To All Appearances A Lady - University of British Columbia

expressed in the steps of the dance, the formalised
gestures of oratory, is part of the
tradition from which chiefs draw their
respect. The overtone of the book is nostalgia.
Many of the speakers refer to the past
of native custom before assimilation, even
going back to the lives of their parents, and
the general consensus of these older people
seems to be that the old ways were best and
that in gaining liberation the native peoples
should use the past as a foundation. It
seems almost as if, in memory, the past has
been remade into a geriatric paradise. This
book is a fine monument to the old ways,
but I wonder if it offers a solution to contemporary
native problems or how far it
will aid in that reconciliation through
which, before too long, the native and the
later coming peoples must come together
and learn from each others' wisdom, G.W.
Eric W. Sager. Ships and Memories:
Merchant Seamen in Canada's Age of Steam.
U British Columbia P. $29.95. Ships and
Memories is a good piece of semi-oral history.
Eric Sager is a professor, not a seaman,
yet the material on which he relies and
which he handles sympathetically is drawn
from the oral accounts of Canadian seamen
(together with one non-oral account of the
life of the ship's cat, a necessary member of
the crew on many vessels). The result is a
deromanticing of life at sea, the portrayal
of a working-class existence, somewhat
more risky than most trades, and generally
less well paid. In fact, some of the most
interesting pages deal with unionization
and the modification of the structure of
seaboard authority. Of course, since the
1870s and the 1880s, when Canada had the
world's fourth largest merchant marine,
Canadiah shipping has been in a steady
decline; I often drive sadly along the shores
of Burrard Inlet, count the ships waiting to
take on wheat in Vancouver harbour, and
realize that not one of them is a Canadian
ship carrying Canadian grain, G.W.
Gabriel Dumont Speaks. Trans. Michael
Barnholden. Talonbooks. After the North
West Rebellion, Gabriel Dumont, who
could not write in any language, dictated
two groups of his memories of his life and
the uprising of 1883. The first was written
down in 1887, among a company of sympathizers,
by B.A.T. Montigny, the Recorder
of Québec, and a translation by G.F. Stanley
appeared in 1949 in the Canadian Historical
Review. Later, in 1903, the second memoir
was taken down by someone in
Saskatchewan, and found its way into the
archive of the Union Nationale Métisse de
Saint-Joseph, which is kept in the Manitoba
Provincial Archives. Michael Barnholder,
who now presents a translation of the document,
states that he received a copy of it
by chance from the National Archives when
he asked for a copy of the first Dumont
memoir. He now presents his translation of
this "discovery."
This is indeed the first published translation
of the text in its entirety, though I
received a copy from the Manitoba
Archives when I was writing Gabriel
Dumont (1975), translated it for my own
benefit, and quoted it extensively in my
book—of which Barnholder seems to be
unaware. Thus the second Dumont memoir
is not the "chance discovery" that this
introduction suggests. It has been publicly
known for nearly two decades.
There are other doubtful points. The
frontispiece is entitled "Possibly Madeleine
Dumont with Gabriel Dumont." The
woman beside Gabriel is certainly not
Madeleine, for the photograph (here reproduced
the wrong way around) was taken in
New York when Gabriel was with the
Buffalo Bill show: he is wearing a silver
medal given him by a New York audience in
September 1886. Madeleine was dead by
then. The woman is probably a member of
the company. No known photograph exists
of Madeleine. When Barnholder talks of
her "teaching school" at Batoche, I think he
167