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An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, 3rd. ed. Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie, eds. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2005. 578 pp. $44.95 sc; Our Story: Aboriginal Voices on Canada's Past. Preface by Rudyard Griffiths; Foreword by Adrienne Clarkson. Toronto: Doubleday, 2004. $32.95 hc; Toronto: Anchor, 2005, $ 19.95 sc. (Doubleday and Anchr are both divisions of Random House).
Daniel David Moses and Terry Goldie's Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English has been, since its first edition in 1992, a field-shaping resource for teachers, students, and general readers of Canadian Native literature. This third edition enhances its influence by adding the work of seven new Aboriginals and ninety new selections. One of these, the work of Haida myth-teller Ghandl, comes through the carefully crafted and scrupulously informed but controversial translation by Euro-Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst. Poetry is the genre most successfully practiced by the newest writers if one can judge by Moses and Goldie's selections, because all but novelist Robert Arthur Alexie are poets. The work of Alexie and Joan Crate, Sharron Proulx-Turner, Marvin Francis, Joanne Arnott, Randy Lundy, and David A. Groulx collectively supports Moses's assertion in the preface that "Native literature is almost past its youthful idealistic and angry stage [...] taking time to consider just what it can do to heal its community [...] quietly and more artfully than ever before, and perhaps a bit too introvertedly" (p. ix). Certainly both new and older writing looks inward to the self and community far more often than it does outward, so that when a writer does direct her or his gaze outward as Connie Fife does in her moving "dear wait" and "for Matthew Shepard" or as Lundy does in his vitally imagined nature poems, the shift is welcome. Yet no one better illustrates the claim that "some of our new writers are articulating 'that same old story' but with fascinating new vocabularies" (p. ix) better than Francis in his City Treaty poems:
And Wayne Keon's revitalizing of shape poems, as for example in "replanting the heritage tree," represents an innovative appropriation of a literary tradition for Native purposes.
In addition to much fine new writing, the clearest improvement to this edition is the enhancement and moving of notes on...