[In the following essay, Howells asserts that Wiebe presents a God-centered view of history in his The Temptations of Big Bear which “transcends any regional history and allows us to accept all events as part of a divine plan beyond our limited human comprehension and which can only be asserted through faith in God.”]

WIEBE: When you start looking at the actual stuff from history from a slightly different angle you start seeing so many different stories there than the standard ones we have been given …

KROETSCH: One of the great things about Big Bear is the way you undo all the documents of the culture.

WIEBE: Yeah, but that doesn't mean that I don't discover a larger meaning which has perhaps escaped the untutored eye of a lot of people.¹

In this conversation Wiebe signals his approach to historical fiction by suggesting that there are ‘different stories’ and ‘a larger meaning’ to be discovered behind the facts and fixed dates of recorded history. How Wiebe uses the narrative of The Temptations of Big Bear to reveal these other stories and this larger meaning which has escaped the untutored eye is the subject of my essay. In Big Bear Wiebe is writing about Canadian prairie history at the time of the land treaties a century ago, focusing on the career of Big Bear, chief of the Plains Cree, during the twelve years from his refusal to sign Land Treaty Number 6 up to his death in 1888. The novel documents the breakdown of Indian culture under the pressures of white imperialism backed by a military and industrial power; it uses the facts of history, while at the same time insistently points beyond these apparently determining facts towards a more comprehensive view, which is that of a metaphysical order centred on God. Arguably the epigraph from Acts at the beginning offers us the key to the whole system of signification in the novel.

History may be a nightmare from which Wiebe is trying to awake, but he is not naive enough to try to rewrite history in his fiction. He accepts the conditions of determinism for history is already written and irreversible. What he argues is that it is far from all-inclusive, being full of gaps and silences and moments out of sequence which open up world views not contained in official histories. Wiebe insists on asserting some of the other possibilities buried within prairie history, and this role of his is astutely observed by Robert Kroetsch in the interview referred to at the beginning, “I think you're not really an historian, you're more of an archaeologist—in fact the dedication to Big Bear is something about unearthing, isn't it?”² Wiebe sets out not to deny history but to go “Beyond Determinism” by giving back to history some of its many other voices and so subvert the fictions of Canada's official past.³ There are other pasts too, Indian and Biblical for instance, and Wiebe argues through analogies between them that the history of man is determined, yes, but by a metaphysical power, the power of God. Such a reading which sees history from the different angle of Christian idealism offers a more expansive view, allowing for faith and vision and hope through history itself. It is towards this transcendent vision that Wiebe moves via his narrative strategies involving the manipulation of time, the visions of Big Bear, and the use of multiple voices in the narrative.

W. J. Keith and Wiebe himself have given us the details of his exhaustive historical research for Big Bear.⁴ Two things that emerge most plainly from these accounts are Wiebe's anger that so much of authentic prairie history should have been lost, and his desire to retell Big Bear's story so that the true significance of his resistance to the imposition of white rule might be understood a hundred years later. The characters in Big Bear are historical personages and the events had a real existence in time and place, as the Section headings in Big Bear indicate. In writing this novel Wiebe became he said, “almost psychotic about dates; I had to know whether something happened on Monday or Tuesday!”⁵ The creative effort begins at exactly the point where the facts end, and Wiebe seems as fascinated with the problems and the necessity of his story-telling as he is with his subject matter:

Fiction is always truer than fact in this sense: it is never possible to know all the facts about anything, even the very smallest act. The things done vanish with their doing; they can live only in a living memory, and the true story-teller has the unstoppable longing to capture these acts forever beyond memory. I cannot let this act die … There are any number of origins for that passionate emotion that seizes a story-teller and will not let him rest until he has made something out of facts.⁶

The most striking feature of Wiebe's making something out of the facts in Big Bear is his treatment of narrative time, for the novel operates on an elaborate counterpoint between the chronological order of history and transgressions of this order by every story-teller within the narrative.⁷ Though the time markers following the sequential pattern of history are explicit at the beginning of every section, the narrative is discontinuous with its multiple voices, its internal timeshifts, its changes in rhythm; the relationship between these two temporal orders of history and experimental time is basic to the text. A temporal analysis of Big Bear would look something like this:⁸

I. Fort Pitt, September 13, 1876. The Indians' signing of Treaty Number 6 and Big Bear's refusal to sign is the main focus of this section; but this event （or non-event） is counter-pointed by various ‘anachronies’ （time shifts）: Rev. John McDougall's retrospective narrative of events in 1874 and ’75, also by Big Bear's prophetic vision of doom and the omniscient narrator's hints of future events.

