This week, we explored the issue of “Canada and Modernity” by considering what Canada looked like at the turn of the twentieth century. A variety of factors were implicated in making Canada “modern” including industrialization and urbanization, new technologies, and immigration among others. While modernity is often seen as a positive force, this week’s readings provide a caution about how we define modern Canada and who might be left behind (or ignored) in those narratives. Ian McKay suggests that in the Maritimes, the shift to modern approaches in production were juxtaposed against the “…creation of a backward, rustic ‘Folk’…[who served]…the interests of middle-class cultural producers and tourism.”[1] Stephen Dutcher acknowledges the importance of considering small craft-producers and the role that folk culture played in the Maritimes in this period, but he cautions against making the assumption that modernization means that “the traditional, pastoral, communal life” represented by the Folk traditions McKay outlines, were not desirable. Specifically, he documents how his own research suggests that these forces came together in the region’s co-operatives. Further, Dutcher notes that by suggesting that antimodernist forces were responsible for shaping the precarious socio-economic position of the Maritimes, McKay ignores the complexity of both antimodernist and modernist forces.[2]

Dutcher’s call to explore the complexity of modernism is echoed in Gerald Friesen’s opening chapter of Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada. In it, Friesen invites readers to consider the important part that Indigenous peoples played in the development of Canadian economy and culture.[3] Like the folk traditions in the Maritimes, Indigenous economic practices can be linked to the foundation of modern Canada, particularly the history of the fur trade. Yet, as European capitalism took hold of the Canadian economy more fully in the late nineteenth century, and as Indigenous peoples dealt with different crises that impacted, for example, their food availability, a narrative of European triumphalism and Aboriginal defeat emerged.[4] Friesen suggests that, “Aboriginal perspectives [on economics and production] have been relegated to the sidelines, where dissenting individuals and a number of communities…can preserve and pass them on.”[5] In this sense, Indigenous economic perspectives were left behind in favour of a capitalist and “modern” approach to production. This does not mean that Indigenous peoples are not a central part of Canadian culture, however, and he suggests that it is Indigenous culture that is “fundamental to Canadian institutions.”[6] These readings suggest that the historian of Canada must pay careful attention not only to the dominant narratives of modernity, but also to those that live on the margins in order to understand Canada at the turn of the century and the people and cultures that shaped the nation.

[1] Stephen Dutcher, “Reflections on Modernity and Antimodernism in Ian McKay’s ‘The Quest of the Folk’”, Acadiensis, 35, 1 (Autumn 2005), p. 138.

[2] Stephen Dutcher, “Reflections on Modernity and Antimodernism in Ian McKay’s ‘The Quest of the Folk’”, Acadiensis, 35, 1 (Autumn 2005), p. 140.

[3] Gerald Friesen, “Genealogy and Economy,” in Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communication, and Canada, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

[4] Ibid., p. 28.

[5] Ibid., p. 29.

[6] Ibid., p. 30.