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      George Mann was not a cowboy : rationalizing western versus Aboriginal perspectives of life and death 'dramatic' history

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      Date
      2007
      Author
      Long, Alan Leonard
      Type
      Thesis
      Degree Level
      Masters
      Metadata
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      Abstract
      The dramatic history of the 1885 Riel Rebellion has been revisited and reinterpreted countless times by hundreds of amateur and professional historians from all cultural backgrounds. From 1885 to the mid-twentieth century and beyond the tendency of many historians was to create melodramatic narratives, a writing style that began in various English theatrical traditions, dating back to the Middle Ages. Of particular interest to this study were the eyewitness narratives whose melodramatic style included a desire to codify and define the roles of Aboriginal people, another British tradition of defining the dark skinned ‘other’ that was debated in London theatres from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The Canadian historical myth was created by gifted writers who captured the broader public’s imagination with their dramatic style, a hegemonic force which eclipsed many Aboriginal versions of similar historical events. One such event was the George Mann family’s dramatic “escape to Fort Pitt,” as remembered by descendants of Mann and those of Nehithawe (Wood Cree) treaty Chief Seekascootch, whose family aided the Mann family in their escape. Through a variety of methods that have included historiographical analysis, literary analysis, playwriting, microhistory, and interviews with members of both families, this paper engages an interdisciplinary approach to the academic areas of drama, history and anthropology as a means of creating a broader picture of history that is hopefully interesting and accessible to people from multiple cultural backgrounds. This project concludes that single discipline western academic narratives do not sufficiently problematize their archival sources, and often underestimate the complexity of Aboriginal epistemologies.
      Degree
      Master of Arts (M.A.)
      Department
      Interdisciplinary Studies
      Program
      Interdisciplinary Studies
      Supervisor
      Day, Moira; Carlson, Keith Thor
      Committee
      Waiser, William A.; Haig Bartley, Pamela; Guedo, James
      Copyright Date
      2007
      URI
      http://hdl.handle.net/10388/etd-10302007-112704
      Subject
      Cowboy
      George Mann
      Aboriginal
      Western
      Drama
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      • Graduate Theses and Dissertations
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