Book Notes: David Thompson at the Champlain Society

Members of the Champlain Society have been receiving their annual members' book for 2024 recently. Or at least I did. (Actually, I thought my membership had lapsed, but evidently there has been a lapse in record-keeping at one end or the other, presumably at mine.) 

The essence of the Champlain Society for over a century has been that by having a membership you assist in the publication of edited volumes of essential documentary collections from Canadian history. In exchange you get a copy of the new volume each year. Nowadays they do various other things too, as documented on their website. Notable: the Witness to Yesterday podcast, which must do more interviews on historians of Canada and their new books than everybody else combined.

Anyway, this year's members' book is a big one. Even physically big: two big hardcovers in a boxed set. But significance-big as well. In 19th century Canadian literature as well as in exploration history, David Thompson's Travels and other writings have been reckoned as essential reading. And since I've never done much more than dip into them for an anecdote or two, I may actually read widely in this year's volume (not always the case, I confess). Here are the blurbs for Volume One, edited and introduced by John Warkentin (geographer and longtime pillar of the society) and William Moreau, and for Volume Two (by Moreau).

Sometimes Society books are published commercially as well.  Not this one I think, but from the links non-members can order individual copies through University of Toronto Press, the publishing partner for all the Society books.

Book notes here on recent and interesting works on Canadian history have been a bit scarce lately.  Got some catching up to, mebbe.

Book Notes: Friesen on Norquay

Here's one worth looking for, and not just for proof that Canadian history (including political history, including the history of nineteenth-century politicians) is hardly as dead as it is said to be.

Gerald Friesen's long-awaited biography of John Norquay, the first indigenous premier of Manitoba, is now in the University of Manitoba Press catalogue, and should be shipping in April. 

Friesen is the author of The Canadian Prairies: A History and other works. From having enjoyed cups of coffee with him intermittently over the years, I know he has been working on and talking about Norquay and this book for quite a while.   

Book Notes: Robert Lower on the Selkirk Settlers

Would it be fair to say that Robert Lower is something of a self-hating historian?  

The first lines of his new book, Unsettled: Lord Selkirk's Scottish Colonists and the Battle for Canada's West, 1813-1816, declare that the book "is not a history." He goes on to report that as a child in Winnipeg he naturally had no interest in the history of the place he grew up and he still dismisses everything written about it as "dry historical accounts."

In retirement, however, he has discovered an interest in his ancestors, some of whom participated in the migration of Highland Scottish farmers to Red River in 1813-16 under the auspices of the Earl of Selkirk and the Hudson's Bay Company. Indeed, the Selkirk settlers fascinate him enough to have inspired this history of them. 

But instead of realizing he should blame the self-absorption of youth for his long neglect of their struggles and adventures, he insists that all previous work on the topic has been "just facts, a series of incidents that had no power to fire the imagination." The previous works, in other words, were histories. Since he dismisses "history," he has to present his own as something entirely new, a different thing.  

Is anyone else really tired of this trope that historical writing is by definition merely a pedantic recitation of dates and facts -- a history, that is -- but THIS ONE ISN'T?

Unsettled, of course, is a history, despite Lower's protests, and not a bad one at all. It is written exclusively from the correspondence the leaders of the settler group sent to their backer, Lord Selkirk, home in Britain, so it abounds in small personal details of the settlers, including the experiences of Lower's own ancestor, the millwright Samuel Lamont. For the larger sweep of that time and place -- the Indigenous civilizations, the contesting fur trade companies, and the proto-Metis whom Lower calls the Bois-Brules -- a historian with a wider lens would be required. But if your interest is the few score Scots who made the agonizing trek from the Highlands to Hudson's Bay, up the long rivers, down Lake Winnipeg, to set up as farmers thousands of kilometres from any other such European settlement, he's your man.

Lower presents them in a lively close-up narrative, much of it told in the historical present. It should get a good reaction from readers not only in Winnipeg but in Scots-Canadian communities anywhere. And maybe such a response will encourage Lower to start his next book with the thought that he has come to appreciate history a little, maybe to admit he is even becoming a historian himself.

Lower is alert to contemporary matters. He includes in his preface a recognition of and apology for the suffering and injustices his ancestors helped inflict on Sauteaux, Cree, Dakota, and other original inhabitants of the Assiniboine and Red River valley. But having recently read Myrna Kostash's Ghosts in a Photograph, an account of her ancestors' later settlement in a different part of the prairies, I can't help thinking how much and how thoughtfully she has internalized and historicized in detail how settlement actually engaged with indigeneity. That's where the leading edge of historical writing should be taking us today.