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Linguistique

Discourses of Contrast and Deficiency: a Lexicogrammatical Analysis of first Nations Representation in Samuel Hearne’s Journey (1795)

Discours de contraste et de manque : analyse lexico-grammaticale d’une représentation des premières nations dans Le voyage de Samuel Hearne (1795)
Christoph Schubert
p. 23-41

Résumé

Cet article explore la représentation linguistique des indigènes canadiens, en particulier la culture des Chipewyans dans A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean de Samuel Hearne. Le but de cet article est de démontrer que la vision impérialiste de l’auteur peut se lire à partir d’une série d’éléments lexico-grammaticaux correspondants. Nous nous intéressons ici à deux stratégies discursives exprimant la perspective eurocentrée à l’encontre des populations indigènes du Canada.
Tout d’abord, Hearne emploie une « rhétorique du contraste » qui renforce le concept de différence culturelle et le mode de vie européen comme culture de référence. Les contrastes se manifestent non seulement dans des groupes lexicaux antonymes, dans plusieurs formes linguistiques de comparaison mais aussi dans des conjonctions et des adverbes adversatifs. De plus, dans les rares cas où la parole est donnée aux indigènes sous la forme de discours rapporté, leurs discours contribuent de façon caractéristique à la dissociation culturelle. Une « rhétorique du manque » accentue l’idée d’une supériorité européenne, en exprimant les carences culturelles des indigènes. Ceci s’accomplit linguistiquement par des quantificateurs de rareté et plusieurs formes de négations qui fonctionnent comme une métaphore (celle d’une pénurie de civilisation). À un niveau métalinguistique, le texte révèle une crise de la représentation descriptive, puisque Hearne considère certains incidents comme « au-delà de la description », postulant que le manque de culture des indigènes est responsable d’une perte du langage.

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Texte intégral

  • 1  I would like to thank Birgit Däwes, Ernst Burgschmidt, and Matthias Merkl for bibliographical advi (...)
  • 2  Hearne’s account is typical of the genre of ‘exploration literature’ in combining “edification” wi (...)
  • 3  For the publishing history of the Journey see MacLaren (Massacre, 27-43) and Goldman (44-46).
  • 4  In an application of Mitchell’s model of representation on the Journey, the Native Canadians are l (...)
  • 5  A history of the Chipewyans, whose name is derived from the Cree word for ‘pointed skins,’ is offe (...)
  • 6  Gidley points out that in the colonizers’ discourse it was “virtually inevitable that the represen (...)

1Samuel Hearne1 (1745-1792), the first European to reach the Arctic Ocean in Canada overland, gives a detailed account of his travels to the mouth of the Coppermine River in his exploration  narrative A Journey from Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson’s Bay to the Northern  Ocean  in the Year 1769, 1770, 1771, and 1772,2 first published posthumously in London in the year 1795.3Apart from meticulous descriptions of flora and fauna, the book is well-known for its ethnological  representation of Native Canadian culture in the eighteenth century.4 Since Hearne had a Chipewyan guide,5 he describes the culture predominantly of this Canadian tribe, commonly called “Northern Indians” in the Journey. Although Hearne provides a lot of factual information, his Eurocentric perspective can be recognized by his strategy of representing the First Nations chiefly in terms of contrast and deficiency in comparison to Europe.6 The aim of the following analyses is to discuss these two discursive strategies from a linguistic perspective. The term ‘lexicogrammatical’ refers to the fact that the linguistic items examined belong to the classes of grammatical (closed word classes) as well as lexical morphemes (affixes and open word classes).

The Discourse of Contrast

  • 7  I follow Lubbers in his definition of a stereotype as a “simplified, commonly held, often emotiona (...)
  • 8  The term ‘Indians’ is today used by researchers when “referring to the image of Native people held (...)

2The discourse of contrast results from the fact that Hearne perceives the First Nations as the ‘Others’ from an imperialist, Eurocentric stance, establishing an antithesis between the hetero-stereotypical, uncivilized Native culture and the auto-stereotypical, refined European way of life.7 The cultural contrast is topographically matched by the spatial dichotomy of “two distinct sites,” the first of which is the Prince of Wales’s Fort in Hudson Bay, and the second “the ‘world of the Indians’. “ (Venema, 11)8.

1. Semantic Opposition

3On the level of vocabulary, the dissimilarity between Europeans and First Nations manifests itself in semantic oppositions or “oppositeness” (Cruse, Lexical Semantics, 197). As the boundaries of word classes are transgressed in this respect, it is most appropriate to use the term of antonymic “lexical sets” (Lipka, 173) or to speak of complementarity in “collocation” (Halliday/Hasan, 285). Since Hearne’s descriptive focus is on features of the indigenous peoples, it is obvious that the text contains more lexemes referring to them than to the Europeans and Hearne himself.

  • 9  According to the OED, the noun warble denotes a “small tumour or swelling on the back of cattle, d (...)
  • 10  As Hutchings points out, the dichotomy of the “savage” vs. the “civil” is based on the “assumption (...)

