Title My Thesis, By the Numers Abstract Chapter Arguments

Chapter 1

Mining and Colonial Historigraphy in In the Skin of a Lion

Context

published in 1987
set in early-1900s Toronto, Canada
follows the lives of laborers (many of them immigrants) building the city of Toronto

Chapter 1 Argument

In the Skin of a Lion connects mining and history-making, as protagonist Patrick Lewis sees a reflection of his experiences as a tunneller and dynamiter in how historical records are extracted and processed into a historical narrative by Toronto’s government. This narrative glorifies the actions of Toronto officials in building the city’s infrastructure on the back of mistreated laborers like Patrick.
In contrast to the exclusionary history-making emblematized and challenged by the motif of mining, the novel gestures towards art as a potential means for recovering the stories excluded from dominant histories. But while the novel is centered around the settler colonist project of Toronto’s development on Indigenous land, it fails to engage with this history. This omission locates the novel in an act of historical erasure—the very deed it critiques.