The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

some ways the selections are predictable:
Wallace Stegner's "The Question Mark in
the Circle" provides the—still remarkable—prairie
centre, but Grady's sense of
reading the landscape by focussing on the
people living in it, provides a different take
from meticulous description of flora and
fauna. An excerpt from Edith Iglauer's loving
portrait of her fisherman-husband
(from Fishing With John), for example,
measures the worker's way of reading the
Pacific Ocean.
Working and "worked" geographies also
fascinate Stephen Hume. His collection of
journalism Ghost Camps: Memory and
Myth on Canada's Frontiers (NeWest, n.p.)
contains essays on the Crowsnest Pass
country as expressed in the tough jaw and
black irony of Joe Brown, coal miner, and
on the westcoast of Vancouver Island as it is
risked by the halibut fishery and remembered
in the legends of countless shipwrecks.
In "The Heartwood of our Present,"
Hume pleads for the preservation of the
archival and documentary resources which,
even in their absences, contain "the landmarks
of Canada's culturally distinct future."
Another such preservation—of oral as
much as documentary sources—is Peter S.
Schmalz's The Ojibwa of Southern Ontario
(U Toronto P, $24.95 / $60.00), a book
which might be called a political history of
a people since European contact, if we
allow, with Schmalz, that "political" here is
more a matter of linguistics and culture
than of rulers and ruled. Nonetheless, I
found this book a little too bound to a textbook
concept of history as compilation of
facts and dates (however welcome in itself);
despite the author's claim that "of all Indian
groups, the Ojibwa have produced the
greatest number of Indian authors," little of
Basil Johnston's wit or Duke Redbird's song
finds its way into the book. Few reviewers in
1992 could attempt such a brief summation
without acknowledging, self-consciously,
its naive and culturally-determined concepts—of
Ojibwa, of poetry. Nonetheless, I
had something of the same reaction reading
Adolf Hungry Wolf's Teachings of Nature
(Skookumchuk, B.C.: Good Medicine
Books, $9.95), a slim book described as "a
handbook of outdoor knowledge from various
native tribes of North America."
Although I longed for some variation of
sentence structure, or some more concrete
verbs, I welcomed the several catalogues of
flora and fauna, their uses and significance
in native cultures, particularly where the
transliterations of the native terms were
included—violets called "blue mouths"
and grouse called kitssitsum or "looking
like smoke" in Blackfoot.
"Outdoor knowledge" is a favourite with
publishers eager to find a place on the
bookstore shelves now inevitably labelled
"Environment." Among the many picture
books that should show cover-out there are
Celebrations of Nature (Goose Lane,
$29.95), an album of black and white photographs
by Reg Balch, one-time director of
the Federal Forest biology laboratory in
Frederickton. Balch's emphasis is on the
human role in biotic communities, and
where his eye for the amusing does not pick
out people, it picks out the transformations
of the physical world that originate with
humans. Two BBC publications, spinoffs
from television series, include a great deal
more text, and amount to combinations of
picture book and reference work (with
quite detailed indexes). Peter Crawford's
The Living Isles: A Natural History of Britain
and Ireland (BBC Books, $34.95 CDN), a
reissue of a 1985 work, is organized by different
ecosystems (pasture, stream, tidal
zone), whereas Robert McCracken Peck's
Land of the Eagle: A Natural History of
North America (BBC, $39.95 CDN) is organized
by region. The Living Isles is a great
deal more alert to biotic interdependencies,
and seems to me, partly because the sites
are less familiar, a good deal more useful.
Besides, Land of the Eagle treats Canada