Remembering the spirit of the Beothuk : The Beothuk Saga of Bernard Assiniwi

• Main Author: Christophe Premat
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2020
• Subjects: Language; Communication and Culture not elsewhere classified; Culture; Gender; Sexuality; Globalisation and Culture; First Nations; Beothuk; Bernard Assiniwi; Decolonial paradigm; Postcolonial studies; Cultural genocide; Initiation; Saga; Historical novel
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.17045/sthlmuni.13077278.v1; https://figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Remembering_the_spirit_of_the_Beothuk_The_Beothuk_Saga_of_Bernard_Assiniwi/13077278

The paper was presented at the 20 th International Baltic Conference on Canadian Studies (10 October, 2020, Vilnius University) and deals with the historical novel of Bernard Assiniwi, The Beothuk Saga. Bernard Assiniwi was a well-known writer of the First Nations whose masterpiece was a historical novel written in French in 1996, The Beothuk Saga (Assiniwi, 2000) . Divided into three parts (The initiate, the invaders and the genocide), Assiniwi incorporates oral stories in the written genre of historical novels. The aim of the novel is both ethnological and cultural as the author presents the history of a nation that was destroyed by colonizers with the help of rival clans. By introducing a chronology on the history of this nation, Assiniwi adds a literary style to enlighten the cultural specificity of the Beothuk. Some researchers in native studies focused on the role of ethnopoetics (Feld, 1982) in order to catch the language and the spirit of the First Nations, whereas others prefer to introduce a form of comparative poetology (Miner, 1990; Beaujour, 2017: 19). The comparative poetology avoids the ethnocentric illusion and opens the possibility of translating and understanding the cultural and artistic productions of the First Nations. Hence, the historical novel is an interesting genre as it contributes to collect fragments of oral traditions into a continuous narrative. Unlike comparative poetology, the focus is on how the author re-members some important actions from unknown ancestors to describe a forgotten genealogy. By using the concept of “remembering” (Premat, Sule, 2016), the present presentation shows how the story of the Beothuks echoes an ancient tradition of Icelandic and Nordic sagas . Assiniwi rediscovers some important features of the first novels to give a voice to this nation. It seems that Assiniwi describes an ancient form of métissage that was possible in the genealogy of the Beothuks. In the previous studies on The Beothuk Saga, the hybridity of the narrative was analyzed as well as the ...