Search: Brendan Frederick R. Edwards

Basil H. Johnston is today one of Canada’s most successful and widely read Aboriginal writers. Emerging in the 1970s, during what is now recognised as a time of Aboriginal cultural renaissance in this country, Johnston’s early books were not met with widespread enthusiasm in the publishing world. If not for the professional support of Jack McClelland, Anna Porter, and a handful of other editors, Johnston’s early classics, Ojibway Heritage (1976) and Moose Meat & Wild Rice (1978), may never have been published.

In her own words, Ethel Brant Monture was a “one-woman crusade to reverse over four centuries of propaganda.” It was her wish that the contributions of Aboriginal people be known to all Canadians and that school textbooks be revised to eliminate bias and falsehood, to reflect historical reality in relation to First Nations. Her contribution to Clarke, Irwin’s Canadian Portraits series, Famous Indians (1960), was a significant biographical achievement that she employed in her crusade.

During his lifetime, Reverend Edward Ahenakew received little or no payment for his writing, and struggled financially. Through family ties, Ruth Buck became the steward of Ahenakew’s manuscripts after his death. Her association with the Ahenakew papers, eventually editing and publishing his Voices of the Plains Cree (McClelland & Stewart, 1973), brought Ahenakew’s writing to the reading public and brought Buck herself considerable literary success.

Maria Campbell’s first book, Halfbreed (1973), was a landmark in modern Canadian Aboriginal literature. To this day, Halfbreed is widely taught in Canadian schools and universities. The archival record reveals much about what is not told in the book, including at least one incident Jack McClelland considered too libellous to publish, despite Campbell’s desire that her story be told in its entirety.

The period between 1913 (the year of E. Pauline Johnson’s death) and 1960 (roughly when the modern cultural renaissance of Canada's Aboriginal peoples began) is sometimes regarded as having been void of Aboriginal literary production. But some Aboriginal peoples, perhaps for the first time, used print and publishing during this period to communicate with other Aboriginal peoples in Canada and internationally. Works by Edward Ahenakew and Ethel Brant Monture exemplify the continuum of Aboriginal writing in Canada from the early nineteenth century through to contemporary times, as do such widely read Aboriginal authors as Maria Campbell and Basil Johnston (who often signed his letters "Yours Aboriginally").