ELEANOR TY Revising the Romance of the Land: Place in Settler Narratives by Contemporary Asian Canadian Writers Due to the vastness and variety of the Canadian landscape, much of Canadian literature, especially those works which were produced before the 1970s, makes references to nature in all its forms and manifestations. From the early settler narratives about the bush and wilderness, to Canadian landscape poetry, to French Canadians’ ‘roman du terroir’, to Frye’s ‘garrison mentality’, the natural landscape has been a force to struggle with, an entity to celebrate, to revere, a vehicle for poetic metaphor, and a subject for literary and artistic works. Poets, such as A.J.M. Smith and F.R. Scott, and the Group of Seven painters, for example, re-envisioned the Canadian landscape and used their representations of certain areas in Canada as a way of creating a distinctive national identity (see New, ch. 4). Early autobiographical writings by Canadian women, as Mariam Fowler and Helen Buss have noted, show an identification of the female self with the wilderness of the new country. Significantly, this pre-occupation with the land and with the great outdoors is largely absent from the biographical or fictionalized narratives of early Chinese settlers by contemporary Asian Canadian women writers. There is a curious silence about the vicissitudes of the weather, or the beauty, sublimity, and power of the land in the historical accounts of early Chinese settlers in Canada. Instead, spaces and geographical locations are mostly limited to towns, cities, to homes, to business establishments, churches, and to institutions. Unlike the settler literature of the earlier generation of European Canadians, works by Sky Lee, Denise Chong, and Judy Fong Bates which concern the arrival and ‘settlement’ of Chinese Canadians tend to focus on interior rather than exterior scenes, on psychic states rather than on physical landscapes. The terms ‘settler’ and ‘settlement’ are usually associated in Canadian history with immigrants, mainly from Britain, who came to Canada to make a new home for themselves by clearing land, initially in the Maritimes and Upper Canada, and later in the Prairies, and establishing systems of government. However, as Daniel Coleman points out, the “peaceable-seeming term ‘settlement’ suppresses, even as it depends upon, the violence that was deployed to expunge any claims which First Nations people had to the northern half of this continent” (Coleman, 29). Coleman argues that the official history of Canada is a symbolic one: “according to this way of telling our history, Canada was once a wilderness – wild, uncultivated, largely empty – until Europeans arrived and carved out a society. They fought the overwhelming odds of nature – harsh weather, wild animals, fecund and chaotic vegetation – and won a cultivated, orderly society” (28). What is obliterated by this narrative is “a complex history usually involving the lower classes, first of Europe and later of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, being displaced from their homelands and in turn displacing Indigenous