Appropriation, Absence and the Canadian Studies Classroom

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on “appropriation of voice” or “cultural appropriation” in the Canadian Studies classroom. It is aimed at instructors who teach Canadian Literature outside Canada, in places where Canada is itself a strange, foreign or even exotic country. Keeping classroom practice in mind, I divide the article into three sections. The first provides a classroom-oriented overview of appropriation debates; the second looks at tokenism on reading lists; the third reflects on problems of absence or of dealing with canonical texts that skim over Canada’s Indigenous Peoples—specifically, by analyzing two brief examples from Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and one from Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996).

KEYWORDS:

• Stephen Leacock
• cultural appropriation
• teaching Canadian Studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Lutz uses “Indian” for “the (stereotyped) images which [many] have of Native Americans” (2016, 23). Thus, Chief Wahoo on the Cleveland Indians logo is not a “Native American” but an “Indian.”

2. The student’s words are reproduced exactly from her informal e-mail message after an in-class presentation on Laurence (she was a third-year student who had studied English only in Slovenia). She had also mentioned that her views would probably be less “lenient” if she were in North America, where “different views on appropriation” prevail.

3. Though “settler” may be a contentious term, it is less wieldy than “the non-Indigenous peoples living in Canada who form the European-descended sociopolitical majority” (Vowel 2018, chap., 2). But what to call the (almost uniformly) white students I teach in Europe, in a country that did not gain statehood until 1991?

4. It is easy for writers and the rest of us to forget, for example, that Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Rio de Janeiro are in the same time zone, that the sun rises and sets and different times in different places, that winter and summer are “reversed” in the two hemispheres, and so on. A non-fiction example from Mordecai Richler’s Home Sweet Home: My Canadian Album: “The federal government in distant and sometimes utterly daft Ottawa had just awarded the town [of Yellowknife] $40,000 worth of fireworks to be set off on Canada Day, July 1. The locals, instead of rising to cheer, were rolling about with laughter” (1984, 217).

5. Gregory Younging argues against the “tendency to pigeonhole the Indigenous Voice—this important, distinct canon of literatures—as a subsection of CanLit” (2018, 15). When I mentioned this distinction early in the semester, my students appeared puzzled at how an author born in Canada might not be part and parcel of CanLit.

6. In “Subversive Humour: Canadian Native Playwrights’ Winning Weapon of Resistance,” Mirjam Hirch accurately observes that “it is important not to play the game of ‘Spot the Trickster’” (2005, 95) any time a First Nations author tells a joke. Michelle Gadpaille observes the similarly reductive tendency to engage in “creative misreading of tone and genre” and to see Margaret Atwood’s famed survival thesis as “a universalist prescription for a national literature” (especially in Europe) (2014, 165).

7. For the full text of Niedzviecki’s introduction and his commentary on the much-maligned article, see “I invoked” (2017).

8. When I asked students how they lord it over neighboring towns, a student who lives not far south of Sevnica (the First Lady’s hometown) said his village is particularly proud to have “two roundabouts.”

9. A simple and common way to gauge students’ pre-knowledge is to ask them to provide keywords for Canada. In addition to the latest Hollywood heartthrob, students inevitably mention hockey, maple syrup, and Indigenous Peoples (though my students usually say, “Indians.”) When reading Sunshine Sketches, the teacher can ask, “What’s missing from our start-of-semester list?” This, I find, helps match theme and motif against words on the page.

10. From Leacock’s influential Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada: “there is no evidence to show that the [Indigenous] population was ever more than a thin scattering of wanderers over the face of a vast country … The continent was, in truth, one vast silence, broken only by the roar of the waterfall or the cry of the beasts and birds of the forest” (1915, “The Aborigines of Canada”).

11. Here I admit my bias for close reading. The Slovene school system admirably prepares young people for higher education, and they arrive at university with stellar English, but there is a tendency to lose oneself in extra-textual matters such as the author’s biography, literary movement (realism, naturalism, etc.), and the social and historical context—sometimes to the detriment or relegation of the actual text.

12. Note that “peanut butter” is slightly exotic in Europe. In the American classroom, this line surely reads as comedy; in Slovenia, not every student will have dined on peanut-butter-and-jam sandwiches (though they will know Skippy™ and Jif™ from films and sitcoms).

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Jason Blake

Jason Blake is an associate professor in the University of Ljubljana’s English Department. He is co-editor of The Same but Different: Hockey in Quebec, the author of Canadian Hockey Literature, and the editor-in-chief of the Central European Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes en Europe centrale. He translates widely from Slovenian and German, and less widely from French.