Bruce Trigger, archeologist and savant, died in Montreal recently of pancreatic cancer. Make no mistake, Trigger stood among the great Canadian historians -- even as he mostly stood apart from the rest of them.
I've said for years that the really profound story in Canadian history is the five hundred year epic of the collision of aboriginal and immigrant cultures in the northern half of North America. I started to understand that reading Trigger's The Children of Aataentsic. It is still, I'd say, the place to start to grasp that deep reality of Canadian history.
It happened that I read that huge book during a summer back in the 1970s when we lived close by the banks of the Gatineau River north of Ottawa. When I read that Huron traders around 1600, seeking to avoid conflict on the St. Lawrence, sometimes travelled down the Ottawa and turned up that same Gatineau River to cross central Quebec and come down to salt water at Tadoussac, suddenly I understood something about pre-contact Canadians, their networks of trade and diplomacy, and their sense of their country, that has never left me.
I interviewed Bruce Trigger once, for an Ideas documentary on CBC Radio. He was a great scholar, but it was not so as the media would notice. I had the strong sense I was the first person to interview him seriously and at length about his work and his views. Neither of us were very media savvy, actually. He was concerned that phone calls might interrupt our conversation, so we moved from his office to an empty classroom. What did I know about acoustics?
The interview sounded like he was speaking from the bottom of a well.
But his ideas rang out clear, I think. And he seemed to take my teccy failings in stride. I met him twice thereafter, at historical conferences, and both times he made me feel like an old and trusted colleague.
Sandra Martin's obit is at the Globe & Mail site.
