MARGARET ATWOOD FIRST SUGGESTED SURVIVAL AS A CANADIAN THEME.
Atwood began to study Canada’s literature in order to find the roots of this feeling. She came to a conclusion when she published Survival in which she suggested that every country has a single unifying symbol at its core,and for Canada that symbol was survival. For early explorers this meant bare physical survival, later for French Canadians—after the English took power—it meant cultural survival, and later again English Canada itself had to fight for cultural survival in the face of the overwhelming influence of the United States. Our central idea is not of the excitement an adventure that the frontier offers, as we see in the United States, rather our stories are likely to be tales not of those who made it, but of those who made it back, from “the awful experience”—the north, the snowstorm, the sinking ship. - quote from CBC Source
Fur trade stories provides access to primary and secondary
sources relating to Canadian trading and wilderness history. The website covers a large breadth of
material, using different types of sources (i.e. diaries, letters and
images), to present a clear and approachable picture of Canadian
trading history. Fur Trade Stories is run by Canada's National History
Society and allows access to their archives, along with sources in the
Hudson Bay Company Archives (HBCA) in Manitoba, The Manitoba Museum,
Parks Canada
and First Nation community archives.