4In terms of cultural development and customs, Hearne develops a binary distinction between the Natives’ “superstition” (304) and European “religion” (325). As far as culinary preferences are concerned, the Natives consider “warbles”9 as “fine” (215) and are “fond of those vermin [i.e. lice]” (313), whereas the narrator Hearne is filled with “disgust” (215) and regards the consumption of lice as “detestable” (313). Moreover, Hearne depicts the character and actions of the Natives in sharp contrast to his own world view, creating in the ‘Indians’ a negative counter-image to English values. Hyperbolic lexemes with pejorative connotations shape a concept of Native Canadian depravity as opposed to European moral superiority. Thus, the narrator characterizes the Natives’ state of mind as “diabolical” (65), “sly” (71), “artful” (71) and “blood-thirsty, revengeful, and vindictive” (145), which serves as a reason for the assertion that they are “villain[s]” (71, 281), “wretches” (183), and “savages”10 (180, 266), whose disposition is characterized by “disrespect” (326), for example to elderly people. In contradistinction to that, Hearne’s character is allegedly marked by “respect” for Native customs (210), and European societieshold in high esteem “humanity and social feeling, which ought to be the characteristic of men, as the noblest part of the creation” (219).

  • 11  Bataille points out that the common use of the term ‘massacre’ instead of ‘battle’ hints at Europe (...)
  • 12  By a comparison of the three consecutive versions of the ‘massacre narrative,’MacLaren manages to (...)
  • 13  Despite Hearne’s explicit and unambiguous condemnations, Hutchings characterizes his style as “rel (...)
  • 14  Referring to the massacre episode, Kröller states “that its poignancy has more to do with the lite (...)
  • 15  These terms used by Hearne closely correspond to Berkhofer’s description of the stereotypical “bad (...)
  • 16  Hence, another stereotypical contrast that Hearne supports in the ‘massacre episode’ is “the myth (...)

5A particularly noteworthy judgement of the Natives’ behaviour is realized in Hearne’s account of the Chipewyans’ “massacre”11 (177, 178) of Inuit at Bloody Fall, which “has become the most famous incident in the corpus of Canadian exploration writing” (Moreau, 348). In this episode, the narrator vividly depicts how his travelling companions ambush a group of Inuit in their sleep and murder entire families.12 This description and other similar passages abound with quasi-synonymous adjectives belonging to the lexical set of HORROR: “bloody” (175, 177), “horrible” (179), ”shocking” (179, 267), “dreadful” (179), “barbarous” (180, 281), “horrid” (180), and “brutish” (180).13 Owing to this cluster of “[l]urid and pathetic adjectives and epithets” (MacLaren, Massacre, 37), the style has been described as related to the diction of the Gothic novel.14The narration evokes an image of the ‘Indians’ as pitiless, as their actions are called “brutality” (143), “barbarity” (179, 266, 281), “butchery” (180), “murder” (180), “violence” (272), and “cruelty” (281).15 Hearne, however, portrays himself as a pitiful and sympathetic European who is constantly on the side of the Natives’ innocent victims, whether they are Inuit,16women, or old people. Hearne’s most salient rhetorical device for this aim is the frequent use of the adjective “poor” (141, 143, 178, 179, 180, 203, 272), which has strong affective connotations and gains additional emphasis in an exclamation like “poor creature!” (219). The noun “pity” (143) and the narrator’s statement that “even at this hour I cannot reflect on the transactions of that horrid day without shedding tears” (180) help to establish Hearne’s moral and ethical superiority.

  • 17  For the role of Chipewyan guides like Matonabbee for explorations initiated by the Hudson’s Bay Co (...)
  • 18  The OED quotes eighteenth-century uses of ‘sensible’ with the meaning “[c]ognizant, conscious, awa (...)

6In Matonabbee, Hearne’s Chipewyan guide,17 however, the reader finds a notable exception to this portrayal. Although Matonabbee is not completely free from occasional “bloody” (141) and “horrid” (141) actions like stabbing another Chipewyan for defamation, Hearne describes him as “the most sociable, kind, and sensible18 Indian I had ever met with” (102). The narrator attests that “to the vivacity of the Frenchman, and the sincerity of an Englishman, he added the gravity and nobleness of a Turk” (330-331), cardinal virtues which make him an almost super-European role model. By means of these clusters of favourable attributes and epithets, he is moved in the vicinity of the in-group of the so-called civilized’ nations of the Old World.

2. Adversative Function Words

  • 19  Berkhofer points out that accounts of the New World in general had to live up to the preconception (...)

7Another means of expressing differences between Europeans and First Nations is the use of contrastive adverbs and coordinators, which can be subsumed under the cohesive categories of “contrajunction” (de Beaugrande/Dressler, 71) or “adversative conjunction” (Halliday/Hasan, 250). Since the basic meaning of the adversative relation can be paraphrased as “contrary to expectation” (Halliday/Hasan, 250), it does not come as a surprise that this type of semantic link is central in a text largely influenced by the readers’ projected expectations.19

  • 20  For instance, Goldman argues that Hearne and his editor may have added “unsubstantiated accounts o (...)

8In the following extracts, the adversative adverb however indicates that the proposition is in contrast to an implied reader’s expectation. As the sentences show, the world knowledge of this implied reader is entirely based on European values, so that he or she is likely to be astounded by the Native Canadians’ way of living: “[...] and however wasteful it may appear, it is a practice so common among all the Indian tribes, as to be thought nothing of” (89-90), “[t]his, however odd it may appear, is but too true a description of the situation of women in this country” (102), “[h]owever laughable this may appear to an European [...]” (210), “however strange it may appear [...]” (305), and “however shocking and unnatural it may appear [...]” (327). Since it may be assumed that the European target audience was not really surprised, but rather prepared—and probably even eager—for sensational details,20 this use of however can be described as a rhetorical strategy only pretending to disappoint presupposed expectations. Hence, the adversative adverb, which here premodifies strongly evaluative and partly even emotive adjective like odd and shocking in terms of degree, serves as an explicit marker of European expectations, which are ultimately confirmed. This device is additionally supported by the copular verb appear, which also expresses an implied reader’s projected anticipations.

