Biocritical Essay (Christie Harris)

During her long life, Christie Harris has written hundreds of stories and radio programmes for children in a variety of modes and with a wide range of subjects, but it is for her versions of Pacific Northwest Indian tales that she is most famous and for which she has won many awards such as the Canada Council's Award for Children's Literature (now the Governor General's Award).Inevitably, given the current negative climate of thinking about white appropriation of native culture, for a critic such as myself to be writing about an author such as Harris is to be involved at once in controversy.A radical rethinking over the past twenty years of the relationship between the dominant white Canadian culture and the native First Nations cultures has led to a different understanding of the rights of a culturally appropriated society than was prevalent during the years when Harris was writing her books.It seems likely that, were she to be starting her career as an author today, Christie Harris would not feel comfortable with at least the early material for which she has become famous, so sensitive an issue has cultural appropriation become in Canadian intellectual life.Nevertheless, I hope to point out later in this essay that, even thirty years ago, when she was casting her versions of the tales in Raven's Cry and Once Upon a Totem, she was very much aware both of the responsibilities that went with her task and of the need to educate herself as best she could about native culture before she ever wrote a word of the retellings.She knew that the great tales, the histories, of those called by her the Lords of the Coast were the possessions of individual families and thus needed to be treated with respect.She knew, too, that her versions of these tales should be regarded as no more than mediations between their native origins and a white audience and never as replacements.True, her earliest writing about native culture which appears for a children's page in The Vancouver Daily Province when she was twenty years old, in the late 1920s, was full of stereotyping and condescension, a troubling trend in many children's books of the same era.Her later books, though, for which she is best known, show a much different understanding of the great culture she was writing about.One needs to keep in mind also that the native tales make up only a minor amount of Harris's output over seventy years of writing.She also wrote a large number of other stories for children, both published and broadcast, radio dramas and talks and juvenile fantasies, a few poems, and whole books historical, fantastical and ficto-biographical, all on a variety of subjects.Too, though this fact may be less well-known, she wrote adult radio dramas and women's

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