During the time of increased economic industrialization, people especially in Ontario wanted to re-experience the untapped nature of Canada. The North had the untapped wilderness, which began to be captured through photos in newspapers and paintings. These pictures always caught the beautiful and uninhabited scenery, however, these areas where not lifeless. The Native people still had a dominating presence, but throughout these pictures they are taken out. The romanticizing of the North was made and presented in a way that left out the Native people entirely. The removing Native people and romanticizing of the landscape, made extinguishing territorial rights of Native people easier and more support from citizens for the government. “To a Canadian, the North is an idea, not a location; a myth, a promise, a destiny.”[1] In The Group of Seven and the Tourist Landscape in Western Canada, or The More Things Change, the North was a territory that was uninhabited and untapped but yet deep divisions were happening in regards to possession of the territory. “The resultant removal of Native rights to the animal world through the introduction of policies and laws restricting hunting and fishing technologies and access went hand in hand with the aesthetic appropriation of the environment as landscape.”[2] The Natives land claims rights were being discredited due to the aesthetic role that landscape was given, even though to the Natives the land was a way of life, more than a landscape. In From the Outside Looking In: Aesthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North, Sandlos states “an iconic image of a dehumanized northern wilderness-characterized by lonely pine trees, windswept shorelines, and the desolate grey rock of the Canadian Shield-that effectively erased aboriginal people from southern conceptions of the northern wilderness”.[3] The refusal to acknowledge any life in the North further excluded the people from the southern society, which framed the Natives as destructive to the aesthetic beauty of nature. Natives and their practices during the Caribou crisis further advanced feelings of discontent and destructiveness from Ontarians to a nature that had been romanticized.[4] Any coverage of the North that involved people or the land being used in a non-aesthetic way was negative, further marginalizing this group of people. The romanticizing of these landscapes stripped territorial rights from Native. Despite the long storied lives on the land, Southern people, through the Caribou Crisis and the romanticizing of nature, looked at Natives with a conception built from pictures in media and asked, why are they here? Not only were the parks beginning to be exploited for economic potential in the tourism sector but also allowed easier transferal of land rights to the federal government in later years, during Prime Minister John Diefenbaker reign, where his Northern Vision policies, of industrializing the North were implemented. Both these needed a removal of a human presence in order to happen, so the romanticizing of nature did just that. Aesthetic appropriation of the land disregarded and helped the assimilation of Native people living in these areas, territorial and hunting rights were stripped in an effort to keep these pristine areas perfect, free of human sabotage
[1] Sandlos, “From the Outside Looking In: Aesthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North,” Environmental History, 6,1(January 2001): 7.
[2] 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): 149.
[3]Sandlos, “From the Outside Looking In: Aesthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North.” 7.
[4] Ibid., 17
