This chapter explores what is unveiled when Canadian Prairie writing
turns its gaze towards that which goes unnoticed or does not elicit
attention. Focusing on animals which are deemed too mundane and ordinary
to catch the eye tuned for locking into the exotic other, I analyse
writings such as Robert Kroetsch’s Seed Catalogue which engage
with the power relations that fuelled the centre–colony debates of the
first decades of postcolonial criticism. Yet I propose that the
distinctiveness of the Canadian Prairies remains unseen if the region
and its peoples are simply framed as the other of the colonial centre.
To unveil that distinctiveness, it is necessary to engage with texts
which turn their gaze towards the mundane such as the Canadian Prairie
gopher, which appears in Seed Catalogue and elsewhere as an
agent which operates “below the thresholds at which visibility begins”
(Michel de Certeau). An ethical engagement with the distinctiveness of
an other requires looking beyond hegemonic, formulaic ways of knowing,
but also beyond exotic others which are fashioned to operate above such
thresholds.