CanLit-2 Of Beavers, Bibles, and Broken Identities: Voices Before the Apology

If Canadian literature were a person, this is the phase where it’d slam the bedroom door, declare it doesn’t want to be British or American, and start writing painfully introspective poetry while glaring at the national flag.

Welcome to the early 20th-century identity crisis—a literary adolescence packed with contradictions, quiet rebellions, and polite rage in footnotes.

The British Empire may have planted the flag, but on the page, Canada was rapidly realizing it had more than one voice. Unfortunately, they were all speaking at once—and in two official languages, no less.

The Indigenous Voice: Storytelling Before Colonizers Invented “Literature”

Before anyone named the place Canada, stories already existed. They were sung, danced, chanted, and woven into oral traditions by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities. But colonial Canada, with its chronic need for paperwork and Protestant guilt, didn’t consider oral storytelling “literature.” Apparently, if it didn’t come in a hardback edition with Latin quotes, it didn’t count.

Despite this, Indigenous voices survived—outside the canon at first, but pulsing with memory, resistance, and truth.

Think of Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), the early Indigenous poet who performed in Victorian gowns while delivering Mohawk pride in verse—Canada’s first literary mic-drop in lace gloves.

But let’s not pretend things were fair. For decades, Indigenous literature existed under erasure, as government policies like the Indian Act and residential schools tried to stamp out language, memory, and identity.

The stories, however, waited. Quietly. Furiously. They would erupt later in CanLit history—and steal the show. But more on that in Scroll 5.

Francophone Canada: The Other Voice You Forgot to Read

While English-speaking Canada was busy building railroads and writing pastoral sonnets about pine trees and Protestant guilt, Quebec was crafting a rich and conflicted literary tradition of its own.

Early French-Canadian literature was dominated by rural Catholic conservatism. Think: maple syrup, Marian devotion, and tragic endings. Authors like Gratien Gélinas and Ringuet (Thirty Acres) explored the declining power of the church and the tensions between land and modernity.

Then came the Quiet Revolution (1960s), which was about as quiet as a chainsaw in a library. Writers like Michel Tremblay and Gabrielle Roy (yes, she wrote in both English and French) began deconstructing identity, class, gender—and doing it with unapologetic flair.

French-Canadian literature didn’t want to be Canadian. It wanted to be Quebecois. And it didn’t ask permission.

The English-Canadian Angst: Still Trying to Impress Britain

Meanwhile, English Canadian writers continued their literary identity crisis by gazing longingly across the Atlantic and asking, “Did we do it right, Mother England?”

This period is filled with writers who wanted to write Great Literature but were still unsure whether they were allowed to be interesting.

Cue Hugh MacLennan, the man who gave us Two Solitudes (1945), a book so Canadian it was practically printed on flannel. MacLennan’s work is often praised for trying to capture the cultural chasm between English and French Canada. Spoiler: The chasm was real, and still echoing in parliaments and polite dinner arguments.

Then there’s Earle Birney, who killed off his fictional friend “Dave” in a poem so full of Canadian mountain guilt it probably should have come with a Parks Canada permit.

Let’s not forget Robertson Davies—Canada’s first properly weird, Oxford-educated wizard of narrative. His Deptford Trilogy taught Canadians that it’s okay to be cerebral, superstitious, and slightly smug—all at once.

Meanwhile in the Margins: Who Gets to Be “Canadian”?

During this phase, if you were Indigenous, female, Black, Asian, queer, or anything other than Anglo-Saxon with a British bookshelf, you were not considered “mainstream CanLit.” You were a sidebar. A footnote. An asterisk in a textbook.

But those footnotes were starting to sharpen their pens.

Writers like Joy Kogawa (with Obasan, about Japanese internment), Mavis Gallant, and Austin Clarke (chronicling the Caribbean immigrant experience) began rattling the monocultural foundations.

CanLit was no longer a quiet chorus of white voices from the woods. It was becoming complicated, contradictory, and—finally—interesting.

Themes That Refused to Die

• Nature as both muse and monster

• Survival—not just physically, but culturally

• Identity split three ways: British, French, and Indigenous—with awkward silences in between

• A love-hate relationship with history, geography, and weather

• Politeness used as both sword and shield

So What Was CanLit Becoming?

It was still early, but by mid-century, Canadian literature had become a mirror of its national mood: polite on the surface, but bubbling with rebellion just below.

It was struggling to hold its multiple truths: colonizer and colonized, settler and Indigenous, English and French, insider and outsider.

If literature reflects the soul of a nation, then this era was Canada looking into a cracked mirror and asking:
Who am I when no one’s watching? And can I write about it without sounding too American?

ABS closes the scroll with a polite nod to chaos, as the voices within continue arguing through footnotes and frost. Somewhere, a beaver chews thoughtfully on a copy of “Two Solitudes.”