Canada's day of atonement, the Contemporary Native Literary Renaissance, the Native Cultural Renaissance and post-centenary Canadian mythology

grantor: University of TorontoLittle attention has been paid to the Contemporary Native Literary Renaissance (CNLR) and the Native Cultural Renaissance (NCR) of the 1960s and 1970s in Canada. As well, there has been little consideration of the manner in which this Renaissance has affected non-Native Canadian literature. However, this dissertation attempts to prove that the CNLR and the NCR have affected both contemporary Canadian mythologies and the criticism of Native literatures in Canada. This dissertation relies more on the principles of storytelling than theory to make its suggestions. It immerses itself in a story which surfaced in the nineteenth century in Canada and which I have called Canada's "search for a sacred mythology." It then draws connections between this story and later manifestations of this story in post-centenary, non-Native Canadian mythologies and the criticism surrounding Tomson Highway and his work in order to suggest that contemporary modifications of this story indicate that Eurocentric negotiations with pan-Canadianism, or nationalism, show an anxiety with contemporary aboriginal influence. When I do rely on theory, I rely heavily on Northrop Frye, and I create both a large pan-Canadian "centre" and pan-Indian "centre" to account for mythological change and cultural exchange. While such centres do not exist, and while post-structuralist theories could easily dismantle the binary which I have created, my methodology has allowed me to search for large mythological changes, and my three most noteworthy findings are the following: (1) given time, it may be possible to suggest that Canadian history has become a contemporary trickster which has been born out of contemporary, reductive notions of the sacred and profane, or reductive understandings of "Native culture" and the "Canadian nation," respectively; (2) contemporary attempts to justify this nation's beginnings are often arrested in traumatic recall of the holocaust which has happened here; and (3) that self-reflexivity which is found in post-centenary Canadian mythologies, as well as in the criticism surrounding Tomson Highway, might be attributable to the social and political fervor of the NCR, which rekindled an awareness of the importance of participation between speakers and listeners, and/or the formal characteristics of Native oral literatures.Ph.D