Naturalizing
the Nation: Northern Landscape and Canadian National Identity
The Perception of Landscape in Canadian Identity in
the Pre-Confederation Period
In Canada, the celebration of untamed
nature did not occur until the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and even then, took half a century to
consummate. In the eighteenth century, for instance, English-Canadians (the
principal narrators of Canadian identity), like their American
counterparts, viewed their land through the Protestant lens of the Old Testament. As
a consequence, for the Loyalists who founded English Canada, their new Canadian home was
interpreted partly as a foreboding Wilderness, and partly as a new Garden
of Eden. Dennis Duffy aptly describes the latter mood: 'Loyalists...proved
themselves good, inescapably good, Americans in extending the [Calvinist]
tradition [of election] to include their particular variant'. The sense that
Providence has blessed His elect with prosperity is conveyed in a letter from
Michael Grass, captain of a New York Loyalist militia company and a leader of the
first arrivals at the Bay of Quinte, who wrote to the Kingston
Gazette in 1811, praising 'HE who causeth the
wilderness to smile and blossom like a rose' (Duffy 1982: 93, 95). These traditional utilitarian
and biblical attitudes toward the land are clearly analogous to those in the
eighteenth century United States from which the Loyalists
had fled.
English Canadians also
expressed the traditional agrarian/biblical fear of wilderness depravity.
Trans-continental explorers David Thompson, Samuel Hearne and Alexander
Mackenzie, for instance, in their travel journals of the late
eighteenth century, described the 'convulsion[s] of nature' they
found, and waxed eloquently about the desolation and barbarity of Canada's Northwest (New 1989:, 43-5). Susanna Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush (1852) and Catharine Parr Traill's
children's book, Canadian Crusoes (1852), extended this tradition to
the more settled context of Upper Canadian pioneer agriculture. Here again, the narrative is one of
'nationalization', stressing the advance of civilization
against nature, while retaining a social distance between narrator and subject matter
(New 1989: 54-7, 70-1). In general, therefore, treatment of the north (and
the Canadian landscape in general) in the early nineteenth century was
traditionalist in tone: it treated nature as a challenge to be overcome. Never
was there a hint that untamed landscape was an asset or a source of primeval
energy.
This all began to change by mid-century
as Romantic ideas spread to Canada from Britain and the United States. From the beginning, this new sensibility
involved an emphasis on the elixir of the New World environment and its
uplifting effects. Perhaps the first writer to express the new zeitgeist was Major John Richardson:
part-Indian, Loyalist, and a veteran of the war of 1812. Influenced
by the work of both Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper, Richardson began writing wilderness
adventures from a romantic point of view. These tended to mix British-Canadian
nationalism with primitivism and a sense of the sublime.
For example, his first important work, Tecumseh; or, the Warrior of the West (1828) glorified an Indian chief who fought with
the British in the War of 1812. Dennis Duffy remarks that Tecumseh's character
represented a departure from pre-existent forms, and represents the first
Canadian pagan hero: 'Here is no nationalist St. Isaac Brock, a Christian knight to be
prayed into his monument, but the savage vengeance-seeker Richardson
would later immortalize in Reginald Morton/Wacousta' (Duffy 1982: 60). The
latter reference - to the protagonist in Richardson's most famous novel, Wacousta (1832) - describes a renegade Briton who, echoing Cooper's
Leatherstocking, had 'gone native', again demonstrating Richardson's keen sense
of naturalistic nationhood (Smith 1994: 54; New 1989: 78; McGregor 1985).
