In 2009, Stephen Harper, then prime minister of Canada, surprised many when he declared that Canada had “no history of colonialism.” Canadian critic Margery Fee’s recent study, Literary Land Claims: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Attawapiskat, offers a compelling rejoinder to the prime minister’s claim. Not only does Fee’s account of roughly 250 years of indigenous dispossession in what has come to be known as Canada thoroughly dispel Mr. Harper’s misrepresentation of the country’s history, but it also serves to illustrate the complex ways in which Canada’s ongoing colonial project has been alternatively contested and facilitated by the pages of its national literature.

Literary Land Clams is an examination of the ways that Romanic ideals of literary nationalism—the lingering belief, established in the eighteenth century, that in expressing a country’s “soul” a national literature establishes a claim to the land—has functioned within the settler-colonial state of Canada. In addition to two introductory chapters framing the study’s primary questions and a conclusion addressing contemporary concerns, the study includes two chapters on the novelist John Richardson, and one chapter each on Louis Riel, E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake, Archibald Belaney/Grey Owl, and Harry Robinson.

With the possible exception of Robinson, these are familiar—and contested—figures in the study of indigenous and Canadian literatures. It is notable, then, that Literary Land Claims is a recuperative project: Fee suggests that Riel’s reputed insanity is better read as the audience’s inability to comprehend his indigenous/Catholic rhetoric, for example, and argues that Richardson’s superficial portrayals of “savage Indians” mask a nuanced critique of British policies toward indigenous peoples. Similarly, she suggests Johnson’s allegedly opportunistic embrace of her Mohawk ancestry is best understood as an exploitation of the performative nature of identity that enabled the poet to critique colonial injustices directly to White audiences and that the Englishman Archibald Belaney’s bestselling books and international tours as the indigenous “Grey Owl” was not a case of simple appropriation but a process of “disidentification” that interrogated the notion of static racialized identities. Although at times overstated, this recuperative gesture is important for Fee, who acknowledges her “white British settler ancestors” early and emphasizes contemporary Euro-Canadian complicity with the settler-colonial project. Literary Land Claims is not a study of indigenous literatures per se, after all, but rather of the claiming and contestation of land in Canada through its literatures; one of the book’s central insights is that “demands for an impossible authenticity are characteristic of much writing about Indigenous peoples and, by undermining their claim to a valid identity, also discount their rights to land.”

Many of the book’s strengths and limitations can be traced to its ambitious scope. Fee convincingly demonstrates the length, breadth, and impact of what she terms “literary land claims” across Canadian history, for example, but, perhaps unavoidably, coverage proves a challenge. Fee’s decision to dedicate two chapters to Richardson, in particular, means that her engagement with the recent resurgence of indigenous authors, movements, and methodologies are unfortunately relegated to a short conclusion. Similarly, Fee is surely right to insist that the political, cultural, and historical nature of her study demands an interdisciplinary approach. A literary critic by training, Fee’s efforts to draw on legal studies, literary criticism, history, anthropology, sociology, indigenous studies, new genre theory, and other disciplines demonstrate both the possibilities and the challenges of such wide-ranging scholarship: here it produces insights into the complexity of the subject, but also some tenuous connections (Are Riel’s court testimonies best read as “literary” texts? Is Richardson best read as rewriting Edmund Burke?). It also results in an occasionally awkward episodic structure for the argument, with a page and a half on “unlocking Locke,” a page on “problems of representation,” and so on.

In general, however, this is a valuable contribution to the growing body of criticism in Canada engaging indigenous texts and concerns, and Fee confirms the complexity of canonical figures that are sometimes dismissed as colonial apologists or frauds. Historicizing the role of literature in the claiming and contestation of land rights in Canada is a productive and necessary project, and Literary Land Claims is likely to motivate future work in the field.