II. Between the Forks and the Missouri, 1878–1882. Section begins back in 1877 with more treaty negotiations, deals with the winter of 1878–9, the buffalo hunt, Big Bear's prophetic vision of blood, the coming of the CPR railway, and ends with Big Bear's signing of the Land Treaty, 8 December, 1882.

III. The Battle and the North Saskatchewan, June, August, 1884. Section begins with the omniscient narrator's retrospective view of the ten-year history of the North West Mounted Police, plus premonitions of future events; Big Bear's Thirst Dance, his dark vision, his attempts to form an Indian Confederation in the summer 1884 as the only way towards future resistance of white domination; section ends with another of Big Bear's prophetic visions and his final urging towards confederation.

IV. Frog Lake, April 1 and 2, 1885. Section opens back in 1884; Frog Lake crisis April 1 signalled by the narrator, but the date dissolves in the next Indian chapter; then the Indian attack and massacre of the white and Big Bear powerless to stop it, Maundy Thursday April 2; section ends night of April 2 as Big Bear begins to see his prophetic visions confirmed by the present disaster.

V. From Fort Pitt to Fort Carlton, May and June, 1885. Section opens back in April, with the journal of Inspector Dickens （N.W.M.P.） and Kitty McLean's diary which records events of the whites' captivity by the Indians from April onwards; battle at Frenchman's Butte in May and the attack on the Indian camp at Loon Lake on June 3 recorded by the omniscient narrator and Kitty McLean; an account by a Canadian Volunteer records details up to the soldiers' retreat to Fort Pitt June 11; June 20 is the date when the Indians' white prisoners walk in to Fort Pitt; last date is July 1 when Big Bear accompanied by his youngest son Horsechild goes to give himself up at Fort Carlton.

VI. The Trail to the Sand Hills, September 1885; January 17, 1888. Section opens September 3 with charges against Big Bear referring back to April; September 11 and 12, Big Bear's trial and conviction for treason-felony; newspaper reports on Big Bear in Stony Mountain prison 1885 and 1886; Big Bear's release from prison and his death January 17, 1888, when time is exploded in Big Bear's cosmic vision.

Examining this analysis of the internal evolution of the narrative, we see historical chronology exposed as a bizarre fiction; we are plunged instead into the ‘now’ of every one of the characters who are experiencing events. By drawing attention to the different narrators, Wiebe deliberately separates the events as lived facts from history as recorded facts, and by his frequent use of flashbacks and flashes forward he dissolves any sense of time progression in a kaleidoscopic presentation of a variety of intensely realised subjective experience. There is no continuity of rhythm in the novel, for its patterns are frequently interrupted and dislocated. Arguably dislocation and discontinuity are what the novel is about, and we might see Wiebe adopting here a strategy as in The Blue Mountains of China, making the reader undergo a similar experience of chaos to that experienced by the characters in the fiction.⁹ （There is also a wider perspective on events and time in Big Bear than anything in The Blue Mountains but I shall discuss that later.） Certainly the novel registers the interference with the prairie Indians' life by Ottawa's policy of expansion westwards via the Indian Land Treaties and the CPR railway. Indeed, in the clash between white and Indian cultures one of the fundamental differences is their perception of time: where the white men consult watches and diaries, the Indians consult the sun and the seasons and so have a concept of duration rather than of the significance of any specific moment. Kipling's ‘unforgiving minute’ is totally alien to their organic sense of time, and throughout the novel we see the dimensions of irritation and incomprehension that arise from these differences. In Chapter 1 the Hon. Alexander Morris is irritated when the Indians keep him waiting at the treaty signing:

“The Bear isn't rushed.”