More explicitly cleaving to
the naturalistic-nationalist axis was William Kirby, a staunch Loyalist
intellectual. Writing in 1846, he declared that the old
country, now dotted with the marks of industrialism, might renew its contact
with the landed traditions that made it great by finding new life in Canada. In a similar vein came the
idea, in the 1850's, that the Canadian Loyalists were 'a superior
breed of loyal Briton'. This was due, Colonel George Taylor
Denison later wrote, to the fact that the British race required
'the new blood in the Colonies [to] leaven the mass' (Smith 1994: 34). Carl
Berger sums up this aspect of Canadian distinctiveness as follows: 'Because of
the inevitable deterioration that was creeping over the urbanized and
industrialized Englishman, cut off from the land, Canada was to be a kind of
rejuvenator of the imperial blood' (Berger 1966: 17).
This period also brought
forth the first calls for a native art and literature - comparable to the
clarion cries of the New York literaries in the 1830's.
In 1858, for instance, Lower Canadian statesman Thomas D'Arcy McGee
crowed: 'We have the materials - our position is favourable - northern
latitudes like ours have been famed for the strength, variety and beauty of their
literature' (Staines 1977: 8). In 1864, McGee's call was echoed by
Upper Canadian clergyman Edward Dewart, who declared that 'a
national literature is an essential element in the formation of national
character' (Woodcock 1987: 10). These writings, though eloquent, should not, however, be taken as an indication of the widespread
development of naturalistic nationalism in Canada. Not only had the country yet
to be officially born, but its wilderness was too overpowering and
its colonies were as yet too isolated from each other to generate a widespread
sense of common nationality.
Canadian Identity and Northern Landscape in the
Post-Confederation Period
In 1867, the colonies of Canada East, Canada West, Nova Scotia and New
Brunswick united to form one united Canadian Confederation. This event
generated the first significant stirrings of Canadian national sentiment, though this new nationalism
took place largely within imperial confines (New 1989: 24). The first such
movement was Canada First, formed in 1868. The brainchild of W.A.
Foster, Canada First expressed a Canadian national sentiment that was
remarkably free of either British or American influence. 'It is the duty of all Canadians,' Foster insisted, 'whether by birth or
adoption to recognize the pressing necessity for the cultivation of a national
sentiment which will unite the people of the various provinces more closely in
the bonds of citizenship…That an organization which will draw the line between
Canadians loyal to their soil and those who place their citizenship in a
subordinate or secondary position, affords the surest means of
cementing a confederation and securing political action in the interests of the
whole Dominion' (Smith 1890: 6).
From the beginning, the new nationalism looked
to Canada's northern climate and location for inspiration. For example, Canada First associate
Robert Grant Haliburton, a Nova Scotia lawyer and provincial historian, proclaimed, in an 1869 address to the
Montreal Literary Club that 'We are the Northmen of the New World'. The gist of
Haliburton's argument was that Canada's cold climate and forbidding terrain
would give birth to a 'healthy, hardy, virtuous, dominant race' (Berger
1966: 6; 1970: 53).
Drawing on Haliburton's work
for the 1871 inaugural address of Canada First, William Foster further
wrote, in a conscious attempt to distinguish Canadians from Americans, that 'The old Norse
mythology, with its Thor hammers…appeals to us,-for we are a Northern
people,-as the true out-crop of human nature, more manly, more real, than the weak marrow-bones
superstition of an effeminate South' (Foster 1888: 25). Cast now in a new
Darwinian vocabulary, such statements illustrate the close
association that Romanticism had begun to foster between Canada's northern
wilderness and its new national identity.
Northern Landscape and Canadian Cultural Nationalism
In parallel with the
political nationalism of Canada First came a cultural nationalism centred on
the arts, taking the Canadian landscape as its subject matter. Prior to
Confederation, the Canadian terrain was generally considered 'a vast, hostile, dimly seen, unpoetical mass'. Meanwhile, poets tried 'ineffectually
to catch and express its [the land's] feeling in imitations of the clear, regular, elegant couplets and poetic
diction which Pope and his school bred to civilized perfection in the garden of
England' (Watt 1966: 243). Similar attitudes were prevalent in Canadian visual
art. For example, British Army officers of the eighteenth or
nineteenth century regularly painted Canadian forests in which 'the grass
seem[ed] recently to have been clipped and the bushes trimmed' (Fulford 1991:
3).
