Temptations Of Big Bear

Early in his writing career, Rudy Wiebe's imagination was caught by a heroic character of Cree and Ojibwa ancestry whose birthplace was within twenty-five miles of where Wiebe himself was born 110 years later. The man's name translated into English was Big Bear, and he came to be the subject of one of Wiebe's most highly praised works of fiction. A modern classic, Wiebe's fourth novel is a moving epic of the tumultuous history of the Canadian West. The book won the 1973 Governor General's Award, and in the 1990s was made into a CBC television miniseries based on a script co-written by Wiebe and Métis director Gil Cardinal, shot in Saskatchewan's Qu'Appelle Valley.
From the early days of North America, European settlers forced Natives aside, taking over their land on which they had lived for thousands of years. Big Bear envisioned a Northwest in which all peoples lived together peaceably, and in the 1880s made history by standing his ground to keep his Plains Cree nation from being forced onto reserves. The buffalo food supply was vanishing, but Big Bear led his people across the prairie, resisting pressure to cede rights to the land and give up freedom in exchange for temporary nourishment. The struggle brought starvation to his followers, tearing apart the community and eventually his own family. The story follows Big Bear's life as he lives through the last buffalo hunt, the coming of the railway, the pacification of the Native tribes, and his own imprisonment.
Wiebe's magnificent interpretation of Western Canadian history encompasses not only his hero's struggle for integrity and justice but also the whole richness of the Plains culture.

RUDY WIEBE's novels, stories and essays stand at the forefront of Canadian literature. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has won the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction twice, for The Temptations of Big Bear and for A Discovery of Strangers. He is also the co-author of Stolen Life, which won the Viacom Canada Writers' Trust Non-Fiction Prize, the Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-Fiction and the Alberta Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His memoir, Of This Earth, won the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction and was a national bestseller.