“The gopher was the model”: The Secrets of Ordinary Animals in Canadian Prairie Writing

This chapter explores what is unveiled when Canadian Prairie writing turns its gaze towards that which goes unnoticed or does not elicit attention. Focusing on animals which are deemed too mundane and ordinary to catch the eye tuned for locking into the exotic other, I analyse writings such as Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue which engage with the power relations that fuelled the centre–colony debates of the first decades of postcolonial criticism. Yet I propose that the distinctiveness of the Canadian Prairies remains unseen if the region and its peoples are simply framed as the other of the colonial centre. To unveil that distinctiveness, it is necessary to engage with texts which turn their gaze towards the mundane such as the Canadian Prairie gopher, which appears in Seed Catalogue and elsewhere as an agent which operates “below the thresholds at which visibility begins” (Michel de Certeau). An ethical engagement with the distinctiveness of an other requires looking beyond hegemonic, formulaic ways of knowing, but also beyond exotic others which are fashioned to operate above such thresholds.