After this period, however, change began to take place.
In the forefront of the new change in aesthetic was the 'Confederation School'
of poet-critics: men like Archibald Lampman, W.W. Campbell, Bliss Carman, Charles G.D. Roberts and
D.C. Scott 'enjoined Canadian writers and painters to head to the 'cleanly'
North, rather than to disport themselves in the jaded fleshpots of Europe'
(Woodcock 1987: 10). Thanks to the efforts of this school, writers and poets by the
1880's no longer were 'bemoaning the inhuman and unpoetical nature of Canadian
landscape' but instead began to celebrate it (Stacey 1991: 52-3; Watt 1966:
243).
This comes across clearly in
an anthology of poetry entitled Songs of
the Great Dominion edited by William Douw Lighthall, which struggles to
naturalize the Canadian nation while simultaneously eulogizing its
transformation into an agrarian idyll. 'The poets whose songs fill this book
are voices cheerful with the consciousness of young might, public wealth, and heroism', he wrote in 1889, 'through them…you may catch
something of great Niagara falling, of brown rivers rushing
with foam, of the crack of the rifle in the haunts of the moose and caribou …The
tone of them is courage;- for to hunt, to fight, to hew out a farm, one must be a
man!…Canadians are…the descendants of armies, officers and men, and every generation of
them has stood up to battle…Canada, Eldest Daughter of the
Empire, is the Empire's completest type!' (New 1989: 113).
In the visual arts, meanwhile, the Toronto Art Students
League of 1886-1904 took up the torch of nationalism ignited by the
Confederation School. Publishing in annual exhibitions and calendars between
1893 to 1904, this youthful organization made sketching outings to rural Canada to
depict northern landscapes and folk life (Tooby 1991: 15). Around this period
in the late nineteenth century, there also appeared a
rising volume of northern adventure novels, often centering on such
themes as 'life in the isolated Hudson Bay posts and the exploits of the lonely
trapper' (Berger 1966: 20). This spiritual shift may be traced in the editorial
transformation of the work of Catherine Parr Traill. As W.H. New observes, the 1882 Nelson revision of
her Canadian Crusoes (1852), entitled Lost in the Backwoods, 'distort[ed] the book by
cutting the journal passages, truncating the text, and emphasizing the romance
of conventional wilderness both in its preface and in its illustrations. (By
the 1900's, Nelson editions of Lost were
reproducing 'wilderness illustrations' indiscriminately from other Nelson books, portraying the Rockies
[and] western gunmen… as if they were all features of the Ontario backwoods….)'
(New 1989: 56).
The period between 1896 and
the first world war continued these patterns, and witnessed the northern
theme's most rapid literary advance, with Ralph Connor, Robert Service and William
Fraser, some the most popular figures in Canadian literature, serving as exemplars
(Berger 1966: 20-21; Woodcock 1977: 78-9). Many of these stories (which
together sold in the millions) were openly linked to the promotion of a
naturalistic Canadian nationalism, as with Service's derision
of American softness in 'The Cremation of Sam McGee' or Ralph Connor's
assertion that a new Canadian type was forming in the northwest (Smith 1994:
138). Given all of these developments, it is perhaps unsurprising
that Robert Stanley Weir's 1906 English language version of O Canada, the unofficial Canadian
national anthem (alongside God Save the
Queen) included the stanza: 'the true north strong and free'.
Certainly, as the previous paragraphs
show, the northern idea had been amply expressed prior to the first world
war. However, during the 1920's the northern 'naturalization' of the Canadian nation
reached its apogee. This process was spurred on by a new English-Canadian cultural
nationalism that sought to make a clear break with the British connection.
