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JOHN FRANKLIN’S FIRST ARCTIC LAND EXPEDITION THROUGH A DOUBLE LENS
exacts. It is plausible that draftsman and midshipman Robert Hood could have
fallen in love with her after drawing a portrait in the camp. However, Wiebe
developed an entire intricate love affair between the young girl and not only
one man in his fiction.
THE NATIVE PERSPECTIVE
The civilisational point of view in A Discovery of Strangers is dramatically
disparate when set against Franklin’s travelogue hypotext: the landscape itself
assumes the features of an omnipresent supernatural being which provides
the inhabitants with food, clothing, tools and other necessities, on condition
that they should obey the strict rules and taboos of natural survival.
Chapter 1 bears the indicative title “The Animals in This Country” and alerts
the postmodern reader to the powerful links between the Natives and wildlife,
many species of which function as totemic animals in the respective tribes.
Thus caribou, capable of withstanding even the northern winter, appear in the
introductory pages of the novel, and recur throughout the text as the source
of food and garments, but also as the paradigms of steadfastness and commu¬
nal behaviour. In historical and geographical context, the motif is a mainstay
of Tetsot’ine life, which Franklin was ignorant about before reaching those
northern latitudes. According to Robert Janes, the tribe was indeed an edge¬
of-the-forest people. They spent their summers on the barren ground, custom¬
arily following the movement of the caribou and catching abundant amounts
of fish in the numerous lakes, rivers and brooks. In the winter they would
return to the forest edge, where they went on to hunt caribou, moose and some
kinds of small game (Janes 41). A passage will serve well to illustrate the
all-permeating force of life in the Native worldview:
Lying safe, alert in this instant of rest, they were reassured that when that blazing
sun stands three times its height over the glazed levels of this lake, they will feel the
restlessness of their young grow heavier within them. And then they will move again
into their continual travel. [...] From every direction more and more of them will
drift together, thousands and tens of thousands drawn together by the lengthening
light into the worn paths of their necessary journey, an immense dark river of life
flowing north to the ocean, to the calving grounds where they know themselves to
have been born (Wiebe 3).
The narration in such instances gradually transports the reader into the sen¬
sations, and then even the thoughts of the animals the tribe draws its sustenance
from; it is by no means an error on the narrator’s part to declare that the
caribou possess some knowledge of their own birth, which sets this novel far
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