David F. Stirrup

Wild West in the Mild West: Reading the Canadian Anti-Western through The Englishman’s Boy

Concluding an essay titled “Dances with Wolfers: Choreographing History in The Englishman’s Boy,” Herb Wyile writes: “Somewhat ironically, given Vanderhaeghe’s sentiments about images, yet not surprisingly, given the success and cinematic potential of The Englishman’s Boy, Vanderhaeghe is working on the screenplay for a movie version. Let’s hope Kevin Costner is busy with other projects” (48). The tone of Wyile’s comment on Guy Vanderhaeghe’s 1996 novel seemingly indicts the ability of film to actively subvert genre. The novel itself, meanwhile, offers an excoriating critique of the ideologically distortive effects of Hollywood. Wyile’s repetition of the common critique that Dances with Wolves, well-intentioned though it may have been, ultimately falls into the generic binaries and heroic codes of the conventional Western, implies, however, that even a novel as explicitly critical of those conventions as The Englishman’s Boy is not guaranteed a successful transition to film. Whether or not it is another Dances with Wolves, the

I'm indiginous, I'm indiginous, I'm indiginous: Indigenous Rights, British Nationalism, and the European Far Right

11.7 million two-part dramatization of The Englishman’s Boy by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (2008) was similarly lauded, winning six Gemini awards.1 It also paralleled the novel’s earlier success, which earned the Governor General’s Award for 1996 and a nomination for the Giller Prize, both significant markers of entry into, and establishment in, the Canadian literary elite.

Parallel Encounters: Culture and the Canada-US Border

In his appearance on the BBC’s Question Time on October 22, 2009, Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party (BNP) since 1999, commented: The indigenous British … skin colour is irrelevant … no one [would] dare go to New Zealand and say to a Maori, what do you mean indigenous? He wouldn’t go to North America and say to an American Red Indian what do you mean indigenous, we’re all the same. The indigenous people of this island are the English, the Scots the Irish and the Welsh … it’s the people who have been here overwhelmingly for the last 17,000 years. We are the aborigines here. I’m sorry if you laugh.2