Refashioning Mi’kmaw Narratives into Maritime Fictions: Theodore Goodridge Roberts, Frank Parker Day, and Alden Nowlan

• Published in: Journal of Canadian Studies
• Main Author: Creelman, David
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) 2015
• Subjects: History; Cultural Studies; Mi’kmaq; Mi’kmaw
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jcs.49.2.150; https://utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/jcs.49.2.150

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, missionary Silas Rand worked with the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia. His two-volume collection, Legends of the Micmacs, contains 87 distinct stories, and these texts soon became important source materials for Euro-Canadian writers who were interested in telling stories about the Mi’kmaq people. Three Maritime writers attempted to tell tales from within an Aboriginal perspective: Theodore Roberts in The Red Feathers (1907), Frank Parker Day in John Paul’s Rock (1932), and Alden Nowlan in Nine Micmac Legends (1982). All three writers retell or refashion Mi’kmaq narratives, all three provoke questions related to the issue of appropriation, and all three advance their own imperial, colonial, or modernist perspectives as somehow innately part of the Maritime experience. Roberts’s imperial romance, Day’s realist-romance, and Nowlan’s modernist reshapings tell us a great deal about the shifting perspectives of Euro-Canadians towards Aboriginal peoples, as well as the shifting discourses that have confined Aboriginal communities.