Breaking through our ‘historical amnesia’
Charlotte Gray and the Canadian Canoe Museum
On the afternoon of last Sunday at the Elmhirst Resort on Rice Lake, Charlotte Gray spoke to Canadian Canoe Museum supporters and Peterborough book lovers about Canadian history and her recent best-seller, The Promise of Canada (2017). Knowing that Charlotte and I have shared a strong interest in Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill over many years, Ann Wipper invited me to participate.
The event was well attended on a warm and sunny autumn day. My role was to introduce Charlotte and ask some leading questions, though the audience needed little prompting. Her talk was entitled Telling Tales in an Age of Historical Amnesia — it might have been subtitled “The stories we choose to tell ourselves, age by age.” Attentive to the Indigenous presence on Canadian land, she chose to look closely at two periods of settlement history, both of which seem to be fading from public memory today —hence the “amnesia.”
The first was the influx of British settlers and colonizers in the early 1800s, epitomized by Susanna Moodie. Second was the era defined by Harold Innis in the early 20th century when he brought forward, in copious detail, the story of the fur trade and the emergence of a staples economy in Canada. In succession these two “stories” or “tales” became national narratives that, for much of 20th century, served to explain Canada to Canadians. That both Moodie and Innis were canoeists in their day cemented their prominence on this occasion.
Many of us in the Kawarthas know about Moodie, but few will recognize the name of Harold Innis, though it can be found today on one of the colleges of the University of Toronto where he taught economics and economic history during his distinguished career. The Innis story is one of the biographies that make up The Promise of Canada. A brilliant piece of sharp-edged but sympathetic biography, Beaver Tales: Harold Innis and the Ties That Bind is the story of a sensitive and determined farm boy from southwestern Ontario who went off to World War One, was wounded, and brought home with him a sense of outrage at the dismissive treatment he experienced at the hands of snotty British officers. He came back to Canada determined to define the significance and specialness of his boyhood world.
While Moodie endured many alienating experiences as a settler in our local backwoods, she went on in later years to talk about Canada as a land of opportunity for British immigrants — in this brave new world a meritocracy was emerging out of an inherited but antiquated class system. Education could make all the difference in a young Canadian’s opportunities and social position. Loyalty to British institutions also helped.
By contrast, Innis offered a different sort of “creation myth,” one dependent on beaver pelts and the vastness of the country itself. Having paddled Canada’s northern rivers in the summers and done extraordinary “dirt research” and library work, he developed a new perspective that gave the Native Peoples special prominence in the development of Canada’s northwest and its contribution to the larger economy. Gray sees Innis as “a profoundly original thinker.” “The present dominion,” he argued, “emerged not in spite of geography but because of it.”
Noting that there is now a new creation myth at large — one perhaps best defined as a “tale” of diversity and inclusion — Gray argues that we need to be attentive to such changes as they come to dominate public consciousness. There is no master narrative, no correct version, of Canada’s national development — how it came to be, how it evolved, and what it is becoming. Our role as citizens, she suggests, is to continue to study our history closely and to maintain an informed perspective as new changes occur. We must learn to understand and respect these changes and rise above morally charged and polemical calls to alter previous history, for example, by tearing down statues. The preservation of John A. Macdonald’s legacy (and the statues that celebrate him) has an able supporter in Charlotte Gray.
But being once again in close connection with Charlotte reminded me of what a lively and well-informed historian she has become. Indeed, the Winnipeg Free Press has quite correctly called her “One of Canada’s best-loved writers of popular history and literary biography.” Her own story is, I think, worth telling here.
Born in Sheffield, England, she did not immigrate to Canada until she was thirty. She shares that life-altering, thirty-something change with both Susanna Moodie and her sister Catharine Parr Traill. By then she had degrees from Oxford and the London School of Economics and had begun a successful career in magazine writing and editing in London. It was her friendship with George Anderson at Oxford that led her to cross the ocean and take up life in Ottawa where George held an important government position. Ottawa offered different sorts of challenges, but her early years in Canada were certainly less painful than those experienced in the backwoods by Moodie and Traill.
For 20 years she wrote for Canadian newspapers and magazines, but the prospect of undertaking books held a special appeal for her. It was a gamble on her part but it paid off handsomely. From the late 1990s she has forged an extraordinary career as a biographer and an interpreter of Canadian history for popular audiences. Her 10 books make for an impressive record. Hard work and organizational skills have a lot to do with it, as does her perspective as a well-educated immigrant eager to make sense of Canadian history and worthy Canadian lives.
As a writer she has an eye for an attractive subject and the ability to give it body and depth in a vivid way. She sees things freshly and cuts through the blur of historical embroidery and tired old myths. She takes the measure of the larger picture— both nationally and internationally—as it relates to her chosen subject. Moreover, she consults widely and is able to subsume a vast body of academic and scholarly information in a relatively short time. In her biographies she takes what is out there and gives back to her readers a better story. And she does so efficiently, book by book, every two years or so.
If we think in terms of predecessors, we might look to the writings of the still-popular Pierre Berton. But unlike Berton, Gray gives us fascinating stories of women (as well as men) and she does so on her own, without paid researchers and assistants. Having worked closely with her as she made her way through a mass of background material to create Sisters in the Wilderness, I can speak with some knowledge about her self-reliance as a writer and her unfailing ability to seize on the salient detail or the compelling image among the many available to her. Through her writing ability, she has become, like Susanna Moodie, a Canadian icon for her time. And, by the by, her forthcoming book will take her in a new direction. It is about Sir Harry Oakes, the American-born goldmining magnate who helped put Kirkland Lake on the map before he was gruesomely murdered in the Bahamas. Another story worth retelling.