Preview
RUDY WIEBE
WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival
Thursday, October 16
Nickle Arts Museum (U of C)
Friday, October 17
Glenbow Museum Theatre
In May of 1845, two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, left the Thames estuary with the goal of finding the Northwest Passage.
Sir John Franklin, already a veteran of several overland Arctic treks, commanded the expedition. Erebus and Terror were as well fitted as they could have been – both had reinforced hulls, propellers driven by massive steam engines and prows covered with plate-metal for ice-breaking. Franklin’s vessels also carried five years’ worth of provisions, which could be rationed to seven, should the need arise.
With such technology, no rescue plan was thought necessary. Pausing briefly in the Orkneys, the expedition set off for the Canadian Arctic. After a brief encounter near Baffin Island with two whalers, they were never seen again.
So the story goes. Of course, Erebus and Terror were seen again. Their crew of more than 130 men took at least four years to perish entirely. During that time, the dwindling survivors came into repeated contact with the Inuit. And it was the Inuit, ultimately, who were left to relate such information to the rescue expeditions that followed.
If the fate of the last Franklin Expedition was the most spectacular instance of the perfidy of the Arctic, it is by no means the only one. In Playing Dead, now reissued by NeWest Press, Rudy Wiebe delivers a series of discursive essays on the frequently blighted history of exploration in the Canadian Arctic. Why was it that all of Franklin’s men died, as did those of so many other expeditions?
As Wiebe writes: "In startling contrast to the difficulty even the strongest white men have with the Arctic, the Inuit – both men and women, infants and elderly – have lived there happily for at least eight thousand years." Clearly, it is possible to survive.
When Wiebe spoke to me from Edmonton on a recent fall day, the Arctic seemed as remote as the last Franklin Expedition. The veteran author has only recently returned from Montreal, where he was serving as a judge for this year’s Giller Prize. The change in the world of Canadian letters since he began writing 41 years ago has been both taxing and welcome. He jokes that when he published Peace Shall Destroy Many in 1962, only the scorn with which it was received in the Mennonite community saved it from total oblivion.
Today, Wiebe is well established – an officer of the Order of Canada and a two-time Governor General’s Award winner. And it is with felicitous timing that two of his most profound works on the North have been reissued just as the Governor General is conducting her circumpolar tour of our Arctic neighbours. Playing Dead and its companion piece, The Mad Trapper, are the product of Wiebe’s lifelong fascination with the Arctic, a fascination with "that great global sea which surrounds us and in so doing defines our true boundaries."
The inability to adapt to the Arctic, which he deals with in Playing Dead, can extend beyond the merely technical to reflect a social failure.
The Mad Trapper, republished by Red Deer Press, is the story of Albert Johnson, the misanthropic trapper of Rat River. His senseless murder of an RCMP officer precipitated a manhunt through the high Arctic during the winter of 1932, culminating in a bloody shootout. Aside from the innate drama of his life, Johnson is a touchstone for Wiebe, to whom he returns in Playing Dead and elsewhere. He epitomizes a certain zeal for solitude on the part of the white men who came to live in the Arctic.
To the Dene – the native people of the Northwest Territories and heirs of thousands of years of tradition in the North – this urge is inexplicable. Survival for them has always been a communal affair. This communal concept is especially important to Wiebe with regards to nationhood.
"Is it surprising that Medicare was first introduced in Canada?" he asks.
"Canada is an arctic nation," he adds. "You cannot live alone."
Wiebe argues that we are the stewards of the forests and the tundra, and, as a nation, we are only grudgingly coming to terms with this reality. Demographically, Canada is a thin strip huddled against the American border and, whatever our pretense towards heartiness, we display an almost avian obsession with seasonal migration southward. Canadians seem determined to dislike the cold. But perhaps, as evinced by Medicare, we will in time create a culture that reflects our Nordic heritage.
Rudy Wiebe joins fellow Arctic-exploration author Ken McGoogan for a reading on October 17 at noon. He also discusses Western Canadian literature with Jacqueline Baker and Fred Stenson on October 16 at noon. |
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