This week, we continued our case study, “Public and Private Canada”, focusing on Tourism and Environmentalism as the government sought to expand the country westward into land that had been previously untouched by Euro-Canadians. One of the means of attracting tourists to Western Canada, specifically the Rocky Mountains, was through landscape paintings by artists such as the Group of Seven, who contributed to Canadian nationalism, “[claiming] to speak for the nation as a whole” [1]. The paintings were well-received by the public, specifically in Ontario, as Lynda Jessup notes in her article, “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change…,” where the scenic landscapes were seen as “a place of recreation — of scenic values and spiritual renewal” [2]; however, they offered an idealized representation of an “uninhabited” [3] Canadian West, which, in reality, had been inhabited by the Aboriginal populations. Jessup adds that the preferred landscape displayed in the paintings “reflected a romantic notion of nature, which placed emphasis on solitude, privacy and an intimate, semi-spiritual relationship with undisturbed natural beauty” [4]. Further information on the dismissal of the role of the Indigenous in these areas and the importance of portraying the landscape in an ideal way is provided in John Sandlos article, “From the Outside Looking in: Aesthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North,” where he remarks, “Rather than attempt to understand the cultural landscape of local [First Nations] inhabitants, Canadian artists and intellectuals created an idea of North that would, for them, become the North” [5]. As demonstrated by the displacement of First Nations people and the disregard displayed for their cultural ties to the land, the Anglo-Canadian population has a drastically different perception of the Canadian wilderness. Instead of a sacred territory rich in history and resources, they saw an opportunity to increase tourism, thereby exploiting the land. Many Anglo-Canadians shared the mindset of creating a nation that was assimilated, which was driven by policy makers and social commentators, who “[prompted] a surge of publications on the subject” [6]. Through the use of such publications, as well as the emphasis on the idealized version of the wilderness in the West depicted by artists such as the Group of Seven, the experience of Anglo-Canadians and those who were able to share their values was ever-improving as they travelled to areas such as the Rocky Mountains, while that of the Indigenous population was quickly decreasing as their territories were invaded and misrepresented.
[1] Lynda Jessup, “The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change,” Journal of Canadian Studies: 37,1 (2002): 145.
[2] Ibid., 146.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid., 147.
[5] John Sandlos, “From the Outside Looking In: Aesthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North,” Environmental History, 6,1 (January 2001): 9.
[6] Jeff Oliver and Ágústa Edwald, “Between islands of ethnicity and shared landscapes: rethinking settler society, cultural landscapes and the study of the Canadian West,” Cultural Geographies, 22, 2 (2016): 201.
