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Editorial Board / Comité de rédaction
Editor-in-Chief
Rédacteur en chef
Robert S. Schwartzwald, University of Massachusetts Amherst, U.S.A.
Associate Editors
Rédacteurs adjoints
Caroline Andrew, Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa, Canada
Claude Couture, Centre d’études canadiennes, Université de l’Alberta, Canada
Coral Ann Howells, University of Reading, United Kingdom
Managing Editor
Secrétaire de rédaction
Guy Leclair, ICCS/CIEC, Ottawa, Canada
Editorial Assistant
Adjointe à la rédaction
Laura Hale, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Advisory Board / Comité consultatif
Maria Cristina Rosas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico
Giovanni Dotoli, Université de Bari, Italie
Saturo Osanai, Chuo University, Japan
Jacques Leclaire, Université de Rouen, France
Bernd Dietz, Cordoba University, Spain
Vadim Koleneko, Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia
Michael Behiels, University of Ottawa, Canada
Maria Bernadette Veloso Porto, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brésil
Wolfgang Kloos, Universität Trier, Germany
Myungsoon Shin, Yonsei University, Korea
Wilfredo Angulo Baudin, Universidad Pedagógica Experimental Liberator,
Venezuela
Coomi Vevaina, University of Bombay, India
Helen O’Neill, University College Dublin, Ireland
Jane Moss, Romance Languages, Colby College, U.S.
Jiaheng Song, Université de Shantong, Chine
Malcolm Alexander, Griffith University, Australia
Ines Molinaro, University of Cambridge, U.K.
Therese Malachy, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israël
Erling Lindström, Uppsala University, Sweden
Leen d’Haenens, University of Nijmegen, Les Pays-Bas
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International Journal of Canadian Studies
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes
26, Fall / Automne 2002
Performing Canada
Le Canada mis en scène
Table of Contents / Table des matières
Coral Ann Howells
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Tamara Vukov
Performing the Immigrant Nation at Pier 21: Politics and
Counterpolitics in the Memorialization of Canadian
Immigration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Johanne Devlin Trew
Conflicting Visions: Don Messer, Liberal Nationalism and the
Canadian Unity Debate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Ryan Edwardson
Narrating a Canadian Identity: Arthur R.M. Lower’s Colony to
Nation and the Nationalization of History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
Andrea Kunard
Relationships of Photography and Text in the Colonization
of the Canadian West: The 1858 Assiniboine and Saskatchewan
Exploring Expedition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Robert Cupido
The Medium, the Message and the Modern: The Jubilee
Broadcast of 1927 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
Forum / Discussion en forum
Richard J.F. Day
Can There Be a Postcolonial Multiculturalism? A Response to
Ian Angus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
Ian Angus
Abyss, or a Located Ethics? Reply to Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Review Essays / Essais critiques
Daniel Salée
Enjeux et défis de l’affirmation identitaire et politique des
peuples autochtones au Canada : autour de quelques ouvrages
récents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Katalin Kürtösi
Books on Québec Theatre, Playwrights, and Michel Tremblay . . . 163
Authors / Auteurs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
Canadian Studies Journals Around the World
Revues d’études canadiennes dans le monde . . . . . . . . . . . 171
4
Introduction
Présentation
“Performing Canada “evokes
images of theatricality and drama,
of addressing an audience from
onstage, “where it’s so bright and
so dark at the same time,” to quote
the novelist Ann-Marie
MacDonald who is also an actress
and a playwright. All these
performative elements are present
in our thematic dossier in this
volume, where Canada is shown to
be inseparable from its various
cultural and historical
representations. These essays offer
a series of shifting scenarios on the
spectacle of nation-building since
the mid-nineteenth century, or
alternatively the essays might be
read as a dialogue onstage,
“performing Canada” in different
voices through various frames of
inquiry and analysis. But whose
voices do we hear, and what kind
of performances are we watching?
What is illuminated and what is
left in the dark? What surprised the
Editors most in the submissions for
this volume was the emphasis on
history rather than on the present
time or on the performing arts.
Indeed, there is only one thematic
essay which addresses
contemporary performances of a
national narrative, and that too
deals with a historical
phenomenon. There are no
thematic contributions from a
francophone perspective, and
though that absence is recuperated
in our final review essay on recent
theatre studies in Quebec, these
responses to the topic raise
important questions about how
« Le Canada mis en scène »
évoque des images de théâtralité et
de drame, d’acteurs s’adressant au
public de la scène, « là où c’est si
brillant et si sombre en même
temps », pour citer un mot de la
romancière Ann-Marie
MacDonald, qui est également
comédienne et dramaturge. Tous
ces éléments de la mise en scène
sont représentés dans le dossier
thématique du présent numéro, où
le Canada apparaît comme
inséparable de ses diverses
représentations culturelles et
historiques. Ces articles offrent
toute une série de scénarios
changeants sur le spectacle de la
construction d’un pays qui se
poursuit depuis le milieu du
dix-neuvième siècle, ou encore on
peut les lire comme un tout, une
sorte de dialogue qui se
poursuivrait sur une scène, « le
Canada mis en scène », dans des
voix différentes et à travers des
cadres d’analyse et d’enquête
différents. Mais de qui entend-on
les voix et à quelle sorte de
représentation assiste-t-on?
Qu’est-ce qui est illuminé et
qu’est-ce qui demeure dans
l’ombre? Ce qui a surpris les
rédacteurs de la Revue dans la
plupart des textes qu’ils ont reçus
pour ce numéro a été l’accent mis
sur l’histoire plutôt que sur
l’époque actuelle ou les arts du
spectacle. De fait, on ne compte
qu’un seul article thématique qui
porte précisément sur les mises en
scène contemporaines d’un récit
national, et même ce texte-là traite
International Journal of Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes
Canada is being staged and by
whom in these first years of the
twenty-first century.
Tamara Vukov’s opening essay,
“Performing the Immigrant Nation
at Pier 21: Politics and
Counterpolitics in the
Memorialization of Canadian
Immigration,” focuses on the
celebratory performance of
Canada’s immigration history at
the old immigration centre in
Halifax where over one million
people arrived between 1928 and
1971. Inaugurated on Canada Day
1999, this multimedia exhibition,
modelled on New York’s Ellis
Island Immigration Museum,
offers visitors the virtual reality
experience of being an immigrant
back then, so participating in the
nation-building narrative where
immigration is at the heart (so to
speak) of “Canada’s National
Historical Soul.” Vukov offers a
revisionary reading of such
memorials, deconstructing the
complacency of founding myths of
nation by pointing to those
migrants who were excluded
usually on grounds of race, and to
the marginalization of indigenous
people within European narratives
of settlement and colonization.
Suggesting that such
memorializing glosses over crucial
elements not only of Canada’s
immigration history but also of
contemporary immigration
policies, she introduces an
alternative politics of
memorialization through the work
of independent video artists and
intercultural filmmakers who tell
more shadowy and fragmented
6
lui aussi d’un phénomène
historique. On n’y retrouve aucune
contribution thématique dans une
perspective francophone et, même
si cette absence est en partie
compensée par l’essai critique des
études récentes portant sur le
théâtre au Québec, ces réponses au
thème suscitent des questions
importantes sur la façon dont le
Canada est mis en scène et par qui
il est mis en scène dans ces
premières années du vingt-etunième siècle.