  • 21  Hearne’s account of the Chipewyans’ lethal actions and the resulting dangers for him make the read (...)

9Furthermore, the adversative coordinator but can express divergences between European and First Nations customs. Hereby the text does not only corroborate European assumptions of difference, but also assures English readers of their cultural and moral superiority. The following sentences, for example, confirm the worst apprehensions of ‘savagery’ realized by violence against women: “[t]he women, it is true, sometimes receive an unlucky blow from their husbands for misbehaviour, which occasions their death; but this is thought nothing of [...]” (144) and “I solicited very hard for her life; but the murderers made no reply till they had stuck both their spears through her body, and transfixed her to the ground [...]” (179).21 In both instances, but is employed to emphasize differences between the Natives’ and Europeans’ behaviour, which is demonstrated by the narrator’s conduct in the second example.

10In very few cases, the text indeed disappoints European negative preconceptions of the First Nations with the help of however. For instance, after Hearne describes how the Natives prepare a meal by pre-chewing, which does not appear appetizing to European eyes, he concedes: “[t]o do justice, however, to their cleanliness in this particular, I must observe, that they are very careful that neither old people with bad teeth, nor young children, have any hand in preparing this dish” (306). Hereby it can be seen that Hearne’s Journey in some places exhibits respect for the Natives and consequently an ambivalent tension between “the expectations of his employers, backers, and home audience on the one hand, and the specific demands of life and travel in remoter regions of eighteenth-century North America on the other” (Greenfield, 58).

3. Comparison

  • 22  As Berkhofer shows, “Whites overwhelmingly measured the Indian as a general category against those (...)

11For the portrayal of contrasts between cultures the text makes use of comparative constructions which can be described by the terms “non-equivalence” (Quirk et al., 1128) and “inequality” (Huddleston/Pullum, 1099). Every comparison must contain a “standard of comparison” (Quirk et al., 1127), a reference group, which in Hearne’s text is commonly Europe, basically epitomized by England,22 whereby it becomes obvious that the linguistic term ‘standard’ can here be understood in its literal meaning, stressing European superiority. The following examples display “scalar” comparisons (Huddleston/Pullum, 1099) which place Europeans above the First Nations on a scale of proficiency. In the first example, the quantifying comparative form more is used to describe the way of setting a net under the ice: “[...] they [the Europeans] in general take much more pains; but the above method is found quite sufficient by the Indians” (73).

12For a description of paintings on the Natives’ shields, Hearne uses the comparative form of bad in pronouncing that “these were many degrees worse than our country sign-paintings in England” (176), and the quantifying comparative form less makes clear that the Natives have fewer children: “[p]rovidence is very kind in causing these people to be less prolific than the inhabitants of civilized nations” (303). Hearne mentions a few occasions on which the Natives leave ill persons behind on their way and regards these scenes as “less shocking to those people, than they must appear to the more civilized part of mankind” (219). The quantifier less here introduces a comparative clause and establishes a contrast to the adverb more premodifying the adjective civilized.

  • 23  For more information on Hearne’s interpretations of the visually experienced landscape and topogra (...)

13The juxtaposition becomes more emphatic when the First Nations are compared to the entire rest of mankind as the reference group, whereby they are located at the bottom of human civilization. The verb differ establishes such an opposition, giving a reason for complacent European behaviour: ”t]hey [the Indians] differ so much from the rest of mankind, that harsh uncourteous usage seems to agree better with the generality of them [...] than mild treatment” (300). The general ordinal other and the quantifier half are equally suitable to create a dichotomy between the Natives and other peoples. For instance, Hearne declares that “[a] custom apparently so unnatural is perhaps not to be found among any other of the human race” (219) and adds that for people who are in distress but do not belong to their families the Natives feel “not even half so much as the generality of mankind feel for the sufferings of the meanest of the brute creation” (322). When Hearne and his companions arrive at a copper mine at Churchill River, the comparison reaches a further level in his explanation that the Natives’ statements are in contrast to the truth: “[b]y their account the hills were entirely composed of that metal, all in handy lumps, like a heap of pebbles. But their account differed so much from the truth [...]” (196). Exceptionally, Hearne uses a comparison of equivalence to associate the Natives with their environment, for instance in pointing out that “their senses seem almost as dull and frigid as the zone they inhabit” (320).23

