30 Novels, day 6: Rudy
Wiebe’s The Temptations of Big Bear
When I
first read this novel in my early twenties, the west that I thought I knew suddenly looked a whole lot
bigger. The land itself became more real to me, more alive. The history of my
country proved to be darker and more complex than I had imagined or wanted to
know. The novel did for me what a great work of literature does: it changed my
way of seeing, so that I had no choice but to carry its vision back into the
world outside the book.
The novel weaves a multifaceted
portrait of the Plains Cree chief whose name translates into English as Big
Bear. We see him first through the eyes of white treaty negotiators, who want
him to sign a piece of paper he can’t read. A document that will give them
ownership over the land, an idea that makes no sense to Big Bear: “No one can
choose for only himself a piece of the Mother Earth. She is. And she is for all
that live, alike.”
We see the life of Big Bear’s
River People as it was on the eve of its vanishing: a rich, vibrant life that
dwindles and comes apart as its absolute lifesource, the buffalo, vanishes from
the plains and steel rails slice across the earth. In exchange for signing away
his people’s freedom to live as they have for millennia, Big Bear’s people will
be given food and a small parcel of land to call their own. This is the
temptation, and the impossible choice, of Big Bear. His people are hungry.
Their way of life is vanishing. Yet saving them means ending that way of life
forever.
Wiebe draws attention to the fact
that this is not the story of Big
Bear but rather one possible recreation of history. He does this through
multiple narratives and textual sources, so that the ground always shifts
beneath the reader, and history is seen as a gathering (or better a struggle)
of viewpoints that no one stands outside of. And yet there’s one omission in
this struggle of voices: Wiebe never has Big Bear narrate his own story. He
won’t put words in his mouth. He won’t make Big Bear “sign” yet another piece
of paper he cannot read.
Illustration: Big Bear at Fort Pitt, Saskatchewan, 1884
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