L’article de Tamara Yukov qui
ouvre le numéro, « Performing the
Immigrant Nation at Pier 21:
Politics and Counterpolitics in the
Memorialization of Canadian
Immigration », se concentre sur la
mise en scène célébratoire de
l’histoire de l’immigration au
Canada au vieux centre
d’immigration de Halifax, là où
plus d’un million de personnes
sont arrivées au pays entre 1928 et
1971. Inauguré lors de la Fête du
Canada en 1999, cette exposition
multimédia, conçue sur le modèle
du Musée de l’immigration d’Ellis
Island à New York, offre aux
visiteurs l’expérience de réalité
virtuelle du fait d’être des
immigrants à cette époque. Ils
peuvent ainsi participer à un récit
de la construction du pays à
l’intérieur duquel l’immigration se
situe au cœur même (si l’on peut
dire) de « l’âme historique
nationale du Canada ». Vukov
nous propose une lecture
révisionniste des mémoriaux de ce
genre, déconstruisant la suffisance
des mythes fondateurs du pays en
désignant les migrants qui étaient
Introduction
Présentation
versions of non-white immigrants’
stories. Those little narratives
buried inside the Grand Narratives
of history point forwards as well as
backwards, both as reminders of
what has been forgotten and also
as warnings against repeat
performances under the
Immigration and Refugee
Protection Act of 2002.
Johanne Devlin Trew’s essay,
“Conflicting Visions: Don Messer,
Liberal Nationalism and the
Canadian Unity Debate,” treats an
entirely different aspect of social
history in its analysis of one kind
of performance of Canadianness in
the 1960s via a popular music
programme on CBC radio and
television. The author raises the
question of conflicting cultural
values as she investigates possible
reasons for the demise of
bandleader Don Messer’s
television show, Don Messer’s
Jubilee, with its old time music, its
“trad jazz” and its “down home”
image, arguing that Messer’s brand
of white anglophone Canadian
culture was deemed to be too
old-fashioned and conservative in
the new ideological climate of
liberal nationalism of the late
1960s and 70s. The essay raises
interesting questions about
definitions of Canadian culture and
the relation between popular and
high culture, as it does about the
role of broadcasting in the
construction of a national identity.
While making a strong plea for
traditional anglo-Canadian rural
culture and folk music, it is also
evidence of the importance of
history as the substratum beneath
exclus, habituellement pour des
considérations raciales, ainsi que la
marginalisation des Peuples
autochtones à l’intérieur des récits
européens de peuplement et de
colonisation. Suggérant que ce
type de ressouvenir maquille des
éléments cruciaux non seulement
de l’histoire de l’immigration au
Canada, mais aussi des politiques
d’immigration contemporaines,
elle propose une politique
alternative de la mémoralisation en
se servant des travaux d’artisans
indépendants de la vidéo et du
cinéma interculturels qui racontent
des versions plus ombrées et plus
fragmentées des histoires
d’immigrations non blanches. Ces
petits récits ensevelis dans les
Grands Récits de l’histoire nous
projettent vers l’avenir autant
qu’ils nous ramènent vers le passé,
agissant tant comme rappel de ce
qui a été oublié et comme mise en
garde face au risque de répétitions
de mises en scènes anciennes en
vertu de la Loi sur l’immigration et
la protection des réfugiés de 2002.
L’article de Johanne Devlin Trew,
« Conflicting Visions: Don
Messer, Liberal Nationalism and
the Canadian Unity Debate », traite
d’aspects on ne peut plus différents
de l’histoire sociale canadienne
dans le cadre de son analyse d’une
espèce de mise en scène de la
« canadianité » dans les années
soixante, un programme de
musique populaire à la radio et à la
télévision de la Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation.
L’auteure soulève la question de
valeurs culturelles conflictuelles
tout en s’interrogeant sur les
7
the heterogeneity which actually
characterizes Canadian identity
today.
Ryan Edwardson’s account of
Arthur Lower’s classic school
history textbook Colony to Nation
evaluates an academic
performance of Canada’s national
narrative in the years immediately
following the Second World War.
Published in 1946 when it won the
Governor General’s Award for
non-fiction, it belongs to the same
period as Hugh MacLennan’s Two
Solitudes (1945), and is perhaps
the best example of an EnglishCanadian historian’s vision of an
integrative nationalism twenty
years before official policies of
multiculturalism began to be put in
place. Bicultural and masculinist in
his ideology, Lower uses powerful
metaphors of family relations and
blood brotherhood to forge unity
between anglophone and
francophone Canadians, appealing
to a shared history to heal the
divisive impact of the war on
Canadian society, like his image of
war pilots who “took to the air as
the coureur de bois had taken to
the woods.” Lower’s historiography constructs an epic drama of
culture heroes belonging to the
“two founding nations” and to an
earlier generation of readers,
signifying the importance of
context in Canada’s evolving
narrative of nationhood.
Looking backwards to histories of
settlement in the mid-nineteenth
century, Andrea Kunard’s essay
on “The Visual Colonization of
the Canadian West in the 1858
8
raisons éventuelles du retrait à
l’horaire de l’émission télévisuelle
de Don Messer’s Jubilee, qui se
caractérisait par un programme de «
musique du bon vieux temps », de
musique de jazz traditionnel et une
image « péquenaude ». Elle
soutient que le type de culture
canadienne blanche et anglophone
que représentait Messer a été jugée
trop à l’ancienne mode et trop
conservatrice dans le nouveau
climat idéologique du nationalisme
libéral de la fin des années soixante
et soixante-dix. L’article soulève
des questions intéressantes sur les
définitions de la culture canadienne
et la relation entre la culture
populaire et la culture savante, de
même que sur le rôle de la
radiotélévision dans la construction
d’une identité nationale. Tout en
faisant un plaidoyer appuyé en
faveur de la culture rurale et de la
musique folklorique
anglo-canadienne, l’auteure fait
également ressortir l’importance de
l’histoire à titre de substrat de
l’hétérogénéité qui caractérise
effectivement l’identité canadienne
contemporaine.
Le compte-rendu que Ryan
Edwardson fait du manuel scolaire
classique d’histoire canadienne
d’Arthur Lower, Colony to Nation,
évalue la performance du récit
national canadien dans les années
qui ont immédiatement suivi la
Deuxième Guerre mondiale. Publié
pour la première fois en 1946,
année où il obtint le prix du
Gouverneur général pour les études
et essais, cet ouvrage appartient à la
même période que le roman Two
Solitudes (1945), de Hugh
Introduction
Présentation
Assinboine and Saskatchewan
Exploring Expedition” offers
another version of nation-building
as theatrical performance, this time
with the wide prairie landscape as
the stage and the explorers and
Native people as the carefully
posed actors. In her account of the
work of Humphrey Lloyd Hime,
the first photographer to
accompany a Canadian exploring
expedition (led by the Englishman
Henry Youle Hind), she
investigates the iconography of
photographs and the interaction
between image and text in Hime’s
visual accompaniment to Hind’s
narrative. These men were both
engaged in constructing a factual
record which was inevitably
interpreted through a white
European cultural lens and
designed for circulation principally
in Britain, to appeal not only to
scientists and geographers but also
to prospective settlers and
investors–which it did. As
Kunard’s analysis shows, they
were acting from a prepared script,
where certain facts and images had
to be manipulated or rewritten in
the interests of white colonial
projects of expansion in the
Canadian West.
