SOURCE: Gerson, Carole. “Nobler Savages: Representations of Native Women in the Writings of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill.” Journal of Canadian Studies 32, no. 2 (summer 1997): 5-21.

In the following excerpt, Gerson uses sketches and anecdotes from Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush to portray Moodie's image of Native women.

In her 1986 essay, “‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” American literary critic Jane Tompkins demonstrates the impossibility of establishing historical “truth.” She concludes that the post-structuralist reader seeking the history of European-Native relations can only navigate among the various and conflicting subject-positions of the recorders and scholarly interpreters of the past, ultimately recognizing that, like them, she herself necessarily operates within a limited perspective. Resisting the temptation to retreat to “a metadiscourse about epistemology,” she is left with the task of “piec[ing] together the story of European-Indian relations as best [she] can” (76), discomforted by the ease...