“It's only the third month on this one, who's rushing?” Morris heard the tiredness in his own voice.¹⁰

As a counterpoint to this we see Big Bear's failure to understand the restlessness of the whites:

They kept on wanting some thing here or there and then another and wanting to change still another forever that kept them running forever and frantic. They never had rest.

（p. 101）

The novel registers dramatically that concepts of time, like concepts of history and of language, are not universal but culturally conditioned.

The Indian world is governed in its rhythms by the prairie itself and by the seasons, and the constancy of these rhythms testify to the bond between the Indians and the land, which integrates their physical and spiritual worlds. Big Bear as “heart and soul of the Cree”, their spiritual leader and tribal chief, is the one character in the novel who retains a sense of continuous relationship between man, the land and the Only One, the All Powerful Spirit. When Indian customs and rhythms of life are interrupted, Big Bear's urge is to preserve the sense of ritualistic continuity in the face of pressures towards its dislocation. It is his refusal to compromise his beliefs about land inheritance and his own spiritual authority signified in his Power Bundle given him by the Great Parent of Bear, the most powerful spirit known to his people under the Creator himself, that Big Bear's authenticity lies. He insists on the Indians' inheritance of the land, from the time of his refusal to sign the treaty—“Who can receive the land? From whom would he receive it?” （p. 29）—till his trial at the end:

This land belonged to me … I was free, and the smallest Person in my band was as free as I because the Master of Life had given us our place on the earth and that was enough for us. But you have taken our inheritance and our strength.

（p. 398）

Big Bear's power derives from his relationship with the land which he sees as the Indians' spiritual inheritance and their living space: his language filled with images of the earth is the verbalisation of this relationship. Big Bear speaks at the time of the treaty not only about the land, but for the land itself; when he urges his people to form a Confederation to negotiate with the whites over the treaty conditions, the acuteness of his perception combines with the strenuousness of the hunt:

Who stirs in his sleep when a single buffalo runs? But when a herd moves, ahhh—we too must shake the ground, we must speak with one thundering voice, we must have one huge reserve for us all, for our hunting, for our life where we will live as the treaty says we can: as we always have but also with grain and food growing as the Government will help us. Then when we move every Whiteskin will lay his ear to the ground so he won't get trampled.

（p. 203）

Even at the time of his trial, when his political influence over his people has passed, his spiritual authority and the sources of his power are still there in his voice, “When it came at last, the sound of his voice seemed to growl up from the earth itself” （p. 400）. The image of Big Bear at the time of his death is that of “everlasting, unchanging, rock”.

It is not that Big Bear is a reactionary because he cannot imagine changes in the Indian way of life with the coming of the whites; indeed, he foresees those changes more completely than any other character, white or Indian. As the spiritual son of the Great Bear he has strong visionary powers inherited with his Power Bundle, and he is able to foresee the consequences of breaking the Covenant with the Great Spirit by giving the land away:

But when he contemplated what he found here, though the land appeared the same, something was wrong with it. As if just under the edge of his vision a giant blade was slicing through the earth, cutting off everything with roots, warping everything into something Whiteskin clean and straight though when he tried to stare down, get under it to see, it looked as it always had, seemingly. When chiefs had given the land away, why should the round sun shine or the chinook blow?

（p. 91）

As Wiebe remarked to Eli Mandel, there's a great deal in common between Biblical prophets and Big Bear: they are both crying out against breaking of covenants and betraying inheritances.¹¹ Big Bear's visions of the doom of his people flash across the narrative as a kind of hidden subtext decipherable only to him and to the reader, subverting any sense of present security and indeed any sense of a future which connects with the Indians' past. Big Bear retells his visions to his people but, like parables, they cannot necessarily be read by those they are designed to warn or help.

His first terrible vision of the Little Man in the hard black hat who pays Big Bear back for beating him in a wrestling match by taking him into a dark cave which “stank like the White Sickness” and there shows him six of the River People hanged （pp. 63–6） is the one that insistently returns in the narrative. On every recurrence it gathers force and significance and serves as a sign to Big Bear of the quickening approach of destruction. After his Thirst Dance when he danced “for a council” among the Indians, it is there even as Thunderbird grants the rain:

He drank; Running Second stood there with a leaf funnelling water into him and smiled, her round face streaming shiny, and she merged and doubled, double into not eight but six shapes as indistinguishable blackness hung there distorted in a glazed bulging eye under a black hat rim, blackness strung aloft like heads and bodies.

