Set in the remote Kwakwaka’wakw community of Kingcome Inlet, located about 500 kilometres north of Vancouver, and five kilometres up a shallow fjord, Margaret Craven’s bestseller I Heard The Owl Call My Name (1967) prompted a 1973 movie starring Tom Courtenay and Dean Jagger, directed by Daryl Duke.
Other books and stories by B.C. authors that were the basis for movies include Bertrand Sinclair’s Whiskey Runners (1912), Shotgun Jones (1914), The Cherry Pickets (1914), Big Timber (1917), North of 53 (1917), The Raiders (1921); Guy Morton’s The Black Robe (1927); Lily Adams Beck’s Divine Lady (1929); Rohan O’Grady’s Let’s Kill Uncle (1963); Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart (1964); Paul St. Pierre’s Breaking Smith’s Quarterhorse (1966); Anne Cameron’s Dreamspeaker (1979); William Gibson’s The New Rose Hotel (1981), Johnny Mnemonic (1995); W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982); Evelyn Lau’s Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid (1989); and Michael Turner’s Hard Core Logo (1993).
I Heard The Owl Call My Name was inspired by the life of Anglican missionary Eric Powell. In the novel, a vicar with three years to live absorbs the wisdom and language of the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) and learns they are “none of the things one has been led to believe. They are not simple, or emotional, they are not primitive.” While he is dying, the missionary named Mark Brian simultaneously witnesses the disintegration of Kwakiutl society due mainly to liquor and residential schools. To complicate matters, an English anthropologist arrives with limited understanding of the Kwakiutl and the government intends to eradicate the potlatch ceremony. When the vicar hears the owl call his name, the missionary knows he must soon die. His Bishop arrives, promising to replace him, but Mark Brian decides to stay and die at Kingcome Village. Although the novel received praise as a sympathetic rendering of Aboriginal dilemmas in the 1960s, the protagonist is white and Craven’s knowledge of Kwakwaka'wakw culture borders on superficial. The movie version nonetheless constituted a cultural breakthrough as an attempt to tell a realistic story within the context of a contemporary First Nations community of British Columbia.
Born in Helena, Montana in 1901, Margaret Craven grew up in Puget Sound in Washington State determined to be a writer. She graduated from Stanford University, a member of the Phi Beta Kappa society, and worked for three decades as a journalist, writing an editorial column for the San Jose Mercury for six years. She published her first novel at age 69. A follow-up novel four years later and an autobiography in 1977 failed to gain much notice. Craven died in 1980. A collection of her heart-warming stories, mostly published in the Saturday Evening Post and dating back to the 1940s, appeared posthumously in 1981.
BOOKS
Craven, Margaret. I Heard the Owl Call My Name (Clarke, Irwin, 1967; NJ: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1973).
Craven, Margaret. Walk Gently This Good Earth (Putnam, 1977).
Craven, Margaret. Again Calls the Owl (Putnam, 1980).
Craven, Margaret. The Home Front: Collected Stories (Putnam, 1981).
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2010] "Classic" "Missionaries" "First Nations"
