When one thinks of Canada, images of moose and beavers frolicking in a wild northern landscape rich with maple syrup usually comes to mind. However, Canada’s landscape hardly lives up to the lumberjack paradise of an arctic wilderness, and some regions in the USA are even colder than Canada’s coast, and receive more snow. So why is Canada known as ‘The Great White North’, and is this a bad thing?
This actually dates back to just before the 1950s when Canada, having fought in two world wars at this point, wished to establish its own cultural identity[1]. The first step was to commercialize the landscape, apparently. The government soon began to turn its focus onto the natural wilderness that spread throughout the country, and was heavily influenced by the various books and brochures written by travelers and artists[2]. One of the main culprits was the Arctic Survey, a Rockefeller Foundation and Canadian Social Science Research Council-funded series of research projects that tacitly supported the wilderness falling under the protection of bureaucratic development policy[3]. The Survey depicted the country as the ‘New Northwest’, portraying the image of a arctic wonderland to the ignorant bureaucrats and politicians who had not explored it[4]. The result was legislation affecting land claims, ecology, and human welfare being enacted on the basis of an arctic written into the imagination of legislators whose own experience was limited to what others wrote and painted about[5].
Soon after the Canadian wilderness became a reservoir for the aesthetic appreciation of the environment for landscape[6]. Indigenous rights to the animal world were lamed by the introduction of policies and laws restricting hunting and fishing, choking the cultural traditions of their community, and locking indigenous people out of their home lands[7]. These hunting and fishing lands were ranked on terms of their picturesque qualities, their aesthetic appeal determining how much interference was allowed[8].
In conclusion, Canada became ‘The Great White North’ in an attempt by the government to create an identity for the nation, resulting in further insult to the indigenous peoples of Canada, and a less than accurate representation of the country.
[1]Romanow, Paula. 2005. “Picture of Democracy We Are Seeking: CBC Radio Forums and the Search for a Canadian Identity, 1930-1950, The [article].” Journal Of Radio Studies no. 1: 104.
[2]ibid
[3]Sandlos, “From the Outside Looking In: Aesthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North,” Environmental History, 6,1(January 2001): 9.
[4]ibid
[5]Sandlos, “From the Outside Looking In: Aesthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North,” Environmental History, 6,1(January 2001): 10.
[6]Jessup, “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change,” Journal of Canadian Studies: 37,1 (2002): 149.
[7]ibid
[8]ibid
