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CANADIAN LANDSCAPES/ PAYSAGES CANADIENS
that it is through the subversion of historiographic fragments (passages of
Franklins narrative occurring throughout the novel as intermissions) that
fiction can present a wider array of voices, ideologies, viewpoints and make for
a truer polyphony in this modelled world. Ihe conclusion of the novel under¬
lines this mixing of systems of belief, with first Robert Hood and then his and
Greenstockings’ child acting as symbols of this cross-cultural vision (Langston
144). Although Hood never sees his child, he sincerely hopes that he or she
will be brought to England and that Greenstockings will go through an Old
Testament purification ritual, despite the fact that her tribespeople doubt Gods
power when the explorers cannot manage the life in the Canadian North.
Although she plays a relevant role in the narrative, she never speaks through
a voice of her own and we learn about her actions and words indirectly since
Wiebe supplies the Indigenous population with a communal voice. This tech¬
nique makes for a far more palpable equality of the Tetsot’ine and the English
in comparison with Franklin’s travelogue. Greenstockings decides to give birth
at a tabooed place near the lake of the great bear, a cliff called Forbidden Rock,
and her father wisely lets her go: “Keskarrah smiled at her when she left, and
she understood him: it seems your child is like you — contrary” (Wiebe 255).
Her thoughts that we read indicate a resilience far beyond Eurocentric models
of thinking, for instance, when she views Hood as prey, in a love affair similar
to a meeting of two primordial animals. Even the explanation of the baby’s
birth regresses into the mythical narrative of a child found in a caribou’s foot¬
print, thus completing the cycle of unity of all beings under the sun, and
closing off the plot in the paradigm of a new life in harmony with the totemic
animals, life-sustaining plants, and the natural habitat for all the humans who
can comply with the ways of the Canadian North.
CONCLUSION
The intertextual dialogue between Wiebe and Franklin spans almost two
centuries, and A Discovery of Strangers fundamentally offsets the absence of
the Native point of view from the colonial narrative. While Franklin’s journal
views the Canadian North as an inhospitable virginal land that can offer infinite
material resources, Wiebe’s retelling of the expedition is anchored in the Native
worldview, where man has to obey the natural laws as attested by the blurred
line between mythology and history since time immemorial. With the per¬
spective now shifted to the aboriginal inhabitants, the reader experiences the
sorely absent other side of the encounter between the Tetsot’ine tribe and the
English explorers. Rudy Wiebe allows the Native mythopoetic framework and
collective thinking to embody all the participants in the storyline, thus
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