Given the imperial attachments of the bulk of the English-Canadian population, this movement was, at first, largely confined to
critical intellectuals. World War I, especially Canadian
exploits like Vimy Ridge, had generated in them a heightened sense of
Canadian (as opposed to British) identity while the carnage of war had
dramatically dampened Canadian Imperialist fervour (Francis 1986: 83, 93; Vipond 1980: 43).
Meanwhile, radicals like historian Frank Underhill came to be persuaded by the
arguments of anti-imperialist academics like the British-based Union of
Democratic Control, which began to influence Canadian
historiography (Kennedy 1977: 91-2). The upshot of the preceding was the growth
of an independent, sometimes anti-imperial, Canadian nationalism
(Bashkevin 1991: 8).
Underhill and other
English-Canadian intellectuals also began to consolidate their links through
four associations: the Canadian League, the Association of Canadian
Clubs (ACC), the C.I.I.A. and the League of Nations Society in Canada. These
generally had memberships in the thousands, though the ACC's membership
rose from the brink of collapse in 1919 to roughly 40,000 by the end of the
1920's. These associations tended to have interlocking memberships, academic links, well-circulated member
journals and were centrally concerned with the question of Canadian national
identity. For example, Margaret Prang, a participant in these
nationalist currents, observed that there was a spirit of 'Canada
First' to be found among 'the small groups of young university teachers and
professional men…who established the Canadian
Forum and debated public issues through its pages and who founded the
Canadian League and later the Canadian Institute of International Affairs…'
(Vipond 1980: 33).
The magazine Canadian Forum, for instance, stated as one of its aims
'to trace and value those developments in the arts and letters which are
distinctly Canadian'. More explicitly, its first issue
editorialized that 'Real independence is not the product of tariffs and
treaties. It is a spiritual thing. No country has reached its full stature, which makes its goods at
home, but not its faith and philosophy'. Literary critic W.A. Deacon expressed
a similar sentiment in the mid-1920's when he declared that 'our struggle for
nationhood needs writers and national magazines with native force behind them…' (Vipond 1980: 42-4, emphasis added).
One coterie of artists that
brought Deacon's romantic 'native force' to life was the Group of Seven.
Composed principally of Ontarian artists, this group of landscape
painters first met during 1910-11, though they did not exhibit
together until 1920. In the intervening years, the future Group members
painted largely independently of each other, but began to explore
northern themes, as with A.Y. Jackson's Terre
Sauvage (1913), Tom Thomson's Sketch
for Northern River (1912) or J.E.H. MacDonald's March Evening, Northland (1914).
After 1920, the Group came together as
a unit in what some view as a political act inspired by the cultural
nationalism of the period. For example, the Group spent a large
amount of time writing and speaking to the public as a means of proselytizing
their work. Group members also explicitly set out to paint the rougher, rawer elements of the
Canadian north (primarily the Shield country of northern Ontario) in vivid, sublime strokes. In doing
so, they quickly incurred the
ire of the genteel, Imperial Canadian art establishment.
Nevertheless, the group used this conflict to symbolize the tension between Canadian
and British identity and became active propagandists for the cause of an
independent Canadian cultural nationalism (Woodcock 1977: 73). For example, the Group had strong links
with Canadian Forum and Canadian Nation, the official organ of the
rapidly growing ACC. Canadian Forum
was perhaps the Group's strongest backer, and its relationship with
the Group has been called 'symbiotic' by some observers (New 1989: 137-9;
Vipond 1980: 41-42).
More germane to this
discussion is the way in which the public statements of Group members reflect
the prominence of the northern idea in the new, 'naturalized' Canadian
nationalism. For instance, one member commented that in the minds of
the Group, Canada was 'a long thin strip of civilization on the southern fringe
of a vast expanse of immensely varied, virgin land reaching into
the remote north. Our whole country is cleansed by the pristine and
replenishing air which sweeps out of that great hinterland.' (Berger 1966: 21).
The Group of Seven's
travails were soon given mythical interpretation. This began with F.A.