14The discourse of contrast, as it is constituted by comparisons, can also be detected in passages where Hearne shows a certain amount of respect or even admiration for the indigenous people. When the Natives do not find provisions at a place where they expected to, the narratorcomments that “[t]his disappointment and loss was borne by the Indians with the greatest fortitude” (111), and later he notes that “at the end of three or four days fasting”, his companions talk to each other “in the merriest mood” (113), by which his fears of starving are decreased as well. Since this absolute use of the superlative lacks an explicit standard of comparison, an implicit reference group must be inferred. The most obvious standard is once again Hearne’s native country England with its inhabitants, whom the narrator does not seem to assess as equally patient and modest. Since the Chipewyans allegedly have no religion and therefore no apprehensions about punishment in the afterlife, Hearne calls them “the happiest of mortals” (326), apparently not without a sense of envy. The superlative here takes the issue of oppositeness further, since the standard of comparison is explicitly mentioned in the form of the general noun mortals, which includes all other peoples and nations. Finally, Matonabbee is said to have acquired so much knowledge of Christianity that he “could tell a better story of our Saviour’s birth and life, than one half of those who call themselves Christians” (325-326). Hence, the adoption of European ideas by Native Canadians is so highly welcomed that Hearne does not only paint a very favourable picture of this Chipewyan but even ventures to place him above some of his English compatriots on a religious scale.

4. Direct Reported Speech of Natives

15Since Hearne reports on the culture of the First Nations, he is the one to select when to give them a voice in the form of reported speech. An investigation of the Natives’ direct reported speech, which is signalled by quotation marks in the text, shows that this device does not only have the effect of enhancing the impression of authenticity. Rather, it fulfils the purpose for Hearne to distance himself explicitly from these statements and to strengthen the opposition between the world views of the First Nations and the Europeans. It is, of course, highly doubtful whether Hearne can really give “the actual wording of the original”, as is common for direct reported speech (Huddleston/Pullum, 1023), since he not only had to translate the Natives’ utterances into English, but also had to make field notes from memory, whereby his reliability is once again decreased. It is hardly surprising that derogatory remarks by the Natives about Hearne are presented as direct speech: “[...] they made no scruple of pronouncing me a ‘poor servant, noways like the Governor at the Factory, who, they said, they never saw, but he gave them something useful’” (93). Conclusively, Hearne uses this utterance as an argument for proving the intellectual deficiencies of his travelling companions. With the help of quotation marks, Hearne also ironically ridicules the Natives’ way of painting their shields by pointing out that their achievements do not live up to their pretensions: “most of those paintings had more the appearance of a number of accidental blotches, than ‘of any thing that is on the earth, or in the water under the earth’” (176). This statement does not only display Hearne’s biased approach, but also shows that he, as an eighteenth-century European, lacks appreciation of abstract art. Furthermore, the text contains a few utterances in inverted commawhich are shocking or even insulting for English readers. By presentingthem as quotations, Hearne signals that he takes no responsibility for their contents. For example, he quotes a statement by Matonabbee in which the latter gives reasons for the fact that women are not providedwith as much food as men: “ ‘[w]omen,’ said he again, ‘though they do every thing, are maintained at a trifling expense; for as they always stand cook, the very licking of their fingers in scarce times, is sufficient for their subsistence’” (102). The quotations of Natives reach a climax when they start to insult the people from England:

When I informed them of the assistance which European women derive from the skill and attention of our midwives, they treated it with the utmost contempt; ironically observing, ‘that the many hump-backs, bandy-legs, and other deformities, so frequent among the English, were undoubtedly owing to the great skill of the persons who assisted in bringing them into the world, and to the extraordinary care of their nurses afterward’ (131).

  • 24  Ruoff, who investigates stereotypes in accounts of Europeans by Natives, also comes to the conclus (...)

16It is noteworthy that Hearne, who contributes considerably to the stereotypical image of the First Nations, here quotes an utterance of the Natives displaying a stereotypical image of Englishmen. This statement, which is not immediately commented on by the narrator, is likely to cause indignation in English readers by confronting them with a stereotype bound to collide with their positive European self-image.24

The Discourse of Deficiency

  • 25  As Berkhofer explains, one “persistent theme in White imagery is the tendency to describe Indian l (...)

17The contrast between Europeans and First Nations does not only manifest itself in deviating customs, behaviour, and culture; very frequently, ‘different’ actually means ‘deficient’. Hearne’s perspective fundamentally presupposes the European way of life as the ‘default’ culture against which differing habits are portrayed in terms of a lack.25

1. Negation

  • 26  Hearne’s descriptions of Native customs are generally characterized “by their marked dependence on (...)
  • 27  The opposition of ‘marked’ vs. ‘unmarked’ is used to denote “grammatical contrasts which are forma (...)

