Truth and Conviction: Donald Marshall Jr. and the Mi’kmaw Quest for Justice

Abstract

compulsive repetitions” (219), Deshaye suggests that as early as the 1940s, the genre of the Western “is at a historical moment when a nascent postmodern mode is inclining it to parody” (220). His assertion that the “Smokey Carmain” stories “need to be read cultural-materialistically and serially ... to be recognized as parodies” (225) may also provide students of periodicals and popular seriality with a welcome opportunity to engage more deeply with the archive of Canadian pulps. Political or ethical concerns manifest themselves not only in the structure but also in the tone or style of The American Western in Canadian Literature. Associating, as he self-reflectively notes in the Introduction, “academic habits of ... ‘surveying’ and then ‘staking a claim’ to an ‘area of inquiry’” with settler colonialism and “extractive industries such as those for oil and gas” (33), Deshaye instead chooses to adopt a “more personal, public-facing, risk-taking, and energetic” voice (34-35). The result is a sprawling text—the book has no fewer than 377 pages of text, with each of the analytic chapters averaging between 40 and 50 pages—that may make some readers wish a little more pruning had taken place here and there. Yet if that is the price one must pay for a thoroughly engaged and meaningful text that also speaks to concerns beyond those of literary and cultural studies, then so be it. Considering what is at stake, it is a very small price indeed.