（p. 165）

This vision lies behind his passionate urging:

“We must get to the highest chief and talk,” said Big Bear fiercely, his mind running red in his visions, the hat by the Tramping Lakes blacker and bigger over him than ever, “We danced for a council.”

（p. 187）

At the end of his life, Big Bear realises that the vision of Section 1 and the reality have become one, with the hanging of the six ring leaders of the Frog Lake massacre by Hodson:

Coming towards him he saw at last what he had dreaded so long. The hard boots of Little Man, his white child's clothes and stiff black hat, it was clearly Hodson with glass over his snout making two oval reflections where his bulging eyes should have been. And behind him came the procession; six shapes coming relentlessly and he saw them as he had seen long ago, and knew them in their steady pace, their hands tied behind their backs.

（p. 410）

A similar convergence between vision and reality occurs in Big Bear's other vision of the fountain of blood which he first sees in the midst of his triumph after the buffalo hunt. He hears a coyote laughing, and as he listens he sees what Coyote is laughing at:

The sky above him was flaming red, red slimed him completely, whenever he looked he saw all merging to red in the spray of the fountain he slipped and floundered desperately, down on his knees, to squash down into the earth again, the mountains, the hills, the ridge where the women and children were coming with the travois and pack animals to cut up the meat and pack it to camp.

（p. 130）

Though Big Bear tries hard to forget “what Coyote had laughed him into seeing, just as he had never wanted to remember what the Little Man had laughed him into seeing long ago” （p. 131）, he cannot lose this sense of doom even in the laughter and life of the Indian feast and he knows intuitively, with “vision and certainty”¹² that “this had been the last buffalo run he would ever make” （p. 132）. His prophetic vision gives him the strength to avert a disastrous confrontation between Indians and whites in 1884, but it is not enough to prevent the Frog Lake massacre in 1885, as he knows even before it occurs:

“I'll tell you this now. When I ran my last buffalo cow there,” Big Bear said, “I saw something. I saw a spring shoot out of the ground as if it was water and I covered it with my hand to stop it, but it spurted up between my fingers and ran over the back of my hands, I could not stop it. That was red blood, Sioux Speaker.”

（p. 226）

After the massacre Big Bear sees the confirmation of the vision, and for him it is only a matter of time until the hanging vision comes true too:

“I saw this long ago, but not those six black ones, not yet.”

“What?”

“It is not my doing, this thing of my young men.”

“Ah, I know. But it will all be yours. You will carry it all on your own back.”

“My friend, I am very sorry for what has been done … I have prayed about this for years, and cried for it today.”

（p. 267）

The only other character who shares Big Bear's powers of second sight in his youngest son Horsechild, his true spiritual heir as the ending indicates, and when Horsechild has his first power vision, all he sees is loss and disorientation. Already his people have been dispossessed and driven from the plains into the swamps. Ironically, his talisman is no gift from the Great Spirit but the blue glass eye belonging to Stanley Simpson, the white man whose lies will later condemn Big Bear at his trial:

“I've held it every night,” said Horsechild.

“In my last sleep somebody came to me in a dream and invited me to come along. I was walking along behind him and the willows got too thick, and muskeg, and when I got out into a clearing, on the north side of it, he was far ahead on the south but I couldn't get there before he was gone.” He kicked at the sand. “I couldn't trail him, he didn't have tracks.”

（pp. 329–30）

While his father recognises this as a power dream, he also sees the threats to its fulfilment as the Indians' way of life is destroyed:

“He'll come again,” Big Bear said, “But perhaps you can follow him far enough only on the plains.”

