1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910154961403321

Autore

Niven Frederick <1878-1944, >

Titolo

The Flying Years [[electronic resource] /] / Frederick Niven ; afterword by Alison Calder

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Waterloo, Ontario : , : Wilfrid Laurier University Press, , [2015]

©2015

ISBN

1-77112-075-4

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (250 p.)

Collana

Early Canadian literature series

Disciplina

C813/.52

Soggetti

Canadian fiction - 20th century

LITERARY CRITICISM / General

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Cover; Contents; Series Editor's Preface; The Flying Years; Contents; I: Eviction; II: Red River; III: To the Mountains; IV: Indian Woman; V: Race; VI: Kildonan Bell; VII: In the Haar; VIII: Ettrick Brothers; IX: At Lasswade; X: Impulse; XI: Travellers' Tales; XII: Escape; XIII: "The Great Sickness"; XIV: Blue Jays; XV: Progress; XVI: S.D.; XVII: Blackfoot Crossing; XVIII: A Collet-Ring; XIX: Prairie-Schooner; XX: Fiona; XXI: Voilà les Bœufs!; XXII: Mr. Hodges Advises; XXIII: Photograph; XXIV: Birth; XXV: Changes; XXVI: Descendants; XXVII: Business; XXVIII: Two Sons; XXIX: Heather

XXX: Buffalo BillXXXI: "A Married Man's Town"; XXXII: Sacrifice; XXXIII: Blue Gentians; XXXIV: Angus and Sam; XXXV: Voice of the Prairie; Afterword

Sommario/riassunto

Originally published in 1935, Frederick Niven’s The Flying Years tells the history of Western Canada from the 1850s to the 1920s as witnessed by Angus Munro, a young Scot forced to emigrate to Canada when his family is evicted from their farm. Working in the isolated setting of Rocky Mountain House, Angus secretly marries a Cree woman, who dies in a measles epidemic while he is on an extended business trip. The discovery, fourteen years later, that his wife had given birth to a boy who was adopted by another Cree family and raised to be “all Indian” confirms Angus’s sympathies toward Aboriginal



peoples, and he eventually becomes the Indian Agent on the reserve where his secret son lives. Angus’s ongoing negotiation of both the literal and symbolic roles of “White Father” takes place within the context of questions about race and nation, assimilation and difference, and the future of the Canadian West. Against a background of resource exploitation and western development, the novel queries the place of Aboriginal peoples in this new nation and suggests that progress brings with it a cost. Alison Calder’s afterword examines the novel’s depiction of the paternalistic relationship between the Canadian government and Aboriginal peoples in Western Canada, and situates the novel in terms of contemporary discussions about race and biology.