Locating Illicit Empathy: The Extractive Ecology of Marian Engel's Bear

Abstract: This article demonstrates the indissociable role of empathy in sustaining the systemic violence of extractivism, a term describing the global drive to exhaustively extract resources. The article contends that empathy, as depicted in Marian Engel's Bear (1976), not only fails to serve as a corrective for settler colonial guilt but also reinforces extractivist logic. Although Engel has not been widely recognized as one of the Canadian authors addressing colonial dispossession and ecological depletion, her novel offers a witty exploration of the Canadian natural world and Indigeneity through the way that Lou, the protagonist of the novel, practices empathy. After Lou attempts to form a romantic relationship with the eponymous bear, the animal strikes her on her back, leaving a painful wound that is often interpreted as a symbol of her repentance and personal growth. However, its significance in the context of racialized empathy becomes more pronounced when compared to the strikingly similar slashed upper torso of an Indigenous woman in Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore's photograph Fringe (2007). Engel's novel suggests that while empathy toward Indigenous people and animals can catalyze ethical action, it can also re-enact an extractivist ideology. In Lou's case, empathy causes her both to appropriate Indigeneity while exploiting access to resources unavailable to Indigenous people and to instrumentalize her own sexuality.