Frederick Niven – författare

Frederick Niven was British Columbia’s first professional man of letters and the first significant literary figure of the Kootenays. He lived by his wits, as an independent writer, mainly on the outskirts of Nelson, from 1920 until 1944. Although some of his more than 40 titles were written to keep the wolf from the door, such as Cinderella of Skookum Creek (1916), by contrast, Niven’s collection of 16 short stories called Above Your Heads (1911) consisted exclusively of stories rejected by editors who believed their content would be “over the heads” of readers.

"The Treasure Trail" is a story of Canadian prospectors originally published in 1923.

Originally published in 1935, Frederick Niven's The Flying Years tells the history of Western Canada from the 1850s to the 1920s as witnessed by Angus Munro, a young Scot forced to emigrate to Canada when his family is evicted from their farm. Working in the isolated setting of Rocky Mountain House, Angus secretly marries a Cree woman, who dies in a measles epidemic while he is on an extended business trip. The discovery, fourteen years later, that his wife had given birth to a boy who was adopted by another Cree family and raised to be ""all Indian"" confirms Angus's sympathies toward Aboriginal peoples, and he eventually becomes the Indian Agent on the reserve where his secret son lives. Angus's ongoing negotiation of both the literal and symbolic roles of ""White Father"" takes place within the context of questions about race and nation, assimilation and difference, and the future of the Canadian West. Against a background of resource exploitation and western development, the novel queries the place of Aboriginal peoples in this new nation and suggests that progress brings with it a cost.Alison Calder's afterword examines the novel's depiction of the paternalistic relationship between the Canadian government and Aboriginal peoples in Western Canada, and situates the novel in terms of contemporary discussions about race and biology.