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A Revolutionary Failure Resurrected: Dialogical Appropriation in Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People

Because, in The Scorched-Wood People, Rudy Wiebe writes - in English and as a Mennonite-Western-Canadian novelist - about francophone Manitoba Metis and their struggles to protect their territory and way of life from the national-consolidation projects of English-speaking Ontario and its Confederation partners, we are compelled to deal with the issue of appropriation. Wiebe's novel employs strategies that show its awareness of this problem. Its use of multiple layers of voice, in which most central characters 'speak for themselves,' while a partisan narrator, Pierre Falcon, speaks from beyond the grave, provides a version of what Charles Taylor describes as many voices engaged in a struggle for recognition and against misrecognition, essential in the creation and maintenance of identity (Taylor, 25). Avoiding a simple retelling of history 'as it truly happened,' Wiebe seeks a more just retelling, one that is aware of itself, of the ethical problems of representing the voice of the Other, and of the desperate need for such a representation. Wiebe eschews objective or fact-based accuracy for a method that declares itself in search of truth. He finds this method in what I call dialogical appropriation, an ethically necessary method of engaging history (as opposed to didactically laying it out) and the collective and individual identities that are its raw material. Such a retelling is more truthful for its refusal to declare itself true.