Housser's widely read A Canadian Art
Movement: the Story of the Group of Seven, published in 1926, in which Housser depicted
Group members as heroic battlers for Canada fighting against the dead weight of
Old World tradition:
'Our British and European
connection, so far as creative expression in Canada is concerned, has been a millstone around
our neck…For Canada to find a complete racial expression of herself through art, a complete break with
European traditions was necessary…what was required more than technique was a
deep-rooted love of the country's natural environment…The message that the
Group of Seven art movement gives to this age is the message that here in the
North has arisen a young nation with faith in its own creative genius' (Cook
1986: 185).
Housser's stance was clearly informed by his links
with several nationalist associations - his wife even edited the art page of
the Canadian Bookman, the journal of the Canadian
Author's Association. The myth of the Group was also enhanced by the legend of
Tom Thomson, a figure that had influenced the Group of Seven by painting landscapes
around the Algonquin Park region of Ontario. Thomson often ventured deep into
the park by canoe, and drowned there while on a sketching trip
in 1917. Thomson was thus viewed as an organic individual, an artist of the land who
incarnated the virtues of the Canadian north, and hence the nation (Cook
1986: 205). In an essay entitled 'Canadian and Colonial Painting' (1940), for instance, Northrop Frye contrasted
the genteel pastoralism of Horatio Walker with the 'twisted stumps, sprawling rocks and
strident colouring' of Thomson, whom Frye believed had
captured the 'sphinx'-like spirit of the mysterious north, a subjectivity that linked
him, in Frye's mind, to explorers like Alexander Mackenzie and
Simon Fraser (Frye 1971: 200).
Gradually, as a consequence of their
work's popular resonance and as a result of their self-promotion and
mythologization, the Group became the first (and probably only) Canadian art movement
to communicate with the broader public. In fact, the Group's popularity rose
to such an extent that R.H. Hubbard could write, in his introduction to a
1964 Tate Gallery catalogue that 'by 1938 the group's influence had spread to
all parts of the country. In its own generation only a few resisted its
hegemony' (Tooby 1991: 26). Meanwhile, the northern theme
continued to act as a chrysalis for Canadian literature. Frederick Philip Grove, for instance, and a related school of
'prairie realists' in the 1920's and 30's, played incessantly on the
relationship between the Canadian land and its folk. 'We [Canadians] are not
surfeited at any time with the sweets of the seasons', wrote Grove, 'our appetites are kept
sharp; and what we lack in the breadth of our nature-experience, we make up for in depth, in intensity. I doubt
whether people in the south ever become quite such ardent lovers of even the
most trivial things in nature as we do' (Mitcham 1983: 68; Woodcock 1987: 11).
The Northern Theme in Post-1918 Canadian
Historiography
'Sooner
or later', wrote historian A.R.M. Lower in the 1920's, 'our rigorous climate
working on sterling stock [will] hammer out a vigorous and distinctive people, true men of the north…'
(Levitt 1981: 3). As Lower's remarks illustrate, the northern
'naturalization of the nation' emerged strongly within English-Canadian
historiography after the 'Great War'. Here, many Canadian writers drew
upon a more established vernacular tradition which viewed Canadian farming as a
struggle against nature in a harsh, isolated northern
environment (Harris 1966: 34; Morton 1961: 89-90). In this respect, the seminal figure was
Harold Innis. Innis, a professor of history at the University of
Toronto, developed a Canadian variant of Turner's ideas known as the Laurentian
Thesis in his work, The
Fur Trade in Canada (1930).
The Laurentian Thesis
postulated that the Fur Trade held the key to understanding Canadian history.
Innis outlined two main reasons for this importance. To begin with, he wrote that Canada
'remained British because of the importance of fur as a staple product', and added that the
British-run Northwest Company laid the foundations of the future dominion of
Canada (Innis 1930: 265, 396). Moreover, while the agrarian movement
westward defined the American experience, the great Laurentian Shield
blocked a similar destiny for Canada, forcing it to remain tied
to the French-Indian influenced staple economy of the Northwest. The staples
gradually evolved, from fur to timber and minerals, but the essential point is
that Canadians were participants in an inhospitable, rather than abundant land.
