Tell Me, Grandmother

Andrew Dewar was a graduate of the journalism program at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute in Toronto, and on the staff of the North York Public Library.

Tell Me, Grandmother is a bit of Canadian history tidied up and told in the form of a series of stories from a grandmother to a little boy. The grandmother is Jane Livingston, wife of one of the founders of Calgary and granddaughter of Joseph Howse, who was an early trapper and explorer. Jane Livingston is a Métis, and the stories she tells are about the lifestyle of the Métis in the West just before and after Confederation, and about her own life.

The stories seem a little remote and too tidy to be really true to life, perhaps because of their remove from the original. Jane Livingston told them to her grandson Dennis Dowler, who told his wife Marion, who told writer Lyn Hancock, who tells us. By the time we get the stories, Sam Livingston and Grandmother Jane are saints with no really human traits left.

Still, Hancock makes a valiant effort to sugarcoat the pill of Canadian history with these stories, presenting the history of the West from one person’s viewpoint and taking the Métis side. To her credit, Hancock never lets the history overtake the stories, so the book doesn’t read like a text, though there are maps and an index and it could be used as a very basic one.

My only complaint with the book was its cloying sweetness; Dennis dreams of adventure, but he hangs around Grandmother Jane being “little one” all the time. But it is certainly a worthwhile book, if only for the history it contains.