（p. 330）

I have dwelt on Big Bear's visions because they are the authentic signs of his spiritual integrity; they give his voice its authority because they bear witness to his direct relationship with the metaphysical forces that govern human existence. As we listen to Big Bear, another perspective on narrative time opens up. We have already noted the counter-pointing of history and the subjective experience of the characters involved in the action. Now there is a further counterpoint to be observed: whereas for most of the Indians and the whites the situation looks to be developmental, with the story progressing by causes and effects, there is also Big Bear's other point of view, that all these events are merely fulfilling an end already preordained.¹³ For Big Bear, as for nobody else embroiled in these events, the end is already foreknown, and his status as a tragic hero rests firmly in this certain knowledge of his people's destiny. He knows that any actions, whether of violent resistance to the whites or of compromise in accepting the treaty conditions, are temptations away from the visionary truth vouchsafed him by the One Great Spirit. For him the present and the future being already foreseen are in the past, and his heroism （so fatally misunderstood by his own people as much as by the whites） lies in passively watching the inevitable convergence of forces and events and in the face of this, reminding his people of their inheritance and retaining his own faith in his God. The conflicts between Big Bear's visionary point of view and the humanly limited point of view shared by everyone else are worked out through the narrative in complex patterns of suspense and blindness. It is not only the whites who need telescopes and spectacles to help them see or like Simpson are dangerously one-eyed; the Indians themselves cannot conceive of radical changes in their ways of living off the land.

In one sense Big Bear is as fatally limited as everyone else, for he too cannot get beyond his own cultural conditioning. He cannot see things from the white men's point of view, just as he cannot understand their language and cannot see how they can find him guilty of “stealing Queen Victoria's hat” （as “her crown and dignity” is translated into Cree at the trial） “since he had never so much as seen the Grandmother. How could I do that?” （p. 387） The very language of the novel demonstrates the dimensions of Big Bear's limitations, as Wiebe pointed out at a conference in Edmonton in 1979:

（In the Temptations of Big Bear） “it's very important that the language should warn you at all times that you're sort of off-base with it, because you're dealing with a Cree world-view, and that world-view could not comprehend a lot of what was happening to it. How do you do that except by the way you handle the language?”¹⁴

However, Big Bear does have the visionary power to see through his particular historical situation with all its determining conditions to an impersonal incandescent vision that transcends human limitations. This is the force of his cosmic vision just before his death. On his release from Stony Mountain jail and his return to his own land to die, we experience through his indirect interior monologue his sense of disorientation and despair; all he sees is the desecration of the land when he “suddenly recognised nothing where he knew he had ridden since he was tied in the cradle-board on his mother's back” （p. 409）, and all he hears is Horsechild's catalogue of the deaths and the demoralisation of his people. But if it is Horsechild who tells him this terrible story, it is also Horsechild who restores to him his Power Bundle intact, and with the “warm weight against his soul” of “Chief's Son's Hand hanging from around his neck, on his chest, each great ivory claw curved, there” （p. 415） Big Bear is delivered from despair and released from the cramped conditions of his actual life into his transcendent vision where he gives thanks to the Great Spirit and glorifies Him, against all reason and against the whole history of his people's dispossession:

Such happiness broke up in him that he had to turn the complete circle to see anything once more in the beautiful world that had once been given him.

（p. 415）

When he lies down to die, the last thing he sees is the dawn, “the red shoulder of Sun at the rim of Earth” and the last image of Big Bear is not one of dissolution but of “everlasting, unchanging, rock.”¹⁵ His is the prophetic vision which sees beyond the limits of the present and the logic of circumstances to a cosmic harmony resting in the Only Great spirit. It is what Wiebe calls “The apprehension of a perfection. I think man is an animal capable of the apprehension of perfection”.¹⁶