The last essay in our thematic
dossier, Roberto Cupido’s “The
Medium, the Message and the
Modern: The Jubilee Broadcast of
1927,” returns to radio (at that
early time the responsibility of the
Department of Marine and
Fisheries) in his analysis of the
first nationwide broadcast, which
was a major dramatic performance
of pan-Canadian identity. On the
MacLennan, et constitue sans
doute le meilleur exemple de la
vision, par un historien
canadien-anglais, d’un
nationalisme d’intégration et ce
une vingtaine d’années avant la
mise en place des politiques
officielles en matière de
multiculturalisme. En partant
d’une idéologie biculturelle et
masculiniste, Lower se sert de
métaphores puissantes de relations
familiales et de fraternité du sang
pour s’efforcer de forger un
sentiment d’unité entre les
Canadiens francophones et
anglophones, faisant appel à une
histoire commune pour panser et
guérir les plaies que la Guerre
avait infligées à la société
canadienne : qu’on songe, par
exemple, à son évocation imagée
des pilotes de guerre « qui se sont
envolés comme le coureur des bois
partait dans les bois ».
L’historiographie de Lower
construit ainsi un drame épique
mettant en vedette des héros
culturels qui appartiennent aux
« deux peuples fondateurs » et à
une génération antérieure de
lecteurs, ce qui témoigne de
l’importance du contexte dans
l’évolution du récit canadien de la
nationalité.
Jetant un regard rétrospectif sur les
histoires du peuplement au
dix-neuvième siècle, le texte
d’Andrea Kunard, « The Visual
Colonization of the Canadian West
in the 1858 Assiniboine and
Saskatchewan Exploring
Expedition » nous offre une autre
version de la construction du pays
considérée comme une
9
occasion of the Diamond Jubilee
of Canadian Confederation, the
new communications technology
made it possible for people from
sea to sea (and even as far away as
New Zealand) to listen to
“O Canada” being played on the
Carillon of the Peace Tower in
Ottawa, followed by “The Maple
Leaf Forever” and “God Save the
King,” together with speeches
from the Governor General, the
Prime Minister, and other public
men. Cupido explores the
implications of this astounding
achievement, while posing some of
the same questions about the role
of broadcasting which Drew asks
in her essay. Given such a public
occasion, his focus is on the
emergence of a concept of national
identity, where the official voice of
Canada was not single but double
with broadcasters alternating
between English and French, a
bilingual and bicultural
performance of Canadianness
which continued till the 1960s and
70s. In his revisionary reading
Cupido contextualizes this official
broadcast in relation to those
voices which were off the air
waves, through his account of
Jubilee celebrations in the West
where in Winnipeg that same
afternoon a great folk festival was
staged, the “Pageant of All
Nations,” celebrating the nascent
concept of Our Canadian Mosaic
(as one book published in 1926
was titled). It is with that
celebratory performance of the
immigrant nation on the day of the
Diamond Jubilee that our thematic
dossier ends, though the debate
centred on Canadian
10
représentation théâtrale, cette
fois-ci, dans le vaste décor des
prairies et sur une scène où l’on
retrouve des explorateurs et des
Peuples autochtones qui y figurent
comme des acteurs aux poses
recherchées. Dans son analyse du
travail d’Humphrey Lloyd Hime,
le premier photographe à
accompagner une expédition
d’exploration au Canada (soit
l’expédition dirigée par
l’explorateur anglais Henry Youle
Hind), elle étudie l’iconographie
des photographies et l’interaction
entre l’image et le texte dans
l’accompagnement visuel de Hime
au récit de Hind. Ces hommes
s’étaient tous les deux engagés
dans la construction d’un dossier
factuel qu’on a inévitablement
interprété à travers des prismes
culturels européens et qui, de
toutes façons, avait été conçu pour
circuler principalement en
Grande-Bretagne, et attirer
l’attention non seulement des
scientifiques et des géographes,
mais aussi de colons et
d’investisseurs éventuels – ce qu’il
a réussi à faire. Comme Kunard le
démontre, l’explorateur et le
photographe agissaient ainsi à
partir d’un scénario convenu à
l’avance, à l’intérieur duquel
certains faits et certaines images
devaient être manipulées ou
réécrites dans le sens des intérêts
des projets coloniaux d’expansion
blanche dans l’Ouest canadien.
Le dernier texte de notre dossier
thématique, l’article de Roberto
Cupido intitulé « The Medium, the
Message and the Modern : The
Jubilee Broadcast of 1927 » nous
Introduction
Présentation
ramène à la radio (qui, dans ses
débuts, relevait du ministère de la
Marine et des Pêcheries). Cupido
se livre à une analyse de la
première émission radioDay in his interrogative short
phonique diffusée d’un océan à
piece, “Can There Be a
l’autre et qui, en son temps, a
Postcolonial Multiculturalism?” is constitué une représentation
responding to Angus’s essay on
dramatique importante de l’identité
“Cultural Plurality and
pan-canadienne. À l’occasion du
Democracy” in IJCS Vol. 25, by
Jubilé de diamant de la
challenging his theoretical
Confédération canadienne, la
argument for a postcolonial
nouvelle technologie des
democratic politics in Canada
communications a fait en sorte que
which would “legitimate a
des gens d’un océan à l’autre (et
plurality of traditions” and open up même aussi loin qu’en Nouvellethe field of public discourse. For
Zélande) ont pu entendre
Day as a Foucaultian poststruc« O Canada » interprété au
turalist, Angus’s argument with its Carillon de la Tour de la Paix, à
implicitly hierarchical vocabulary Ottawa, suivi de « The Maple Leaf
fails to articulate any radical
Forever » et de « God Save the
political solution to the problems
King », de même que tout un
of multiculturalism within the
programme de discours du
Canadian nation(s)-state. In his
Gouverneur général, du Premier
reply, “Abyss, or a Located
ministre et d’autres personnalités
Ethics?” Angus sets out to clarify
publiques. Cupido s’interroge sur
the terms on which his argument
les implications de cette
was based and the necessarily
extraordinaire réalisation, tout en
indeterminate conclusions of his
posant, au sujet du rôle de la
political inquiry, incidentally
radiodiffusion, certaines des
delivering some sharp rhetorical
mêmes questions que Drew
blows against Day’s misconstruc- soulève dans son propre article.
tions. Through the forum feature,
Traitant d’un tel événement public,
the IJCS provides a public
il se concentre sur l’émergence
platform for academic debate on
d’un concept d’identité nationale
issues of continuing relevance.
où la voix officielle du Canada
n’était pas unique, mais double,
Our first review essay by Daniel
tandis que les animateurs
Salée provides an overview of five radiophoniques alternaient entre
recent books on Aboriginal
l’anglais et le français, une
peoples and the policies relating to performance bilingue et
their social, legal, and political
biculturelle de la Canadianité qui
rights. Within the contentious field s’est poursuivie jusque dans les
of the “question autochtone” Salée années soixante et soixante-dix.
charts a judicious path,
Dans sa lecture révisionniste,
summarizing and critiquing the
Cupido contextualise cette
multiculturalism is continued in
the exchange between Richard Day
and Ian Angus in the following
Forum section.
