With the outbreak of WWII, sales of A Woman’s Way stopped and the book went out of print. Outside the tiny community of Northwest River, Labrador, Mina Benson Hubbard was forgotten for several decades. But when attention began to refocus on the 1903 tragedy of the first Hubbard expedition in the 1980s with Davidson and Rugge’s book Great Heart: The History of Labrador Adventure (the epithet “great heart,” by the way, was Mina’s name, borrowed from Pilgrim’s Progress, for George), Mina once more entered the stage, albeit in a very minor role as the pathetic widow, as the stubborn and secretive competitor to Dillon Wallace, or as the older woman out to seduce the handsome George. Other writers to invent Mina have been Margaret Atwood, Pierre Berton, Clayton Klein (his Mina is a sex-starved widow, and he passes off fictional letters as real ones), the feminist canoeists Carol Iwata and Judith Niemi, who did the George River in the early 1980s, Lynn Noel, who romanticized Mina as a type of Pauline Johnson paddling her own canoe, in a 1999 song collection called A Woman’s Way, Songs and True Stories of Northern Women Explorers, and the British journalist Alexandra Pratt who attempted to repeat Mina’s expedition with an Innu guide in 2000, but failed and had to be air-lifted out. She published her book, Lost Lands, Forgotten Stories: A Woman’s Journey to the Heart of Labrador in 2002. Despite their differences in perspective and invention, from difficult widow to sexist thriller to feminist celebration to faithful follower-in-the-steps-of who tries to repeat Mina’s journey, all these inventions, like the most recent ones—mine, biographer Anne Hart’s, and Randall Silvis’s 2004 non-fiction version Heart So Hungry—are by southerners, those who Labradorians and Newfoundlanders label as “from away,” American, British, and Canadian. However, in 2005 that changed. On the centenary of her expedition, the tiny community of Northwest River (population 500), assisted by Memorial University’s Centre for Labrador Studies, hosted the Mina Benson Hubbard Centennial (see Illustration 6). Many of us from away were invited guests, but finally the northerners were going to get to tell their stories about Leonidas, Mina, Wallace, George, and their own ancestors who had rescued the 1903 survivors or who had been on Mina’s expedition. It is to these people and their inventions that I want to turn now.
First, I must stress the fact that Mina Hubbard is a legendary figure, along with the men—George, Leonidas, and Wallace—amongst the “liveyers” (mixed race settlers, not Innu) of Northwest, but she is especially cherished because they see her as having respected them in ways that the white men from away rarely did. They also cherish her because of the sensitive ways in which she responded to their beloved Labrador.1 And like human beings anywhere, although with what I see as more generosity of spirit, they have to this day a great sympathy for her personal tragedy, her courage, and her tenacity; for many of them, Mina’s story is a love story—about her dear Laddie and about their northern home. The centennial of June 2005 had four main components: a conference on Labrador exploration; a re-enactment of Mina’s expedition setting forth (see Illustration 7); an original play by Northwest’s resident writer, June Baikie, and a film: everything done in the re-enactment was being filmed as it happened, visitors and locals were being interviewed during our few days there, and the film crew took considerable footage of the Grand River, the community, and the surroundings. Some of us were also flown—by the local airplane company—over the rivers that feature so dramatically in Leonidas’s death and Mina’s success. Many, many things impressed me during this northern adventure, my first to Labrador, but the one I found most moving was the staging, in the local community hall, of Baikie’s play “Mina Song” (see Illustration 8). Perhaps because I am an English professor who teaches drama; perhaps because Mina’s grandsons were also in attendance; perhaps because descendants of those people who had known Mina were performing in the play; perhaps because Baikie’s invention of Mina resonated with my own; and perhaps because I finally sensed that I had come very close indeed to something emotionally true and symbolically important by witnessing this production, perhaps for all these reasons together, it was the play that made the biggest impact on me. This was no professional theatre event, but it was valid and genuinely local. Attending it was a form of field work, for a literary scholar, because I was watching northerners take ownership—which they had never doubted they always had—of their own story (see Grace 2006). Here was a community performing its own myth, living what Pierre Nora calls a milieux de mémoire. No one from away could do this.
Of course, I am aware of the problematic status of the riverside re-enactment with Martha MacDonald playing Mina and I acknowledge the virtual nature of this representation, just as I recognize the wonderfully imaginative creation of Baikie’s Mina. And I shall be fascinated to see what the filmmaker, Ann Henderson, does with all the footage her cameramen got of the re-enactment, the conference itself, and of the participants whom she interviewed. Nevertheless, the play stands out for me because in it Baikie stayed close to the known facts of Mina’s life and death—even to having a train kill her before her grandsons’ eyes—while at the same time making a powerful contribution to the northern discourse of Labrador. Her Mina, who adored her Laddie—as the title song indicates—dies because she thinks she is going back to Labrador to explore; her Mina calls out as she steps in front of the train: “I am coming Laddie,” coming, that is, into the realm of death but also home to the northern landscape in which the historical Mina constantly felt and saw her husband’s spirit.
- During my visit to Northwest River, I was impressed with the strong sense of community identity and pride evident amongst both the settler and indigenous populations. Many of the Liveyers spoke eagerly about their memories of Mina and their views about her character and place in their history. They were welcoming to those of us from away but they were also patiently sceptical about our ability to understand Labrador or to appreciate the full significance of their history. [↩]