As the narrative voice affirms Big Bear's faith at the end, we recognise that Big Bear's apprehension of perfection forms an intimate connection with the epigraph from Acts 17 at the beginning of the novel. And it is the voice of the white story-teller a hundred years on relating these two transcendent visions of history （one Indian, one Biblical） to the continuing story of humanity under God that gives Big Bear his true significance and gives the novel that “larger meaning” which Wiebe signalled in his conversation with Kroetsch. Yes, this is “history from a slightly different angle”: starting from the focal points in official prairie history, Wiebe has imaginatively unearthed the Indian angle, and certainly the flow of sympathy in the novel is toward the Indians and especially toward Big Bear. So much so that, as Keith recalls, Maria Campbell （author of Halfbreed） “claimed that the spirit of Big Bear took over from Wiebe and wrote his speeches for him”.¹⁷ We must add the footnote to this: when Eli Mandel asked Wiebe, “Well, do you believe that?” Wiebe answered, “Well, no, not really; no.”¹⁸ Though Wiebe seems to have an uncanny insight into the Indians' consciousness, as we see when the narrative voice tells most of the Indian sections and slips easily in and out of Big Bear's head, it would be absurd to claim that Wiebe had “gone Indian”. As the storyteller looking back from the vantage point of a hundred years' distance, Wiebe can perceive not only Big Bear's heroic significance but also his limitations which are as inevitable and insurmountable as those of the white participants in the action. Big Bear too is trapped in and by history.

So, “history from a slightly different angle” is not exclusively Big Bear's angle. The complex movement of the narrative has been towards a more comprehensive view of history that will include Big Bear's view and the white unofficial and official views and go beyond them. The “larger meaning” that the total novel brings to our awareness is a metaphysical view of history, where history is contained in the religious vision stated in Acts 17:

God who made the world and all that is in it, from one blood created every race of men to live over the face of the whole earth. He has fixed the times of their existence and the limits of their territory, so that they should search for God and, it might be, feel after him, and find him. And indeed, he is not far from any of us, for in him we live, and move, and have our being.

This is a vision of the overarching presence of God's order which transcends any regional history and allows us to accept all events as part of a divine plan beyond our limited human comprehension and which can only be asserted through faith in God.

Notes

1. Shirley Neuman, “Unearthing Language: An Interview with Rudy Wiebe and Robert Kroetsch,” in A Voice in the Land, ed. W. J. Keith, Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981, p. 230, p. 233.

2. ibid., p. 230.

3. The title of an essay by Gillian Beer, “Beyond Determinism: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf,” in Women Writing and Writing about Women, ed. M. Jacobus, London: Croom Helm, 1979. Some of Beer's perceptions about these two women writers, also writing for oppressed groups, seem peculiarly apposite in a discussion on Wiebe.

4. W. J. Keith, Epic Fiction: The Art of Rudy Wiebe, Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1981, pp. 61–64; Rudy Wiebe, “On the Trail of Big Bear” and “Bear Spirit in a Strange Land,” A Voice in the Land, pp. 132–149.

5. A Voice in the Land, p. 138.

6. ibid., p. 217.

7. The distinction I am making between these two aspects of narrative time is that between ‘story’ and ‘discourse’ as set out by G. Genette in Narrative Discourse, Oxford, Blackwell, 1980, and J. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction, Cornell University Press, 1981.

8. My model for this temporal analysis is the Indicative Chronology of Proust's A la Recherche in Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 91. I have expanded and modified my model, though my discussion owes much to Genette's insights.

9. See Ina Ferris, “Religious Vision and Fictional Form: Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China,” A Voice in the Land, pp. 97–123.

10. Rudy Wiebe, The Temptations of Big Bear, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973, New Canadian Library edition, 1976, p. 16. All references to the text will be taken from the NCL edition.

11. Eli Mandel and Rudy Wiebe, “Where the Voice Comes From,” A Voice in the Land, p. 152.

12. Wiebe, The Scorched-Wood People, Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977, New Canadian Library edition, 1981, p. 188.

13. Cynthia Chase, “The Decomposition of the Elephants: Double-Reading Daniel Deronda,” PMLA, 93 （March 1978）, 215–227, offers a deconstructive reading of that novel which plays with cause and effect and vision, though I find it provocative rather than convincing.

14. Stephen Scobie, “For Goodness' Sake” Books in Canada （Feb. 1980）, pp. 3–4.

15. See W. J. Keith's discussion of the rock image in his excellent reading of Big Bear as tragic hero, Epic Fiction, Ch. 5, pp. 62–81.

16. A Voice in the Land, p. 234.

17. Epic Fiction, p. 73.

18. A Voice in the Land, p. 151.