11
arguments or approaches of these
writers, who represent a wide
spectrum of political opinion. As
he argues, the topic relates to basic
questions of Canadian democracy
and to the wider dimension of
policies of recognition of minority
cultures, though it centres here on
the degree to which Native peoples
are to be considered as distinct
nations within Canada. Moreover,
all the “solutions” are offered
within the framework of the
nation-state, where “nous” is “a
priori non autochtone.” Salée’s
final observation leads him to a
position very similar to Angus’s
theoretical arguments for a
postcolonial multiculturalism.
The final review essay by
Hungarian scholar Katalin Kürtösi
returns to the topic of our thematic
dossier with its evaluative analysis
of three studies dealing with recent
theatrical performance and theatre
history in Quebec and a
monograph on Michel Tremblay
published in Bordeaux. Examining
the changing role of theatre in
Quebec over the past two decades,
Kürtösi highlights postmodern
emphases on intertextuality,
self-referentiality, and the
metafictional strategies which are
features in many of these plays;
she also notes the significance of
drama festivals in Montreal to
showcase Aboriginal and
immigrant productions since the
late 1980s. From the monograph
on Tremblay, which assesses his
achievements not only as
playwright but also as novelist and
autobiographer, Kürtösi provides
the appropriate closing motifs for
12
émission officielle dans ses
rapports avec d’autres voix,
absentes des ondes, par son
compte-rendu des célébrations du
Jubilé qui avaient lieu dans
l’Ouest, à Winnipeg où, ce même
après-midi, se déroulait un grand
festival folklorique, le « Pageant of
All Nations », destiné à faire valoir
le concept, alors tout neuf, de Our
Canadian Mosaic ( titre d’un
ouvrage publié en 1926 ). C’est
donc avec la mise en scène
célébratoire du peuple immigrant
le jour du Jubilé de diamant que se
clôt notre dossier thématique, et ce
même si le débat centré sur le
multiculturalisme canadien se
poursuit dans les échanges entre
Richard Day et Ian Angus, dans le
cadre de la discussion en forum qui
suit la partie thématique.
Dans un court texte interrogatif,
« Can There Be a Postcolonial
Multiculturalism? », Day répond à
l’article d’Angus, « Cultural
Plurality and Democracy » qui
avait paru dans le numéro 25 de la
RIEC. Day jette un défi à
l’argument théorique d’Angus en
faveur d’une politique
démocratique postcoloniale au
Canada qui se proposerait de
« légitimer une pluralité de
traditions » et d’ouvrir le champ du
discours public. Du point de vue du
poststructuraliste foucaldien qu’est
Day, l’argument d’Angus et son
vocabulaire implicitement
hiérarchique ne parvient pas à
articuler une solution politique
radicale aux problèmes posés par le
multiculturalisme au sein de
l’État-nation(s) canadien. Dans sa
réponse, « Abyss, or a Located
Introduction
Présentation
this introduction with her
references to his “système d’échos,
de mises en abymes, et de scènes
spéculaires,” all of them ways of
figuring those others outside the
bright lights of representation who
both reflect and destabilize any
performance of Canada and
Canadiannness.
Coral Ann Howells
Associate Editor
Ethics? », Angus s’efforce de
clarifier la terminologie sur
laquelle reposait son argument et
les conclusions inévitablement
indéterminées de son enquête
politique, assénant au passage de
puissants coups de butoir
rhétoriques aux mésinterprétations
de Day. Cette discussion en forum
est une formule utilisée à
l’occasion par la RIÉC : une
tribune publique où des
universitaires peuvent débattre de
questions d’un intérêt permanent.
Notre premier essai critique, par
Daniel Salée, nous offre un survol
de cinq ouvrages récents sur les
Peuples autochtones et les
dimensions politiques de leurs
droits sociaux, juridiques et
politiques. Dans le champ
controversé de la « question
autochtone », Salée se trace un
chemin judicieux, à la fois
résumant et critiquant les
arguments ou les approches qui
caractérisent les auteurs de ces
ouvrages, lesquels représentent un
vaste spectre d’opinions politiques.
Ainsi qu’il le soutient, le thème se
rapporte aux questions
fondamentales de la démocratie
canadienne et aux dimensions plus
larges des politiques de la
reconnaissance des cultures
minoritaires, et ce bien que
l’accent soit ici mis sur le degré
auquel on doit considérer les
peuples autochtones comme des
peuples distincts au sein du
Canada. En outre, les « solutions »
proposées nous sont offertes dans
le cadre de l’État-nation, où le
« nous » constitue « un a priori
non autochtone » et la remarque
13
finale de Salée l’amène à adopter
une position très semblable aux
arguments théoriques d’Angus en
faveur d’un multiculturalisme
postcolonial.
Notre dernier essai critique, par la
chercheure hongroise Katalin
Kürtösi, revient au thème de notre
dossier thématique avec son
analyse évaluative de trois études
portant sur l’histoire du théâtre et
des mises en scène théâtrales du
Québec, ainsi que d’une
monographie sur Michel Tremblay
qui a été publiée à Bordeaux. Se
penchant sur l’évolution du rôle du
théâtre au Québec au cours des
deux dernières décennies, Kürtösi
met en valeur les accents postmodernes sur l’intertextualité,
l’autoréférentialité et les stratégies
de métafiction qui caractérisent
plusieurs des pièces de théâtre
écrites pendant cette période; elle
souligne également l’importance
des festivals de théâtre organisés à
Montréal et qui mettent en valeur
des productions d’autochtones et
d’immigrants, et ce depuis la fin
des années quatre-vingts.
S’inspirant de la monographie sur
Tremblay, où l’on souligne ses
réalisations non seulement en tant
que dramaturge, mais aussi en tant
que romancier et autobiographe,
Kürtösi nous fournit les motifs de
conclusions qui conviennent à la
présente introduction, à travers ses
références à Tremblay et à son
« système d’échos, de mises en
abymes et de scènes spéculaires »,
tous autant de moyens de figurer
ceux qui se tiennent en dehors des
feux brillants de la représentation
et qui à la fois réfléchissent et
14
Introduction
Présentation
déstabilisent toute mise en scène
du Canada et de la Canadianité.
Coral Ann Howells
Rédactrice adjointe
15
Tamara Vukov
Performing the Immigrant Nation at Pier 21:
Politics and Counterpolitics in the Memorialization
of Canadian Immigration
Abstract
On July 1, 1999, Halifax’s Pier 21, historic point of arrival for over a million
immigrants, became the site of a national memorialization of Canadian
immigration. The Pier 21 memorial promises “to do for Canada and
Canadians what Ellis Island has done for the United States.” This paper
explores what it is precisely that Pier 21 does for Canada, examining how it
produces a celebratory performance of the immigrant nation. The latter part
of the paper questions the institutional “forgetting” of the settler legacies of
racial exclusion that persist in Canadian immigration practices by
considering the provocative counterpolitics of memorialization offered by
such Canadian independent video artists as Richard Fung, Leila Sujir, and
Paul Wong.
