Echo Maker by James Raffan

A book’s subtitle can promise a lot. Consider the subtitle of Echo Maker: “Craig Macdonald and the lives that produced one of Canada’s most significant historical maps.” The author, explorer, and outdoors writer James Raffan, delivers. At the book’s highly charged core he documents a monumental project undertaken by a single outdoorsman to create an almost overwhelmingly detailed map infused with the knowledge of many Aboriginal Elders. Simultaneously, though, Echo Maker is the portrait of a memorable personality, an insight into his unusual family life and his career in the outdoors, and, almost as a bonus, a detailed account of adventure expeditions based on traditional Aboriginal routes and techniques.

In order to manage these—and other—threads, Rattan creates something of a montage. Thus, for example, he begins with the account, in 1938, of two Aboriginal men on a canoe journey.  Alive with ceremonial  and natural detail, it bears no explicit link to the biography—though, oddly, it details the two men’s hearing on their radio the infamous broadcast of Orson Well’s “War of the Worlds.” How could this incident be relevant? Stay tuned. 

Alive with ceremonial  and natural detail, it bears no explicit link to the biography—though, oddly, it details the two men’s hearing on their radio the infamous broadcast of Orson Well’s “War of the Worlds.”

Similarly, without bridging explanations, the author breaks up the biographical chronology with long verbatim chunks from a land claims hearing featuring Craig Macdonald’s testimony and his richly detailed map of Temagami.  The final section is the judge’s brick-wall ruling.  Again, Rattan holds back.  Does the judge damn himself?  He lets the reader decide—except where, almost unnoticed, he slips in the word “festering.”

The author is nothing like as restrained for most of the book, though.  Frequently breezy, even funny, he is also sometimes wry about Macdonald’s role as idiosyncratic, often-absentee father.  Generally, however, his tone is deeply appreciative, even adulatory of Macdonald (affirming, no less, that he deserves the Order of Canada.) In fact, in terms both of shared experiences and values, it is hard to imagine how any other biographer could be as close to his subject as Rattan is to Macdonald. This biography could have been written by no one else. 

Most unusual, though, for a biographer, is the deeply emotional writing where Rattan himself becomes not just a witness, but a part of the story. At one point, for example, deeply affected by what he sees of Aboriginal history and “shatterings of lives rocked by disease, circumstance, upheavals, and the steady caprice of government,” he writes, “Eventually I just sat down on the shore, overcome with sadness.”

Even the title of the book—and Rattan’s most elevated praise of Macdonald—arises from an intensely personal experience, an almost visionary encounter with sand cranes. What is the connection? As he explains, one of the Aboriginal names for the magnificent birds is Basswenazhii—or Echo Maker. He adds, stirringly, in “preserving traditional knowledge,” Macdonald “listened to the Elders and created a physical living portrait—an echo—of knowledge they would surely take to the grave.”

Arguably, his chief purposes are threefold.  First, he emphasizes, repeatedly, the rock solid role played by Craig Macdonald’s wife, Doris, in making possible her husband’s achievements.  Second, he returns, repeatedly, to capturing the essence of his subject’s personality—his incredible memory and meticulousness, his “Craig-o-matic” physical unstoppability, his driving enthusiasm “like a speeding freight train”, his deep humility, and, perhaps most memorably, his feeling acutely the gradual loss of “the last generation” of the Teme-Augama Anishnabai :“there was something profoundly sad that powered Craig’s drive.” Remember “The War of the Worlds” radio cast from early in the book? Rattan makes the resonance of the title all too clear.

And Macdonald’s part in this “war” connects, in turn, to  the third main purpose—Raffan’s underlining that the magnificent map was a “cross-cultural collaboration”, and, even more so, that Macdonald was generally viewed as “one of their heroes”…”a true rock star.” “How gratifying…when the courts were doing their level best to erase your presence on the land, to have a man come along who learns your language, listens intently to your stories, and then slowly, methodically, gently, scribes the routes and the names and the waterlines on a map that shouts ‘You were here! You are here! You will be here as long as you love the land!’ 

Raffan may not have got his wish that Macdonald receive the recognition of the Order of Canada, but in a book where governmental powers don’t fare well, many readers will feel that  the recognition that his book gives Macdonald is more valuable. 

Theo Dombrowski

Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here.