helped by the skills of a Mohawk girl, Indiana, and the group’s cultural composition has led some scholars to speculate that the story is Parr Traill’s metaphor for the kind of cooperation that would be required to forge a Canadian nation.

Dorothy Lander’s re-reading triggered much different responses.

Whereas she was captivated as a child by her father’s expressive recital of Canadian Crusoes, she now heard its words in a different light.