Shifting Narratives in the Canadian Nation

Kahkewaquonaby (Peter Jones), Nawahjegezhegwabe (Joseph Sawyer), Pahtahsega (Peter Jacobs), Maungwudaus (George Henry), Kahgegagahbowh (George Copway), Shawundais (John Sunday), Shahwahnegezhik (Henry Steinhauer and his sons Egerton and Robert), and a devout and politically active woman, Nahnebahnwequay (Catherine Sutton). Because these people were all part of an interconnected Methodist missionary network that ranged into the prairies and the United States, their lives intersected, and throughout the chapters a complex narrative unfolds that speaks their individual and shared responses to their own changing community and to the social, economic and political machinations of the colonizers at the time. In this discursive space, rescuing the forest becomes a national and personal duty, recreation becomes a site of activism, and green consumerism becomes a strategic place from which to protect nature. ,e response Erickson o&ers to the current state of canoe narratives is an interventionist politics of the canoe that can interrogate the colonial encounter that has created Canada.