18 The most obvious grammatical device for the expression of a deficiency is negation, which thereby becomes a metaphor for cultural deprivation and depravity.26 By means of a permanent collocation of expressions for the Natives with negation, European standards come to be equated with positive polarity, while the Natives are marked for negative polarity.27 As far as distribution is concerned, the unmarked term is “the one which occurs in the widest variety of contexts” (Cruse, Meaning, 173), which makes it the default case, so that once again the European civilization as the unmarked case is identified with the standard. Hearne’s text contains a considerable number of adjectives with negative prefixes labelling the Natives’ character as ”unthinking” (79), “inconsiderate” (93), “uncivil” (99), “undisciplined” (177), and “inactive” (301), whereby they are supposed to act “ungenerously” (82). Additionally, their intentions and behaviour are characterized as “inhuman” (149), “unaccountable” (93, 170), and “uncourteous” (92). Due to its frequent collocation with terms for the Natives, the negative prefix becomes a kind of trademark for them. By calling the First Nations “entirely unacquainted even with the name of gratitude” (299), the narrator reaches a higher semiotic level of criticism, since hereby the Natives are said not only to lack the signified, but also the signifier. According to Hearne, the Natives’ “hearts [...] are in general so unsusceptible of tenderness, that they can view the deepest distress in those who are not immediately related to them, without the least emotion” (322). This sentence contains the rhetorical strategy of presenting morphemes with negative meaning (un-, not, without) in collocation with a superlative form (least) for the sake of emphasis, which is typical of the text, as the following examples demonstrate as well: “and though I well knew they had had a plentiful winter, [...] they never gave me or my Southern companions the least supply” (80), “he did not contribute in the smallest degree towards our support” (99), “I never found any of them that had the least idea of futurity” (325), and “during the whole time I had been with them, not one of them had offered to give me the least morsel of victuals, without asking something in exchange[...]” (93). The negative temporal adverb never signals the complete absence of a desirable behaviour, while the negative particle not in collocation with the numeral one denotes a zero amount of people performing the beneficial action. The latter type of negation can also be expressed by the negative indefinite determiner no collocating with a noun or pro-form referring to the Natives: “[...] she dropt behind, and no one attempted to go back in search of her” (219) and “no Indians in this country have the courage to face their enemies when they find them apprized of their approach” (333).

19In addition to criticizing their character and behaviour, Hearne finds numerous deficiencies in the First Nations’ culture and customs, employing a normative concept of the term ‘culture’. Once again, the negative prefix plays a crucial role in downgrading the ‘Others’: their “hieroglyphics” (176) and their conjurers’ “jargon” (209) are “unintelligible” (176, 209) to Hearne, some of their customs “so unnatural” (219), and their ceremonies “unusual” (220). Furthermore, the Natives are “utterly unacquainted with letters” (328) and therefore generally “uncivilized” (265, 326). Hearne even quotes a few lines from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts which support his dissociation from the Natives’ supposed lack of education. The negative adverb never expresses a deficiency of culture when Hearne points out that they “never bury their dead, but always leave the bodies where they die” (323) and that they “have never adopted any mode of dancing of their own, or any songs to which they can dance” (318), but imitate other tribes in this respect. Their alleged lack of scientific progress is mirrored in Hearne’s impression that they “never make use of any medicines of their own preparing” (321). Finally, the negative particle expresses the complete absence of certain traditions as well as religion: “[t]heir marriages are not attended with any ceremony” (301) and “[r]eligion has not as yet begun to dawn among the Northern Indians” (325). In the last of these utterances, Hearne’s biased and restricted Eurocentric perspective becomes most salient, for Chipewyan culture knows shamans communicating with the spirit world (cf. Pritzker, 494).

  • 28  In his rather one-sided and biased biography of Hearne from the year 1963, Speck even finds severa (...)

20All in all, a look at the deficiencies emphasized by Hearne leads to the conclusion that the positive counterimage of the imperfect ‘Indians’ strongly resembles the British gentleman ideal of the eighteenth century. Thus, the moral concept of an ideal gentleman, as propagated by Joseph Addison (1672-1719), included “hard work, virtuous deeds and good character” (Bründl, 151). Similarly, Lord Chesterfield’s (1694-1773) gentleman ideal is characterized by learning, honour, virtue, politeness, and good-breeding (cf. Mason, 64). Evidently, Hearne does not seem to recognize these features in the majority of the Natives, with the exceptionof Matonabbee, as was noted above.28

2. Quantification

21In some respects, Hearne does not claim a total lack of Native Canadian virtues and civilization but chooses to express that they are present only in very small quantities. Since the determiners little and few “suggest that the quantity is less than expected” (Biber et al., 276), they belong the group of “negative quantifiers” (Quirk et al., 392), which play a significant role in Hearne’s representation of the First Nations.

22With respect to disposition and behaviour, the Natives are characterized by “[so] little humanity” (99, 288), “so little feeling and unconcern” (99), and “so little attention” (70) for the needs of others that Hearne detects in them an unparalleled lack of charity and compassion. It is striking that the intensifying adverb so typically premodifies the quantifier, adding emphasis and emotion. In the following example, little is used as the head of the noun phrase and is premodified by the interrogative adverb how, which again intensifies its meaning: “it [the Natives’ behaviour] showed plainly how little I had to expect if I should, by any accident, be reduced to the necessity of depending upon them for support” (93-94). Similar to the use of never, the temporal adverb seldom is employed in the sentence “the humanity of these sages [i.e. conjurers] is seldom known to extend beyond their own families” (143-44) in order to convey their alleged absence of pity. One of the very few instances of humour in the Journey is also connected to quantification, since it is based on the ironical use of the multal quantifier much (cf. Quirk et al., 384). After a few Natives have robbed Hearne of all his belongings, they give him back a few items so that he is able to survive in the wilderness, upon which Hearne comments: “[f]inding them possessed of so much generosity, I ventured to solicit them for my razors” (97).

  • 29  The fact that similar prejudices also exist within Europe at the same time becomes obvious in Samu (...)

