Prairie and Paratext: Contesting Voices in Early Twentieth-Century Canadian Literary Production

Prairie and Paratext: Contesting Voices in Early Twentieth-Century Canadian Literary Production by Lindsey Bannister M.L.I.S., Western University, 2010 M.A., Western University, 2008 B.A. (Hons.), University of Windsor, 2007 Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences © Lindsey Bannister 2019 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2019 Copyright in this work rests with the author. Please ensure that any reproduction or re-use is done in accordance with the relevant national copyright legislation. Approval Name: Lindsey Bannister Degree: Doctor of Philosophy (English) Title: Prairie and Paratext: Contesting Voices in Early Twentieth-Century Canadian Literary Production Examining Committee: Chair: Clint Burnham Professor Carole Gerson Senior Supervisor Professor Christine Kim Supervisor Associate Professor Sophie McCall Supervisor Associate Professor Hannah McGregor Internal Examiner Assistant Professor Publishing Margery Fee External Examiner Professor Emeritus English University of British Columbia Date Defended/Approved: October 30th, 2019 ii Abstract In “Black w/Holes” M. Nourbese Philip comments upon the psychic border that “prohibits or limits” the entry of racialized bodies into what she refers to as “wilderness spaces.” By focusing on literary constructions of the Canadian prairie, this project identifies early twentieth-century Canadian literary production as a site of contestation, where such psychological barriers were either upheld or challenged by writers, critics, and publishers. While twentieth-century critics consecrated the work of white prairie writers (Frederick Philip Grove, Martha Ostenso, Laura Salverson, and Robert Stead) this project seeks to re-centre the textual work of two mixed-race writers who resided in Calgary in the 1920s: Winnifred Eaton (Chinese and English) and Buffalo Child Long Lance (Lumbee and Cherokee). Remembered by subsequent critics as “racial imposters,” Eaton and Long Lance adopted alternate literary personae (as the Japanese writer Onoto Watanna and as a Kainai chief, respectively) as a way of interrogating legal and social categories of racial and Indigenous difference. This project shows how their prairie- centric writings reveal and reflect their conflicted subjectivities, thus calling into question colonial epistemologies. In addition, by examining the paratextual apparatuses surrounding Eaton and Long Lance’s textual interventions (book design, prefatory materials, critical reviews), this project amplifies this moment’s tenor of tension and dissent, when conflicted voices existed in tense relation with the colonizing aims of white settler publishers, editors, and critics. By reading Eaton and Long Lance in confluence with each other and in conjunction with two other under-examined writers of the early twentieth-century period (Anahareo, Christine van der Mark), this project raises the following questions: what literary linkages have been neglected by critics and what do these linkages reveal? How do Eaton and Long Lance’s works illuminate new ways of conceiving human movements and interactions, beyond the limiting language of nationhood? Keywords: Settler Colonialism; Canada; Literary production; Early twentieth-century; Paratexts iii Acknowledgements To my parents for their love and support. I thank my mother for instilling in me the idea that academic work is a creative and generative process. Thank you. A sincere “thank you” to my supervisor, Dr. Carole Gerson. I am very grateful for your patience and wisdom. I am so lucky to have such a generous supervisor. I must also thank my second and third readers, Dr. Christine Kim and Dr. Sophie McCall. Thank you for your support and hard work— and for helping me to get through the “final push.” Thank you to my committee as a whole. Your questions and your feedback have been most meaningful. My work is stronger because of it. Thank you to Karyn Huenemann for your encouragement and for copy editing this work. And for attempting to correct my misuse of the coordinating conjunction. A warm thank you to Karon Maclean. Thank you for sharing your family history. Thank you to Donald B. Smith for your generosity. Thank you to my friends and colleagues. I could not have done this without your insights and your emotional support: Anne Baldo, Laura Beauchamp, Susan Brook, Nikhil Jayadevan, Yiwen Liu, Meghan Longstaffe, Melissa MacGregor, Taylor Morphett, Natalie Rocheleau, Kandice Sharren, Jen Scott, Alix Shield, Alois Sieben, Jorji Temple, and Kate Wensel. Thank you to Graduate Chairs Jeff Derksen, Michelle Levy, and Clint Burnham, and to Christa Gruninger for answering my tireless questions! Thank you to the archivists and archival staff at Glenbow Museum, the University of Calgary Library, and McMaster Library. Warm regards to my colleagues at Douglas College Library. Finally, I must acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and their support of this research. I must also acknowledge the generosity of Simon Fraser University’s English Department in awarding me the Temple Maynard Award (2013), Ann and William Messenger Graduate Fellowship (2013, 2019), Aphra Behn Graduate Scholarship in English (2014, 2016), and the Graduate International Research Travel Award (2016). iv Table of Contents Approval ............................................................................................................................. ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ v List of Figures .................................................................................................................... vi Image................................................................................................................................. vii Introduction ............................................................................................. 1 Social Contexts: Articulating Subjects .............................................................................. 8 Material contexts: Print Culture Interrogations ............................................................... 18 Cultural Conditions: The Canadian Prairies and Literary Nationalism ........................... 25 Troubling Realism: Onoto Watanna’s Cattle ..................................... 32 Contextualizing Onoto Watanna ....................................................................................... 35 Racialization and the Paratext ........................................................................................... 47 Becoming Winnifred Eaton Reeve ................................................................................... 55 Onoto Watanna’s Cattle .................................................................................................... 61 Long Lance and Eagle Speaker’s Autobiography: The Polyvocal Prairies 73 Contextualizing Long Lance ............................................................................................. 77 A Present Absence: Indigeneity and Blackness in the American South ....................... 77 Competing Colonialisms: Performing Indigeneity in the Canadian West .................... 82 The First Person(s) Periodical ........................................................................................... 90 Long Lance and Eagle Speaker’s Autobiography ........................................................... 105 Constellating Points of Contact: Rereading Early Twentieth-Century Canadian Literary Culture ................................................................................ 115 Reading from the Margins .............................................................................................. 119 Contesting Narratives...................................................................................................... 122 The Politics of Literary Recovery ................................................................................... 135 Conclusion ............................................................................................ 139 Works Cited ................................................................................................................... 146 v List of Figures Figure 1.1 An early Orientalist representation of Eaton as “Onoto Watanna" ................... 1 Figure 1.2 Whiteness emerges in proximity to agricultural landscapes ........................... 26 Figure 2.1 Cover art for The Heart of Hyacinth ............................................................... 49 Figure 2.2 A sample of Kiyokichi Sano’s page design ..................................................... 50 Figure 2.3 Sample bylines from various manuscripts held in the Winnifred Eaton Reeve fonds, University of Calgary Special Collections ..................................... 55 Figure 2.4 An image from Emily Murphy’s racist inquiry into Vancouver’s opium trade ................................................................................................................... 59 Figure 2.5 Cover art for the Canadian (left) and American (right) editions of Cattle ...... 65 Figure 3.1 “I Wanted to Live Like

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