“The False Fronts Haven’t Seen the Prairie”

Sinclair Ross’ As for Me and My House Reread as Settler Text

Abstract

This paper proposes that the famous representations of land in Sinclair Ross' canonical Canadian novel As for Me and My House are shaped much more than has previously been surmised by the unspoken subtext of colonization. Rereading As for Me and My House in juxtaposition with the rich accounts of the life of the prairie in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed, listening to the voices of Indigenous scholars such as Campbell, Emma LaRocque, Deanna Reder, and Janice Acoose, lends new significance to the stark physical disconnect between town and land in Ross' novel, and reveals the pull of the narrator’s senses against her settler consciousness. For while early canonical interpretations viewed the land as incomprehensible, “an indifferent wilderness, where we may have no meaning at all” (Ross 141), the knowledge that Okanagan elder and matriarch Jeannette Armstrong shares might allow readers to understand, instead, that “the land constantly speaks” (178).