23As for more specific aspects of the Natives’ culture, Hearne finds further deficiencies. “They have but few diversions” (318), he comments, premodifying the negative quantifier few with the diminisher but. Their music, one of their chief pastimes, consists of “no more than a frequent repetition of the words, hee, hee, hee, ho, ho, ho &c.” (318), and when dancing they “just shuffle themselves a little from right to left, and back again in the same line, without lifting their feet from the ground” (319). The first of these examples is exceptional in negating the comparative form more, whereas the second combines the meanings of the diminisher subjunct just, the paucal quantifier a little, and the preposition without, creating an emphatic impression of deficiency. Even the Natives’ allegedly rudimentary stage of spirituality, labelled ‘superstition’ by Hearne, is performed with “so little energy” (325).29 The moral and cultural shortcomings are mirrored in physical appearance, as can be exemplified by Hearne’s account of the Natives’ beards:

Few of the men have any beard; this seldom makes its appearance till they are arrived at middle-age, and then is by no means equal in quantity to what is observed on the faces of the generality of Europeans; the little they have, however, is exceedingly strong and bristly (298).

24With the beard as a symbol for virility and power, this seemingly trivial excerpt contains in a nutshell a metaphor for the European claim of superiority. The shortage on the part of the Chipewyans is very explicit in the form of the negative quantifiers few and little, the temporal adverb seldom, and the noun quantity in collocation with the negative determiner no. Moreover, the description of the few hairs as “strong and bristly” can hardly be understood as flattering, but rather as a curiosity reminiscent of pubic hair, which is conducive to the stereotype of the moral depravity of the Natives.

3. Privative Content Words

  • 30  Therefore it is doubtless an improper simplification to assert that Hearne exclusively “gives accu (...)

25Apart from bound morphemes and function words, privative content words, whose sememes include non-existence (cf. Leisi, 48), contribute to the representation of the First Nations as deficient. In particular, the text exhibits the adjectives destitute, void, and divested, which express deprivation on the material as well as on the spiritual level. Thus, as stated by Hearne, the Native “women are as destitute of real beauty as any nation I ever saw” (128), while the Natives in general are “utterly destitute of every idea of practical religion” (325) and “destitute of all religious control” (326). In the last two excerpts, the emphasizing adverb utterly and the universal indefinite determiner all underline Hearne’s practice of generalization. Regarding the First Nations’ intellect, Hearne calls his Native companions “so void of common understanding” (93) and leaders of the Natives “divested of every degree of reason” (285). Relevant privative nouns are want and deficiency, by which European standards are again taken as a yardstick. Owing to the “want of every colour but red and black, and the deficiency of skill in the artist” (176), Hearne judges the paintings on the Natives’ shields as substandard. Referring once more to their alleged lack of compassion, Hearne ascribes the miserable situation of Natives to the “want of humanity among themselves” (300), which conveniently serves as an ideological argument for European blamelessness.30

4. Hearne’s Loss of Language

  • 31  Hence, this is a case in which there is the “danger [...] of the representative replacing or obscu (...)

26A metalinguistic anticlimax of verbal representation is reached in passages where the Natives’ moral deficiency purportedly causes a loss of language. When Hearne calls the incidents at Bloody Fall “shocking beyond description” (179), he invokes and concedes a linguistic crisis of descriptive representation: the Native Canadians’ way of life contains items of reality for which Hearne’s linguistic competence cannot provide adequate signifiers. By making representation the topic, Hearne ends up at a metalinguistic level where he indirectly blames the First Nations for deficiencies in his report on the occurrences. Judging the action of the Natives as “so shocking, that it would be indecent to describe it” (180), Hearne presents himself as a conscientious eye-witness whose gentlemanly disposition prevents him from giving a precise account of the events.31 Of course, this is a rhetorical strategy which all the more stimulates the reader’s imagination. Along these lines, he specifies that “[m]y situation and the terror of my mind at beholding this butchery, cannot easily be conceived, much less described” (180), whereby he leaves the description of outward appearances and adds that his inner feelings are impossible to represent as well. The fact that not only Native Canadian culture, but also Canadian nature can render Hearne speechless becomes evident in his statement that “[i]t is impossible to describe the intenseness of the cold which we experienced this day” (118).

27Hearne’s capacity for verbal representation is equally impeded in a passage where he relates the abilities of Native conjurers to cure sick persons. For him, “the apparent good effect of their labours on the sick and diseased is not so easily accounted for,” and he concedes that he is “at a loss to say” how they can have the faculty of doctors (232). In this instance, the limitations of Hearne’s representations become apparent in his own words, as he admits that his accounts are restricted to perceptible events and are thus incapable of explaining all facets of First Nations culture.

Conclusion

28The analyses have demonstrated that the discourse of contrast manifests itself not only in antonymic lexical sets, but also in various linguistic forms of comparison as well as in adversative adverbs and conjunctions. Additionally, in the few cases where Natives are given a voice in the form of direct speech, their utterances typically contribute to cultural dissociation. The discourse of deficiency is realized by negation in various forms as a metaphor for a dearth of civilization, by negative quantifiers, and by privative content words. On a metalinguistic level, Hearne indirectly holds the Natives’ postulated lack of culture responsible for a loss of language on his part and consequently for gaps in verbal representation.

  • 32  This corresponds to the fact that “representation, even purely ‘aesthetic’ representation of ficti (...)
  • 33  Intentions like these are feasible because of the power of representations “to constitute ‘reality (...)

