Oldal 160 [160]
CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
a woman of the country” (Wiebe 98). In fact, the historical source must be lent
credence here, since Franklin spoke to several more reliable witnesses soon
after the deed committed in the treeless wilderness, and Dr Richardson and
seaman Hepburn were close to the spot when (in all likelihood) Iroquois voya¬
geur Michel killed Hood from behind with a rifle:
[B]ut the conduct of Michel soon gave rise to other thoughts, and excited suspicions
which were confirmed, when upon examining the body, I discovered that the shot
had entered the back part of the head, and passed out at the forehead, and that the
muzzle of the gun had been applied so close as to set fire to the night-cap behind.
The gun, which was of the longest kind supplied to the Indians, could not have been
placed in a position to inflict such a wound, except by a second person (Franklin
11 338-339).
The explorers set out into the unknown territory not heeding Indigenous wis¬
dom, accumulated over centuries of struggle with the extreme forces of the
natural surroundings, to which Greenstockings makes a mental note: “Only
Whites would enter the long darkness with such an interminable, annihilating
walk. Only Whitemuds” (Wiebe 137). While she does not give that fact deeper
consideration, but immediately flirts with the hunter Broadface in a vividly
lascivious language, her father has already found an explanation in the ani¬
mistic tradition of his people, ironic when placed in the appropriate European
context: “[T]hey don’t need the animal circle that gives us life every day. They
want to live inside straight walls, as straight as round trees can make them
— maybe they have to live inside the crossed-together corners of the trees that
gave them their endless sorrow and wrong!” (Wiebe 129). He goes on to say that
crossing the trees is unnatural, and that the Whites even smear the trees with
their first ancestors, so that multiple destinies are accumulated in a limited
space — many conclusions like this may be found in the novel, and they dispel
any romantic notion that the Native Canadians hold the unmistakable truth
of all of life’s aspects. Simply put, the English explorers display arrogance in
the face of clear signs of the oncoming winter, but Keskarrah remains impris¬
oned within his deterministic system of animals and plants as living beings
coequal with man. At several places Back infantilises the Natives when he says
that the expedition is made up of the King’s warriors, and that the tribe will
be richly rewarded if they hunt enough caribou for the needs of the English
(Aspenlieder 81). In comments like this, the two worlds of Europe and the
Northwestern Territories could hardly be more apart and stranger to each
other.
The process of geographic discovery is never actually the uncovering of an
absolutely uninhabited land, which the Eurocentric “Adams” could name and
shape to taste, but usually a friction-filled coexistence of the newly arrived
s 158 e