The Temptations of Big Bear

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

This novel, for which Rudy Wiebe won his first Governor General’s
Award (in 1973), examines the events leading up to the Frog Lake
Massacre in 1885. The players are many and varied. The Cree, Sioux,
Blackfoot, and Young Dog nations, and their Métis allies, are faced
with the irresistible pressures of white encroachment. The Europeans
appear as Indian Agents, Mounties, Hudson’s Bay traders, missionaries,
settlers, and Canadian National Railroad employees.

Big Bear is a Cree chief who reluctantly finds himself at the centre of
the conflict. As the last major Native leader who has not yet signed a
treaty with the Canadian government, he still has some credibility in
the eyes of the warrior element of the tribes. Yet Big Bear wants
nothing more than to be left alone. His efforts to avoid war and at the
same time preserve his people’s independence evolve into a full-scale
tragedy for European and aboriginal peoples alike.

Wiebe’s densely packed prose is sometimes hard to follow. He tells
the story from a variety of viewpoints, often jumping without warning
from one character to another. The result is an authentic, but sometimes
contradictory, mosaic of perspectives. Written over two decades ago,
before political correctness and voice appropriation were literary
concerns, this book is saved from being an embarrassment, to both its
author and its publisher, by the depth of Wiebe’s research and
sympathy for his subject. The novel is also timely in view of the recent
resurgence of First Nations land claims across Canada.