29Although in some places the text exhibits respect for the First Nations, especially for Matonabbee, the overall attitude of the narrator towards the Natives is of a generalizing and unfavourable kind. Hence, the dissociation from and debasement of the First Nations by means of the discursive strategies employed in Hearne’s Journey serve as a confirmation of European self-confidence.32 In contrast to the Natives’ alleged deficiencies, the European way of life appears abundant in material, cultural, and ethical respects.33 Ultimately, the discourses do not only corroborate European preconceptions about Native Canadians, but also provide a justification for European colonization and imperialism.

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Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations, Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2001, 1-7.

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MACLAREN Ian S., “Samuel Hearne & the Landscapes of Discovery”, Canadian Literature: A Quarterly of Criticism and Review, no 103, Winter 1984, 27-40.
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Notes

1  I would like to thank Birgit Däwes, Ernst Burgschmidt, and Matthias Merkl for bibliographical advice and constructive remarks on this paper.

2  Hearne’s account is typical of the genre of ‘exploration literature’ in combining “edification” with “entertainment” (Moreau, 349). For more information on the Canadian exploration theme see Atwood (113-120).

3  For the publishing history of the Journey see MacLaren (Massacre, 27-43) and Goldman (44-46).

4  In an application of Mitchell’s model of representation on the Journey, the Native Canadians are linguistically represented by Hearne as the ‘maker,’ while European readers are the target audience (12).

5  A history of the Chipewyans, whose name is derived from the Cree word for ‘pointed skins,’ is offered by Pritzker (493-495). Vogelsang (9-17) presents a general overview of the sociopolitical and economic history of Canada’s First Nations.

6  Gidley points out that in the colonizers’ discourse it was “virtually inevitable that the representations [...] would incorporate, reflect or respond to, perhaps justify, the assumptions of the dominant” (2), and that bias in representation is typically based on the subjective selection of aspects of reality (3), which in Hearne’s case is realized in the form of the two strategies mentioned.

7  I follow Lubbers in his definition of a stereotype as a “simplified, commonly held, often emotionalized mental picture of a person or a social group with a tendency to adjudge qualities, to assign characteristics or to deny them” (15). It can support the ethnocentric or possibly even racist dichotomy of ‘we’ versus the ‘Others’ (cf. Lutz, 13; Gidley, 2; Ruoff, 199).

8  The term ‘Indians’ is today used by researchers when “referring to the image of Native people held by non-Natives” (Francis, 9), whereas the terms ‘Native Canadians’ or ‘members of First Nations’ denote the actual people. For this terminological distinction see also Berkhofer (xvii) and Lutz (2-3). An overview of the use of such terms in public life is provided by Vogelsang (6-8).

9  According to the OED, the noun warble denotes a “small tumour or swelling on the back of cattle, deer, etc. produced by the larva of a gad-fly” as well as the “gad-fly or its larva which produces ‘warbles’” (“Warble”, def. 2 and 3).

10  As Hutchings points out, the dichotomy of the “savage” vs. the “civil” is based on the “assumption that American Indians were representatives of the earliest stages of human development” within the “four stages theory” including “hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce” (53). This accords with the OED’s definition of a ‘savage’ as a “person living in the lowest state of development or cultivation; an uncivilized, wild person” (“Savage”, def. 2). For a terminological history of the use of this term see Berkhofer (12-22).

11  Bataille points out that the common use of the term ‘massacre’ instead of ‘battle’ hints at European writers’ prejudiced stance towards the First Nations (5).

12  By a comparison of the three consecutive versions of the ‘massacre narrative,’MacLaren manages to expose the unreliability of Hearne’s text. A scrutiny of the different textual stages of composition proves that “none of the book’s descriptions of the cruellest acts of the Chipewyan and Copper Indians appears in the field note” (Massacre, 32). Additionally, MacLaren draws attention to the fact that “[t]he genre of the travel book even permitted the author some licence: the aesthetically justified ‘lie’ [...] was regarded as permissible, within limits, in all but the most strictly scientific travel reports through the eighteenth century” (Massacre, 34).

13  Despite Hearne’s explicit and unambiguous condemnations, Hutchings characterizes his style as “relatively mild compared to that employed for the same purpose by most other contemporary writers of exploration” (55).

14  Referring to the massacre episode, Kröller states “that its poignancy has more to do with the literary vogue of the Gothic than with historical accuracy and that the whole scene may not have taken place in this way at all” (76); for Hearne’s Gothic style see also Goldman (50).

15  These terms used by Hearne closely correspond to Berkhofer’s description of the stereotypical “bad Indian” (28). Replacing the American binary distinction of “Good Guy/Bad Guy” Natives (Atwood, 91), Atwood claims for Canada’s First Nations the dichotomy of “Victor/Victim” (91). In Hearne’s ‘massacre episode,’ the Chipewyans doubtless perform the role of the ‘victor.’

16  Hence, another stereotypical contrast that Hearne supports in the ‘massacre episode’ is “the myth of the savage Indian and the peaceable Inuit” (McGrath, 107).

17  For the role of Chipewyan guides like Matonabbee for explorations initiated by the Hudson’s Bay Company see Dickason (121-122).

18  The OED quotes eighteenth-century uses of ‘sensible’ with the meaning “[c]ognizant, conscious, aware of something. Often with some tinge of emotional sense: Cognizant of something as a ground for pleasure or regret” (“Sensible”, def. 11a).