Résumé
Le 1er juillet 1999, le Quai 21 de Halifax, le point historique de l’arrivée au
Canada de plus d’un million d’immigrants, devenait un lieu de
commémoration national de l’immigration canadienne. Le monument
commémoratif du Quai 21 promet de « faire pour le Canada et les Canadiens
ce que Ellis Island a fait pour les États-Unis ». Ce texte explore ce que fait
précisément le Quai 21 pour le Canada, en examinant la façon dont il met en
scène une représentation célébratoire de la nation immigrante. Dans sa
deuxième moitié, le texte interroge « l’oubli » institutionnel des héritages
coloniaux de l’exclusion raciale qui persistent dans les pratiques
d’immigration canadiennes en considérant la contre-politique provocante de
la remémoration historique que nous offrent des artistes indépendants
canadiens de la vidéo tels Richard Fung, Leila Sujir et Paul Wong.
On the last Canada Day of “Canada’s Century” and the millennium (July 1,
1999), Halifax’s Pier 21, historic point of arrival for over one million
immigrants from 1928-1971, became the site of a national memorialization
of Canadian immigration. A private initiative that received significant
funding from the Canadian government and the Chrysler Corporation, the
Pier 21 memorial promises “to do for Canada and Canadians what Ellis
Island has done for the United States” (Pier 21 2000). Yet, as Gérard Noiriel
reminds us, national narratives of immigration history are never innocent,
for they are always implicated in and tied to the politics of nationality at
work in a given moment (Noiriel 1996).
This paper explores what it is precisely that Pier 21 does for Canada and
“Canadians,” examining how it produces a celebratory founding myth of
the immigrant nation. Pier 21’s opening ceremonies offered a performance
of the immigrant nation as a spectacular “fairytale” of immigrant inclusion
(see below, Abella 1999). In the latter part of the paper, I pursue some of the
critical implications of the institutional “forgetting” of the settler legacies
of ethnic and racial exclusion that have been and continue to be central to
Canadian immigration policy. In order to do so, I focus on a site of
contestation that offers a provocative counterpolitics of memorialization to
the official histories produced at Pier 21: that of Canadian independent,
intercultural video productions of the 1990s by such artists as Richard
Fung, Leila Sujir, and Paul Wong.
The permanent exhibition at the Pier 21 centre, entitled “The
Immigration Experience,” promises to “trace the physical and emotional
journey” of immigrants at Pier 21. Installed in the former Pier 21
immigration-processing centre, the exhibit is organized around a series of
iconic, dramatized moments in the immigrant journey that visitors re-enact.
At the start of the visit, guests are given a Pier 21 passport to be stamped at
each station in the “journey.” Filled with imaginative multimedia displays
and creative design elements, the vividness and pathos of the journey
through Pier 21 is recreated through the exhibition narrative of
reenactment, the life-size cutout figures of different immigrant “types”
complete with listening stations for their oral histories, and the immigration
hall benches equipped with speakers broadcasting new immigrant voices
and sounds. The Bronfman “In-Transit Theatre” entrance is designed like
the deck of a ship, and inside, a spectacular holographic film called “Oceans
of Hope” recounts the story of immigration at Pier 21 through the figure of
an immigration officer in a tone of epic melodrama.
Once passports are properly stamped at each stage of the route, visitors
complete the journey by boarding a stationary CN Rail car with projections
of the Canadian countryside in the windows, recreating the train journey
immigrants undertook from the pier. In each train compartment, videotaped
oral histories of Canadian immigrants are projected. Stepping off the train,
visitors face a wall-sized video mosaic of diverse faces and origins
projected over Canadian landscapes to the accompaniment of the national
anthem.
As I follow the journey and get my passport stamped along the way, one
particularly curious element in the exhibit strikes me. Passing through the
“Crossing the Atlantic” section of the exhibit, a large wall of statistics and
graphs chart the “Waves of Immigration” that Pier 21 received. The charts
and graphs show how British immigration constituted by far the largest
group (1,252,435 according to the chart), over half of all immigrants that
passed through Pier 21. Mention is made of the world events that
determined who came to Canada, from “economic cycles, war,
oppression–as well as government policy and individual choice.” Yet no
18
Performing the Immigrant Nation at Pier 21: Politics and Counterpolitics
in the Memorialization of Canadian Immigration
mention is made of how government policy systematically regulated the
preferential inclusion of British and Northern European immigrants
(Kelley and Trebilcock 1998, 326-329). References to mistreatment and
exclusions occasionally surface in the testimonies and oral histories
through the individualized voices of personal experience, but they are
largely absent from the main exhibition narrative and statistical displays.
Such questions are contained within the melodrama of individual struggle
and overcoming, rather than being posed as matters of systematic policy.
One tiny, out of the way section, “Barriers to Immigration,” does
mention the history of racial restrictions of Africans, Chinese, Indian, and
Jewish immigration, as well as the deportation of political radicals and the
medically unfit. Located in an out of the way corner outside the dominant
spatial flow of much of the exhibit, the text naturalizes and elides the
exclusionary settler colonial structures of Canadian immigration in the
following terms: “Until 1961, immigration policies favored immigrants
who would blend into the existing population” (emphasis added). The text
then quickly jumps to the progressive new point system introduced in the
1960s that “opened the door to immigration from all over the world.” The
passage narrative culminates in the customs station, and I watch the lineup
of visitors perform their immigration interviews and get their passport
cheerfully stamped under the “Welcome to Canada” sign. Needless to say,
no deportations are reenacted, and no one is interrogated or refused entry.
Pier 21’s Opening Ceremonies: The Spectacle of the Open Door
The Pier 21 Society was initiated in 1988 as a “non-profit volunteer
organization” made up of a consortium of “private citizens” from the
governmental, business, and cultural sectors. It modeled its project very
explicitly on the Ellis Island Immigration Museum,1 the museum that
opened in New York City in 1990 to commemorate the most famous point
of entry for over 12 million immigrants to the United States from
1892-1954. Sitting in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, the Ellis Island
Immigration Museum sought to enshrine this iconic gateway as “the
symbol of America’s immigrant heritage” and “golden door,” strongly
influencing the eventual formulation and design of Pier 21. The Pier 21
Society’s goals were two-fold: firstly, transforming Pier 21 into a
permanent exhibition and learning resource centre, and secondly,
“… interpret[ing] the immigration experience of those who came through
Pier 21, and recognizing the important role immigration has played and
continues to play in forming our Canadian identity” (Pier 21 2000).2
In June of 1995 at the Halifax G7 summit, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
announced the donation of $4.5 million in government funding for the
establishment of a “permanent monument” to Canada’s immigrants. The
funding consisted of moneys from all three levels of government: $2.5
million from the federal government, and the rest from the Nova Scotia
provincial and the Halifax municipal governments. In what has become a
19
standard neoliberal governmental tactic in the funding of public culture, the
other half of the operating budget came from private corporate
sponsorships. Chrysler Canada donated $250,000 for the construction of
the Chrysler Canada Welcome Pavilion, in what Chief Executive Officer
William C. Glaub called a “permanent and living testament to freedom and
to Canada” (“Chrysler Canada” 2000). However, such funding strategies
also follow a long-standing tradition of Canadian government and
corporate sector collaboration in the business of immigration, through joint
efforts and policies to attract (historically shifting definitions of) “desirable
immigrants.” Most notable given its major historical involvement in
Canadian immigration as one of the largest importers and transporters of
immigrant labour (and party to the 1925 Railways Agreement), Canadian
National Rail’s (CN) donation of $150,000 to Pier 21 was accompanied by
a good deal of local media fanfare. Part of the donation went towards the
recreated CN railcar complete with a pulsating floor that culminates the
immigration exhibition, along with a second restored 1937 railcar for
display outside the entrance to Pier 21 (Passages). The strategy for
corporate sponsorship was also notable in the way that it linked various
themes and sections of the exhibition to particular corporate sponsors.
