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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 underlines 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 technique 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 footprint, 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 perspective 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 + 160 +
