An Ever-Enlarging Circle: Polyphony, Ecology and Nation in John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country and Robert Bringhurst’s Ursa Major

An Ever-Enlarging Circle: Polyphony, Ecology and Nation in John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country and Robert Bringhurst’s Ursa Major

In his groundbreaking book A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada (2008), public intellectual John Ralston Saul argues that the senior founding pillar of contemporary Canadian civilization is the persistent influence of Aboriginal ideas and customs on non-Aboriginal culture. Saul places an emphasis on the Aboriginal concept of the ever-enlarging circle, an ethical pact of fairness and equality, as a defining factor in ideas of modern Canadian nationhood. I illuminate Saul’s argument by bringing it into conversation with one of the most unusual long poems in Canadian literature, Robert Bringhurst’s polyphonic masque Ursa Major (2003/2009). Ursa Major, composed in four languages (Cree, Greek, Latin and English) integrates Ovid’s myth of Callisto and Arcturus, with “Bear Woman” by the Sweet Grass Cree mythteller Kâ-kîsikâw-pîhtokêw. It is Bringhurst’s re-imagined Arcturus, transplanted to the Saskatchewan prairie, who enacts the ever-enlarging circle, demonstrating that the only fair country is one that exists in a state of continuous negotiation and open-heartedness with that which it is not.