Canada Trust sponsored one section of the exhibit dealing with the
historical role of volunteers at Pier 21. A range of corporate bodies
(Sobey’s, Nesbitt Burns) have underwritten different parts of the exhibit
and national narrative. In this way, the national narrative of immigration
offered at Pier 21 became a distinctly promotional and commodified one.
The focal point of the Pier 21 spectacle was the 1999 Canada Day
opening ceremonies. Hosted by Hana Gartner of the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation (the CBC), the opening ceremonies were
broadcast nationally and drew thousands of visitors, many of them
so-called “Pier 21 alumni, ” who had themselves immigrated through Pier
21. Enactments of remembrance, testimony, and affect were abundant
throughout the day. Their continual repetition and circulation was crucial to
the performance of the celebratory nation-building narrative of
immigration dramatized at Pier 21. As Senator Al Graham declared, “We
can hear their voices. We can feel their strengths. The walls behind us
whisper” (Jeffrey and Duffy 1999). Proclaiming the opening of the
“permanent monument to immigrants,” Prime Minister Jean Chrétien
delivered a live video-relayed national address in which he offered the
following somewhat less than nuanced analysis of Canada’s settler colonial
history: “Canada Day is important for the values that we share. We had first
the natives who were here before the French and the English, and after that
people came from all over the world to build this nation … Here in Canada
we are all equal.”3
At the peak of the ceremony, a specially commissioned Pier 21 musical
anthem was performed, proclaiming, “Oh Canada, behind these dockyard
walls, there’s freedom to dream … And here on this day, a new life has
20
begun, when we first set foot on Pier 21.”4 President Ruth Goldbloom
pronounced that, “as one of the greatest symbols of Canada’s national
heritage, Pier 21 is a tribute to immigrants, a living icon in the hearts and
minds of Canadians, the heartbeat and pulse that makes up Canada.”5 The
ceremony was closed with the ceremonial placing of puzzle pieces over
images of Pier 21 immigrants so as to complete a jigsaw Maple Leaf flag, in
a rather literal display of the founding myth of the multicultural Canadian
mosaic. Gartner proclaimed: “As the pieces of our puzzle show, we are one
Canada. It doesn’t matter where you are from, we are one people. Pier 21 is a
testament to this. Canada’s front-door is now officially open.”6
Yet another pinnacle moment of the opening day took place in the
prelude to the official ceremony, when an early morning on-ship
reenactment took place performed by 160 former war brides reliving their
arrival at the pier (Duffy 1999). The ceremonial landing of the navy’s
HMCS Preserver recreated the 1945-1947 arrivals of 48,000 war brides
predominantly from the British Isles and Western Europe, along with their
(continually emphasized) 22,000 children. Escorted ashore by young men
dressed in wartime uniforms and paraded into the opening ceremonies with
romantic tribute, the sentimental tone of national love that accompanied the
war brides’ performance of sexual citizenship confirmed the extent to
which immigration practices are bound up with “the ideology of (white)
women as the reproducers of the nation” (Mohanty 1991, 26-27).
Yet perhaps the most fascinating component of the celebrations was the
avid and active participation of approximately 6,000 people in the opening
day ceremonies. Many were (less eminent) Pier 21 “alumni” or relatives of
those who had arrived at Pier 21 (including soldiers who had embarked
from Pier 21 to fight in World War II). It was among these participants that
the sheer intensity and affective power of recognition–recognition of
immigrant struggles and pasts clearly not often or consistently available to
many of the participants–was most strongly evident and at times very
movingly displayed. It was also here that the active interpellation of affect,
personal memory, and ritualized testimony into the national narrative
proved to be most complex, contradictory, and potent. Such families as the
Leegwater’s of Pictou County actively participated in the sentimental
staging and reenactments of the day. Having donated the suitcases with
which they arrived at Pier 21 to the exhibit display case, the Leegwater’s
posed for the media as they watched a National Film Board film of their
1952 arrival and immigration processing (Jeffrey and Duff 1999, A2).
Some were more hesitant and uncomfortable with the media attention,
while others strongly played into the media spectacle as journalists
scrambled to find Pier 21 immigrants to rehearse the stories of their
passages and arrival to Canada. This was only one layer in the larger
interpellation of immigrant testimony at Pier 21, which includes the oral
history component of the exhibition and archives, along with the “Calling
21
All Memories” project (the videotaped oral history archives initiated as a
joint project between the CBC and Pier 21).
The extensive local, national, and international media coverage of the
war bride reenactment and the opening ceremonies were key components in
the wider spectacle of Pier 21, popularly diffusing this promotional
rendition of the nation’s history both nationally and internationally. A
strategic and “innovative” broadcast partnership was struck between Pier
21 and the CBC, resulting in live coverage of the opening ceremonies and
several co-productions that were broadcast on Canada Day (“CBC
Television” 2000). Most of the other national media coverage combined
the testimony of local immigrants who arrived through the pier with Pier
21’s own promotional rhetoric, as in such headlines as “APier Into the Past”
(directly reiterating the Pier 21 slogan) (Jeffrey and Duffy 1999) or “Where
History’s Soul Remembers” (Toughill 1999).
One of the few articles to circulate widely in the national media coverage
of Pier 21 that even alluded to the thorny question of Canada’s exclusionary
history reveals how the implications of that history tended to be managed
and contained. Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Rosalie Abella delivered a
speech at the inaugural dinner of the Pier 21 opening that was widely cited
and reprinted throughout the ceremony and the media, particularly with
respect to the emotional nature of the speech that drew tears around the
room. Abella is well known as an influential figure in the shaping of
Canadian public policy, particularly for her role as the head of the 1984
Royal Commission on Equality of Employment (known as the Abella
Commission) that led to the Employment Equity Act of 1986.
Abella arrived at Pier 21 as a four-year old Jewish D.P. (displaced person)
in 1950, her family having attempted to get into Canada for several years.
