The Plains Truth:Indians and Metis in Recent Fiction Raymond E. Jones (bio) Indians have always fascinated Canadians, probably because they are the one undeniably exotic element in a country too often assumed, even by its own inhabitants, to be bland and unromantic in both its history and its contemporary life. Authors of historical fiction have been particularly attracted to the Indians of the prairies and to the Metis, those of mixed blood, both of whom were associated with the fur trade, an industry repeatedly mythologized in textbooks and popular adult fiction as an heroic enterprise. Life for the plains tribes was always a struggle for survival, and the prairies offer the additional dramatic conflict of harsh winters. Finally, the Indians and Metis of the West have been involved in some of the most dramatic and violent episodes in Canadian history. Recently, historical novels treating prairie life have tended to go beyond the obvious romantic possibilities of subject and setting and have become thematically deeper: more and more exhibit a trend towards combining the central problem of most adolescent fiction, the quest for individual identity, with questions of cultural or racial identity. As a result, the new historical novel has the potential to be exciting in its episodes, strong in its emotional appeal, and stimulating in its ideas. Two works by Alberta authors (at least at the time they wrote their books) provide instructive examples of the merits of the new historical novel and of its limitations. Brenda Bellingham's Storm Child (1985) and Jan Hudson's Sweetgrass (1984) are both set in 1830's Alberta and are both, to a great extent, novels of manners that focus on the conduct and attitudes of particular groups. Bellingham's novel, the less successful of the two, treats the plight of the Metis, whereas Hudson's studies the life of the Blood Indians, part of the Blackfoot confederacy. Both focus on the roles of adolescent females. Bellingham's Storm Child is an imperfect attempt to create a novel of manners exploring two cultures, that of the white Scots who ran the fur trading business in the Northwest and that of the Peigans who traded with the white men and often bore their children. At the start of the book, Isobel Macpherson, a Metis who is almost thirteen, discovers that her father has decided to go back to Scotland instead of returning to Fort Edmonton after delivering furs to Hudson's Bay. Historically, such behavior was common among the fur traders employed by the Hudson's Bay Company, which tolerated marriages of its employees to Indians although officially forbidding the practice. (See Sylvia Van Kirk, "Many Tender Ties" 1-51.) Like so many others before her, Isobel's Peigan mother, who has become accustomed to living according to white ways, is forced to take up with another white man, the kindly Mr. Fisher, in order to continue living at the fort. She tells Isobel that she must "begin a new life. It is as if your father has died" (22). Isobel, however, is hurt by what she considers to be her father's betrayal, and wants to reject all hateful white ways. Therefore, she determines to live with her Peigan grandparents. Her mother lets her go, declaring, "one day you must choose which path you will follow—the way of your father's people or of mine. You cannot choose if you do not know what lies along each path" (26). Isobel, who now adopts her Indian name Storm Child, goes to live with her grandparents, thus permitting the novel a dramatically plausible way to contrast Indian and white customs. In spite of her contention that she hates the whites, Storm Child finds that she does not automatically fit into Indian life. In many ways, she has been conditioned by white habits and must learn to view things anew. She cannot, for example, at first understand how Jamie Jock Bird, a Metis educated in England, can assure her that her grandfather is religious even though he is not a Christian. Soon she comes to understand that Peigan religion is "reasonable" (41) because it depends on direct observation of nature. She realizes, furthermore, that...