Instead of settling the west, Canadians therefore remained 'directly
involved in the production of the staple' (Innis 1930: 388). Theirs was hence
a northern, not western destiny. More
to the point, the newly historicized Shield, which extensively speaking, covers the vast Hudson's
Bay drainage system, linked the North with the destiny of the
populous South in one great national epic.
Innis'
ideas proved immensely appealing to other Canadian historians, notably Donald Creighton, whose Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence (1937) reaffirmed Innis'
conclusions in the strongest terms and described the first true 'Canadians' as
the fur traders of the North West Company - French and English heroes who, together, won the north for Canada
(Creighton 1937: 67-73). After the second world war, Arthur Lower expanded on
this idea, claiming that 'if the Canadian people are to find their soul, they must seek for it, not in the English language
or the French', but in regional landscapes and in the 'unconquerable vastness of the
north. From the land, Canada, must come the soul of
Canada' (Levitt 1982: 140). The Laurentian theme also ran through the work
of other prominent Canadian post-WWII historians, notably William Morton, president of the Canadian
Historical Association. Morton, for instance, in his Canadian Identity (1961) asserted that:
'Canadian history began when
the Vikings crossed the frontier of fish, fur and farm across the
North Atlantic…From that obscure beginning Canada had a distinct, a unique, a northern destiny. Its
modern beginnings are not Columbian, but Cabotan. And when the
French followed Cartier up the St. Lawrence, they were at once committed
by the development of the fur trade to the exploitation of the Canadian
Shield…The Canadian or Precambrian Shield is as central in Canadian history as
it is to Canadian geography, and to all understanding of Canada…And this
alternate penetration of the wilderness and return to civilization is the basic
rhythm of Canadian life, and forms the basic elements of Canadian
character' (Harris 1966: 28; Morton 1961: 4-5).
Morton's work thus represents the consummation of
the northern idea, in which Canada is seen to have its origins
in distinct, northern voyages of discovery, in contrast to the rest of
the (Columbian) new world.
Northern Landscape and the Arts after 1945
In the post-war era, modernist abstraction came
to the fore in Canadian art, repudiating the work of the Group of Seven
much as Abstract Expressionism repudiated Regionalist art in the United States
in the late 1930's (Woodcock 1987: 11-12; Doss 1993: 112-13). Nevertheless, Robert Fulford, a prominent member of the
contemporary Canadian arts community, claims that each new
generation of Canadian artists, though setting out to
transcend the work of the Group of Seven, invariably 'return[ed] to
the forests and even to the Group of Seven itself' (Fulford 1991: 10). Moreover, the Group still enthralled
cultural critics like Northrop Frye, who stated in his
introduction to a work on Lawren Harris (1969) that 'they [the Group] felt
themselves part of the movement towards the direct imaginative confrontation
with the North American landscape, which, for them, began in literature with
Thoreau and Whitman…While the Group of Seven were most active, Romanticism was going out
of fashion elsewhere. But the nineteen-sixties is once again a Romantic
period…so it seems a good time to see such an achievement as that of Lawren
Harris in better perspective' (Frye 1971: 208).
The new internationalist
modernism of the post-war era also failed to stem the continuing tide of northern
influence in Canadian arts and letters. Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes and Precipice, for example, which helped define
Canadian literature in the 1940's and 50's, eagerly drew upon the now
standard theme of Canadian naturalism (Woodcock 1987: 12). This trend continued
into the 1960's and 70's in the work of prominent writers like Margaret Atwood, Margaret Laurence, André Langevin, Yves Thériault, Gabrielle Roy, Robert Kroetsch and Harold
Horwood, prompting Alison Mitcham in 1983 to proclaim, somewhat ahistorically, that: 'Perhaps the most
exciting creative force in contemporary Canadian fiction - French and English - is the Northern Imagination.
