Intertexts

In the fieldmy grandfatherthoughtwas his

my fatherthought was his

—from “stone hammer poem” by robert kroetsch, completed field notes: the long poems of robert kroetsch

When I met with Canadian novelist, poet, and playwright Margaret Sweatman in Winnipeg on May 14, 2018, she ended our discussion by referring to Robert Kroetsch’s “Stone Hammer Poem.” “In three pages,” Sweatman said, “[the poem] says everything that we’ve been talking about . . . the madness of the tools of writing over land.”¹ Sweatman and I had been speaking about the phenomenon of “section lines,” the surveyor’s marks that delineated large swaths of land and continue to shape land—sometimes without regard for geography—across North America but especially in the Prairies. Louis Riel, Métis leader during the Red River Resistance of 1869–1870, in Sweatman’s When Alice Lay Down with Peter, observes the impracticality of surveyor’s marks and their incompatibility with the experience of people: “These Canadians, they do not follow the contour of the land with their bizarre maps. It is a madness to place their lines so.”² [End Page 27]

Geography and history shape much of Sweatman’s writing. The Red River, a 550-mile-long waterway snaking its way from Minnesota, through Manitoba, to Lake Winnipeg, and thence to the Nelson River and Hudson’s Bay, looms large. The Forks of the Red and the Assiniboine, the site of present-day Winnipeg and a traditional First Nations meeting-place, is at the center of a diverse geological and ecological region, encompassing the Canadian Shield and the Prairies, the leftover remnants of great glacial movements. The low-lying Red River defies the boundary between land and water since the river’s meandering pushes land and water together. More deadly, the river’s shallow depth—it is too young to have carved a substantial valley—produces great floods, some of which, such as in 1950 (described in Sweatman’s When Alice Lay Down with Peter), create temporary lakes 550 square miles in size.

In this liminal space of watery land and oxbow islands, the home since time immemorial of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dené peoples, important parts of Canadian history have played out. For Sweatman, a writer inspired by particular spaces and time, this local history structures much of her writing. Rebellion and resistance have shaped Manitoba’s history, even before the European settlement of Canada. In The Players, Sweatman found herself driven by the “malarkey of the purity of our origins.” Indeed, the Canadian narrative of noble French fur traders and passive Indigenous assimilation has been challenged in recent years as treaty rights are recognized anew and reaffirmed. Sweatman’s fiction thus exists in the past of settlement and the present of resistance and reconciliation. The Métis Resistance resulted in Manitoba’s entry into Canada and its uneasy—and oft-violated— guarantees of land and language rights and religious freedoms. When Alice Lay Down with Peter demonstrates the contest over Riel’s legacy; the title characters are enthralled by “this great man . . . looking directly into their souls.”³ Alice, enraged by English Protestant encroachment on the traditional lands of the Métis, participates in the execution of Orangeman Thomas Scott, the act for which Riel would hang in 1885. For Alice and her descendants, Scott became one of several ghosts that haunted their “property.”

The oxbow, a sinuous near-island, a transitory space between water and land, with the ever-present threat of flood and the complete metamorphosis [End Page 28] that comes with a deluge, stands as a potent metaphor for understanding Sweatman’s fiction. Rather than absolute delineations and identities based on ownership (mine/yours) or reification (settler/indigenous)—the surveyor’s map of straightedge and compass—the appreciation and acceptance of eternal contradiction and contingency generates a kind of individual essence and the possibility of actual interaction. In these truly human interactions, which are played out across land and over boundaries, creativity and art emerge.