19  Berkhofer points out that accounts of the New World in general had to live up to the preconceptions and predilections of European audiences (24), which can lead to misrepresentations. MacLaren goes so far as to state that “the involvement in the text by others, or at least the pressure exerted by others on the traveller/author to make his narrative conform to what a readership was prepared to consume, grew increasingly common” (Massacre, 26). He even speaks of the “evolution of the author” indicating that very often in travel writing, the traveller is by no means automatically identical with the author, since usually ghost writers and editors are involved (Evolution, 39). As Hearne can be called “a man who was not completely literate” (Weaver/Toye, 199) and “a semi-literate man” (Goldman, 45), he probably received assistance in completing the text, so that it is highly likely that editorial amendments were introduced.

20  For instance, Goldman argues that Hearne and his editor may have added “unsubstantiated accounts of cannibalism guaranteed to titillate European audiences” (46).

21  Hearne’s account of the Chipewyans’ lethal actions and the resulting dangers for him make the reader aware of the suitability of Atwood’s concept of ‘Survival’ as the central symbol for Canada: “For early explorers and settlers, it meant bare survival in the face of ‘hostile’ elements and/or natives: carving out a place and a way of keeping alive” (Atwood, 32).

22  As Berkhofer shows, “Whites overwhelmingly measured the Indian as a general category against those beliefs, values, or institutions they most cherished in themselves at the time” (27). In so far as Europeans defined themselves as counter images to the ‘savages’, “Indian images reflected the creators of those images more than the people themselves” (Bataille, 4).

23  For more information on Hearne’s interpretations of the visually experienced landscape and topography see MacLaren (Landscapes, 27-38).

24  Ruoff, who investigates stereotypes in accounts of Europeans by Natives, also comes to the conclusion that “the image of the non-Indian in Indian oral and written literature through the nineteenth century was negative,” basically because “they [the Natives] did not believe that non-Indians would treat Indians as fellow Christians” (219).

25  As Berkhofer explains, one “persistent theme in White imagery is the tendency to describe Indian life in terms of its lack of White ways rather than being described positively from within the framework of the specific culture under consideration” (26). Francis offers a psychoanalytic explanation for the portrayal of Natives as deficient: “Europeans also projected onto Native peoples all the misgivings they had about the shortcomings of their own civilization: the Imaginary Indian became a stick with which they beat their own society” (8). Arguing along these lines, Atwood points out that the Natives “are usually made into projections of something in the white Canadian psyche, a fear or wish” (91).

26  Hearne’s descriptions of Native customs are generally characterized “by their marked dependence on passive constructions”, which “obscure and erase the human agents responsible for the actions” (Venema, 13), so that the passive voice is tantamount to negation.

27  The opposition of ‘marked’ vs. ‘unmarked’ is used to denote “grammatical contrasts which are formally or semantically unequal” (Quirk et al., 69).

28  In his rather one-sided and biased biography of Hearne from the year 1963, Speck even finds several of these traits in Hearne’s own character: “His courage had been tested through seven years of war but he was still a gentle man, preferring persuasion to force and hating violence and suffering and bloodshed, against which he could lash out in verbal fury. And if he had learned that he could not always escape violence and death, he had also learned to forgive those who were responsible for them” (12-14).

29  The fact that similar prejudices also exist within Europe at the same time becomes obvious in Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), where he condescendingly discusses the Scottish Highlanders’ use of charms and their belief in the “second sight” (106-110).

30  Therefore it is doubtless an improper simplification to assert that Hearne exclusively “gives accurate and detailed descriptions of the Chipewyan Indians” (Weaver/Toye, 199), and it is too superficial and even inaccurate to come to the conclusion that Hearne gives an account of the Chipewyans “which has never been surpassed for truthfulness, sympathy, and color” (Speck, 1).

31  Hence, this is a case in which there is the “danger [...] of the representative replacing or obscuring what is meant to be visible ‘through’ it” (Murray, 80).

32  This corresponds to the fact that “representation, even purely ‘aesthetic’ representation of fictional persons and events, can never be completely divorced from political and ideological questions” (Mitchell, 15).

33  Intentions like these are feasible because of the power of representations “to constitute ‘reality’ for the cultures which produced and consumed them” (Gidley, 2).

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Christoph Schubert, « Discourses of Contrast and Deficiency: a Lexicogrammatical Analysis of first Nations Representation in Samuel Hearne’s Journey (1795) »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, Vol. III - n°2 | 2005, 23-41.

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Christoph Schubert, « Discourses of Contrast and Deficiency: a Lexicogrammatical Analysis of first Nations Representation in Samuel Hearne’s Journey (1795) »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Vol. III - n°2 | 2005, mis en ligne le 26 octobre 2009, consulté le 28 mai 2023. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/2366 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.2366

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Auteur

Christoph Schubert

(Würzburg, Germany)
Christoph Schubert is an Assistant Professor at the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Würzburg. From 1991-1997 he studied Anglophone and German language and literature at the University of Würzburg. In 2000 Schubert received his Ph.D. for the thesis entitled The Complex Sentence in English Poetry: A Typology of Poetic Texts Based on Syntactic Criteria (Die Hypotaxe in der englischen Lyrik: Eine Typologie dichterischer Texte anhand syntaktischer Kriterien, 2000). He has published articles on English and German film titles, text typology and Language Poetry, and linguistic features of ‘fallible focalization’ in fictional texts. His current research project is on cohesion and types of visual perception in descriptive fictional and non-fictional texts.

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