Increasingly, our most perceptive novelists have shown that the Canadian imagination
in many of its most original flights is inspired by the North' (Mitcham 1983:
9). Some years later, George Woodcock extended this naturalistic
Canadian narrative into the present, asserting that: 'An
especially interesting trend (it is not organized enough to be called a movement)
among the younger poets has been toward a return to the landscape, though in much less
conventional ways than the confederation poets a century ago. The writers
representing this trend-among them some of the best of younger Canadian
poets-include Patrick Lane, Dale Zieroth, Sid Marty, Tom Wayman and Susan
Musgrave' (Woodcock 1987: 16).
Even in the world of
classical music, the pull of northern nature has been felt. For example, the famous Toronto pianist
Glenn Gould 'found himself constantly preoccupied by the Canadian North, and the wilderness' despite
his European training and big city roots. Gould even claimed that the north
inspired his work, and Gould studied, wrote about and made radio
documentaries on the North in the 1960's (Fulford 1991: 8). More recently, in 1991, Robert Fulford, in commenting on the impact
of the north on the Canadian psyche, insisted that 'It is
geography which sets the tone of Canadian culture just as it sets the rules of
our working lives and governs our economic relations with other countries'
(Fulford 1991: 11). Furthermore, John Ralston Saul, a prominent Canadian
essayist and novelist, appealed to Canadians to reject southern
(American) commercialism and the divisiveness of language (French vs. English)
whilst uniting via the medium of northern landscape: 'Our destiny is tied to
the territory of which we are custodians-that is, the northern half of the
continent', wrote Saul in 1997. 'Not religion, not language, not race, but place is the dominant
feature of civilizations…In more temperate, central countries, place is eventually
dominated…[but] out on the margins, place is never dominated'
(Saul 1997: 69, 158).
Bearing these ideas in mind, it is evident that the
north continues to resonate as a theme in Canadian culture, even amongst those
professing a more abstract modernist (or post-modernist) orientation. For the
broader Canadian public, a similar truism holds, as is evident in the
popularity of exhibitions of the Group of Seven's work (as with the permanent
McMichael collection or in temporary showings such as that held in Vancouver
during the summer of 1996), in the writings of novelists like Farley
Mowat or in the painting of artists like Alex Colville, Robert Bateman and Paul
Calle.
The Northern Sensibility and Post-War Canadian
Identity
'Climate plays a great part
in giving us our special character, different from that of our
southern neighbours' announced Governor General Vincent Massey in his 1948 work
On Being Canadian, 'it influences our
mentality, produces a sober temperament …Nothing is more characteristic of
Canadians than the inclination to be moderate'. As Massey's statement shows, the rhetoric of Canadian
political figures, like that of its historians, continued to resound with
northern imagery after the second world war. Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, for example, played upon the northern
theme frequently during the 1958 election campaign: 'I see a new Canada…A
Canada of the North!', thundered Diefenbaker, whose successful bid for
office nicely demonstrated the cultural resonance of this idea with the
Canadian electorate (Berger 1966: 23). And in the late 1970's, the title of Thomas
Berger's important federal report on cultural policy was entitled Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, demonstrating how firmly
embedded was the naturalistic notion that northern nature was a vital force
behind Canada's cultural distinctiveness (New 1989: 214). Finally, and perhaps of greatest
significance, with the decline of Canadian Britannicism, the northern myth stood 'shakily
alone' as the only pillar of Canadian identity to emerge secure from the
cultural tumult of the post-1945 period (Harris 1966: 41-2).
To summarize, the efforts of Canada First
in politics, the Confederation School in literature, the Group of Seven in
painting and the Laurentian School in historiography helped to 'naturalize'
Canadian national identity along northern lines, a feature which has
persisted to the present day.