Although he had worked as a lawyer for displaced persons in Germany, as
an immigrant, her father was barred from practicing law in Canada. These
tales of hardship constituted the backdrop to Abella’s immigrant paean, as
she recounted the significance of Pier 21:
The story of Canada is the story of immigrants, and Pier 21 is their
proud celebratory symbol … Every immigrant who landed at Pier
21 has two stories–the story they came from and the story they
started when they landed in Canada … There was one thought
attached to every immigrant who set foot here: gratitude. This
country is full of tenaciously grateful immigrants and their
descendants who bloomed in Canada’s field of opportunities …
This triumvirate of opportunity, generosity, and idealism is what
Pier 21 stands for–Canada’s best self. It is the Canada that let us in,
the Canada that took one generation’s European horror story and
turned it into another generation’s Canadian fairytale (Abella
1999). (Emphasis added)
In this way, Abella’s speech offered a literal articulation of Pier 21’s
fairytale of inclusion. Yet, unaddressed and unspoken in this story’s
22
circulation in the media is the fact that, a few years prior to Abella’s arrival
in 1950, her family was likely unable to enter due to the systematic
anti-Semitism informing Canadian immigration policy of the day.7
When fragments of Canada’s exclusionary history did surface in the Pier
21 celebrations, they tended to be contained within a rags-to-riches class
narrative of progress and triumph against the odds. Tales of immigrant
hardship and the real exclusion recounted in stories such as Abella’s served
to create melodramatic tension and affective force. The stories of prominent
and successful immigrants and their class achievements were promoted as
emblematic of the immigrant experience and the glory of Canada as a
nation.
While virtually all of the national media closely reproduced such
celebratory myths of Pier 21,8 one of the few pieces of mainstream media
coverage to offer a more critical and less celebratory assessment surfaced
outside the national press in a New York Times/International Herald
Tribune article. The headline points to the selectivity at work in the
celebratory founding myth of Pier 21: “Canada Celebrates Immigrants, but
Which Ones?” With a distinct tone of American condescension, it goes on
to legitimately criticize the Pier 21 project for its selective focus on an era of
predominantly European immigration to the exclusion of contemporary
non-European immigration (De Palma 1999).
Founding Myths of Inclusion: National Celebration, Terms of
Recognition and the Politics of Immigrant Affect in Settler
Nationalism
According to Anne McClintock, “nationalism is a theatrical performance
of invented community” (McClintock 1995, 375). If founding myths of
Canadian immigration have long served to imagine and enforce the bounds
of the settler nation (Anderson 1983), the Pier 21 opening ceremonies
constituted a striking contemporary performance of the immigrant nation
through the institutional practice of memorialization. In interrogating the
links between such founding myths and the contemporary politics of
immigration, it is worth considering Bonnie Honig’s claim with respect to
the United States that “the myth of an immigrant America serves to
renationalize the state and reposition it at the centre of any
future … politics” ( Honig 1998, 17). Similarly, Pier 21 spectacularizes
national history and dramatizes immigrant inclusion in seeking to
recuperate immigrant energies in this recentering of the nation-state.
At first glance, such founding national myths of immigration hold out the
promise of liberal pluralism and the allure of recognition of the immigrant
roots of the nation (Taylor 1992), particularly in contradistinction to nations
or versions of national history that deny their immigrant pasts and
constitution in favour of a homogenized historical narrative.9 Without
downplaying its political significance or affective power however, it is
23
crucial to interrogate the strategic terms of recognition, when it is offered
and how it is performed, in settler nations where “the commemoration of
origins is an essential element of strategies of political consensus” (Noiriel
1996, 7). Such strategies demand interrogation regarding the function and
circulation of these celebratory founding myths of immigration, by locating
the specific and critical role they play in national narratives of settler
nations–nations borne of settler colonialism and the dispossession of native
peoples. In the so-called “new world,” any retrospective mythology of a
primordial or pastoral rootedness in the land is foreclosed or “interrupted”
by colonial settlement (unlike for instance, French national narratives
based on “a fable of primordial, continuous Frenchness,” Noiriel 1996, vii).
Instead, settler nations anchor their mythical origins in the romance of
immigration as a historical euphemism for settler colonialism.
According to Honig, such a founding mythology is often expressed
through xenophilia, the mythic inclusion of the “iconic immigrant who
once helped build this nation and whose heirs might contribute to the
national future” (Honig 1998, 1). Xenophilia plays a crucial role in settler
nations, not just as an arbiter of pluralist recognition and multiculturalism,
but as a discourse closely bound up with the strategic interests of
nation-building (from founding settler narratives to economic nationalism
and population growth). Such xenophilia is closely implicated in a
“bootstraps” narrative of class achievement that serves to both flatter the
nation’s self-image of tolerance and opportunity, and to distinguish the
merits of the “deserving, hard-working immigrant” from anxieties around
its mirror-image: the lazy or dangerous immigrant/refugee who is a drain on
the system. As Honig cautions, such xenophilic performances are
inextricably linked and interdependent on their necessarily xenophobic
opposite.10 She argues that “the iconic good immigrant who upholds
American liberal democracy is not accidentally or coincidentally partnered
with the iconic bad immigrant who threatens to tear it down” (Honig 1998,
3).
The national memorialization that Pier 21 performs “for Canadians”
functions through certain highly selective iconic moments of xenophilia,
while glossing over and suppressing the history and continued social
relations of xenophobia that are still central to the regulation of Canadian
immigration. It spectacularizes a selective version of immigration history
into a celebratory nationalism. For example, a Toronto Star editorial
entitled “Wave the Flag for Canadian Mosaic” answers my opening
question of what Pier 21 does for Canadians rather candidly:
The opening of [this] shrine … will help raise national
consciousness about the centrality of immigration to the story of
Canada. Pier 21 should do for Canada what Ellis Island has done
for America–romanticize and idealize immigration, and put
poetry around it (Siddiqui, “Wave the Flag” 1999).
24
This insistence on romantic idealism as way to frame immigration history is
crucial. By embedding a celebratory narrative of immigration into the
popular construction of the nation, a highly selective version of national
identity and history is produced. In this way, the memorialization of this site
sanctifies the following narrative of the nation, as displayed in a front-page
headline of the Toronto Star: “On Pier 21 Canada opened its doors, and a
nation walked in” (Schiller 1999). Such a figuring of immigration history
suggests a nation that has been externally preconstituted, in effect
naturalizing the exclusionary structures of past immigration policy by
celebrating a mythical “openness” of the nation to whomever enters its
“doors.” Indeed, the image of the “open door” presents a strongly domestic
and domesticated image of the immigration selection process and
bureaucracy. This obscures the ongoing reality that the “doors” of the
nation have never been open to everyone, and the practices and exclusions
that are formative to Canadian immigration are forgotten or effectively
erased.
In this sense, the public memorialization of Pier 21 serves to both
imagine and manage the bounds of a national narrative of immigration
through which the founding myth of the settler nation is produced. Such
practices of memorialization offer a rich site from which to examine the
active performance and governance of memory and forgetting in the
official historical narrative of Canadian immigration. They are clearly
informed by Ernest Renan’s classic formulation of memory and forgetting
as the source of the nation. For Renan, projects of nationhood impose a
structural necessity of “forgetting” selective aspects of the violence at the
heart of state formation, along with the suppression of disruptive historical
memory in the forging of national “unity”–or “unity through brutality” as
Renan puts it (Renan 1882,11,14).
