<p>Author and Nature artist Dorothy Lander grew up on the Rice Lake Plains in the 1950s and early 1960s, beginning a lifelong practice of collecting and preserving plant specimens and learning their names, as had pioneer, botanist, and literary powerhouse Catharine Parr Traill (CPT) a century earlier. The land where the Traill family lived in the octagonal Tower (the provenance of Tower Farm, later Tower Manor) and attended Anglican worship services at the Valley of the Big Stone has been part of the Lander family lineage since 1874. The outdoor worship services in 1846 preceded the first service in the wooden chapel of St. George\u2019s in Gore\u2019s Landing, which the Traill family attended in January 1847.\u00a0The publishers (HARP Publishing The People\u2019s Press) chose St. George\u2019s Chapel to release the book <em>ReReading Catharine Parr Traill<\/em> to acknowledge this history\u2014and on National Truth and Reconciliation Day (Sept. 30), as an opportunity to strengthen right relationships between Indigenous and Settler Peoples. The grave of CPT\u2019s grandson Henry Strickland Atwood, who died in January 1864 aged three, is in the churchyard and was the site for a symbolic gesture of Every Child Matters on Sept. 30, 2021. When the book is released on Sept. 30. 2022, we will mark the day with a procession of Indigenous and Settler children bearing baskets of orange and white flowers to Baby Henry\u2019s grave.<\/p><p><br><\/p><p><em>ReReading Catharine Parr Traill: Stranging the Familiar<\/em> is a decolonizing memoir and a Truth and Reconciliation <em>project<\/em>, building on the life jolt Dorothy experienced on re-reading CPT\u2019s 1852 children\u2019s story <em>Canadian Crusoes: A Tale of the Rice Lake Plains<\/em> during the pandemic lockdown. Sixty-five years after last hearing her father read it aloud over several successive Sundays, Dorothy owns the \u201ctruth\u201d of her unaware complicity in Canada\u2019s colonization project. She exposes the colonizer messages in <em>Canadian Crusoes\u2014<\/em>messages that support white supremacy and the Doctrine of Discovery, which must have been \u201cread\u201d into her very cells as a child.\u00a0Dorothy faces up to the contradictions that her revered \u201cfloral godmother\u201d represents. Without missing a beat, CPT moves from racialized stereotypes of Indigenous Peoples as stupid, uneducable, dirty, bloodthirsty, and uninventive to her positive portrayals of the Mohawk maid Indiana whose Indigenous knowledge carries the three Settler Canadian Crusoes through three winters on the Rice Lake Plains.<\/p><p><br><\/p><p>Dorothy\u2019s singular effort of producing a \u201csettler accountability narrative\u201d blossomed into a Truth and Reconciliation <em>project<\/em> when several citizens of Alderville First Nation added their contributions.\u00a0Notably, Maurice Switzer, whose grandfather Moses Muscrat Marsden was chief of Alderville 1905-1909, wrote the Foreword to <em>ReReading Catharine Parr Traill.<\/em><\/p><p><br><\/p><p>Could Catharine Parr Traill be time-transported into modern-day Canada, I believe she might well support the need for Reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and her immigrant descendants.\u2026The Dorothy Landers of this country are the real \u201callies\u201d required by Indigenous peoples if Reconciliation is to succeed. As citizens in a country of which they want to be proud, they want to learn everything they can about its past \u2013 warts and all \u2013 so they can have a baseline against which to measure improvement over past practices.<\/p><p><br><\/p><p><img src=\u00a0\u00bbhttps:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.harppublishing.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Re-Reading-Koren-01.png?resize=325%2C466&ssl=1″ width=\u00a0\u00bb325″ height=\u00a0\u00bb466″><\/p><p>Koren Smoke operates a tattoo and art studio at Alderville First Nation. Artist and ecologist Rick Beaver recommended Koren to Dorothy, which led to Koren contributing five spectacular illustrations to <em>ReReading Catharine Parr Traill<\/em>. The All My Relations image re-casts the Mohawk girl Indiana and re-imagines the <em>Canadian Crusoes <\/em>narrative.<\/p><p><strong>ALL MY RELATIONS<\/strong><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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