Pier 21 also faithfully articulates Renan’s linkage of history with the
essence of the nation. To cite the famous passage: “A nation is a soul, a
spiritual principle. Two things constitute this soul or spiritual principal. One
lies in the past, one in the present” (19). The main promotional slogan of
Pier 21 proclaims it to be “Canada’s National Historical Soul.” Pier 21
literature continually circulates such claims: “[immigration] enriched our
social and cultural landscape and uplifted the very soul of the nation
forever!” (Pier Into Our Past 1999). All of the promotional literature closes
with the invocation to visit Pier 21 as a way to “start you national historic
soul searching.” In this way, Pier 21’s institutional articulation of the
national soul positions immigration as the core essence of the settler nation.
This evocation of the national “soul” as central to the memorialization of
Pier 21 clearly implies an affective if not a spiritual project. Indeed, affect
was central to the staging of Pier 21, it constituted its very mise-en-scène. It
is through the affective elements of spectacle that the links between
institutional or official histories and subjective memories of the nation were
sought and regulated. In the opening ceremonies, an affective linking of
25
immigration with utopian nation-building and historical progress was
repeatedly articulated through Pier 21’s celebratory structure of feeling
(Williams 1977). Pier 21’s other key slogan encapsulates this deployment
of national history as a matter of nation-building: “Pier into our past, and see
the future of Canada.” Yet, if Renan is to be taken seriously, such affective
investments in the national “soul” require forgetting as much as they do
remembrance.
The Pier 21 exhibition is rife with dramatizations of this affect. A typical
case among myriad examples: “If these walls could speak, they would tell
powerful stories of fear and anticipation, tears and laughter, of those
seeking a new life and the promise of a future in this country” (Passages
1999). The resolution of such public displays of immigrant affect is
channeled through melodramatic national feeling. In staging such a
celebratory structure of feeling, the more traumatic aspects of immigrant
affect are subsumed into sentimental nationalism and the drama of
individual struggle.
In this way, immigrant dreams, memory, and senses become microcosms
of the nation. Immigrant affect is strategically mobilized towards
national(ist) feeling. As Pier 21 publicity puts it, “Every immigrant must
dream boldly, risk, and dare to create a new life. To achieve greatness, a
nation must be equally bold in its dreams. Pier 21 is a testament to Canada’s
profoundly emotional immigration experience” (Pier 21 2000). By staging
a fairytale of inclusion, the memorialization of Pier 21 provokes
“sentimental experiences of the nation through contact with its
monumental media” (Berlant 1997, 43). National melodrama was also the
privileged genre for the popular memorialization of the settler nation in the
media. “Canada’s newest museum is a place where ghosts come alive and
memories whisper out loud, a place of pain and nightmares and hope
beyond measure. They call it the National Historic Soul” (Toughill 1999).
This insistence on celebration as the means of memorializing Canadian
immigration history requires an institutionalized forgetting of Canada’s
settler colonial legacy and exclusionary immigration practices. The
traumatic silences resulting from such exclusionary structures, palpable in
many immigrant testimonies, are subsumed by the celebratory impulse of
Pier 21. Traumatic immigrant histories are thereby resolved through a
progress narrative that recapitulates the glory of the nation.
Ultimately, the compulsory celebration of Pier 21 demands a regulated
performance of remembrance in which gratitude becomes the obligatory
affective response. As recent works on the role of testimony in public
culture show (Berlant 1997, Fortier 2001), the public compulsion to testify
and the call to manifest one’s national allegiance is disproportionately
directed at those who, in the very act of being called to testify or remember,
are already marked as alien or suspect of non-allegiance. The very terms of
immigrant recognition and inclusion then, are set by this obligatory call to
26
demonstrate and perform one’s patriotic allegiance.11 In the governmentalized terms of recognition offered at the Pier 21 ceremonies, compulsory
gratitude was the emblematic affective marker of immigrant patriotism.
The insistent rhetoric of gratitude, dreams and a new life, constantly
recited by iconic immigrants and “Pier 21 Alumni” such as Abella, serves to
usurp the political silences and traumatic histories underlying such
affective expression. In these compulsory performances of immigrant
gratitude, the requisite suppression of traumatic immigrant memory is
institutionally aligned with the official “forgetting” of systematic national
exclusions. Celebratory nationalism and liberal multiculturalism constitute
the exclusive and highly regulated frameworks through which immigrant
memory is acknowledged, governed and recognized in public culture. In
exchange for this limited and regulated recognition, gratitude is upheld as a
pledge of national allegiance for immigrants to perform. Such
interpellations of immigrant gratitude are further embedded in a whole
series of rearticulations of “place” that the opening of Pier 21 inaugurated.
Les Lieux de Mémoire: Memorialization as Performance and
Practice of Place
The official practice of memorialization is an institutional project that
effects a redefinition of place. Here I invoke Doreen Massey’s critique of
the traditional notion of “place” as a fixed and enclosed, bounded entity
(Massey 1995, 53). Massey reformulates “place” to refer to the provisional
convergence and intersection of social relations in a particular material
location (63). Memorialization is a public practice that seeks to link specific
interpellations of social memory with particular places, sites, and historical
moments. It entails the designation of a physical place or monument as a
repository for particular forms of memory. This social practice links
material markers with practices of affective remembrance (such as
testimonials or pilgrimages) for the purposes of a specific institutional
and/or national project. It redefines and designates the memorialized site as
a new place–a new place that channels particular social and cultural
meanings or performances of historical memory. Such practices of
memorialization mediate between the institutional and the subjective, and
between national history and personal memory.
Several layers of social relations converge in the Pier 21 memorial as a
particular rearticulation of place. The memorialization of the Pier is
motivated by clear national imperatives in the redefinition of this site. Like
the Ellis Island museum, Pier 21 legitimates its national memorial status
through the claim that 1 in 5 Canadians can trace their lineage through the
Pier. Indeed, both museums have or are developing interactive genealogy
database projects, including ships’ passenger lists and immigration
interview archives. In this way, the Pier 21 project seeks to reconstruct itself
as a site of national genealogy for the settler nation.
27
In addition to the nationalist agenda, there is a local economic agenda of
urban “renewal” at work in the creation of a tourist attraction in the context
of a larger redevelopment and “upgrading” of the Halifax waterfront over
the past decade, spearheaded by the Halifax Waterfront Development
Corporation. Halifax Mayor Walter Fitzgerald noted at the opening
ceremonies that the Pier 21 project was “the cornerstone of the
revitalization of the city’s south end” (Jeffrey and Duffy 1999). This was
effected in the context of a regional Maritime economy that has been
decimated through the decline and closure of traditional industries such as
mining and fishing. The federal government has responded to this
economic decline and its own neoliberal withdrawal of social spending in
part by funding and promoting heritage and tourist industries. The
rearticulation of place at work in Pier 21 thereby plays into an economic
progress narrative of the urban regeneration and gentrification of the
Halifax waterfront (McClean 2001).12
The memorialization of Pier 21 also seeks to incite performances of
pilgrimage, rearticulating the site as a “national shrine” (as it was described
by much of the media). Pilgrimages invoke both a physical and affective
journey that links the memorialized place with a practice of affective
remembrance. Pier 21’s promotional literature repeatedly conjures such a
journey, promising to “trace the physical and emotional journey of
immigrants and refugees” (Pier Into Our Past 1999). At a time of national
uncertainty with respect to the competing claims of Québec, First Nations
sovereignty, and regional decentralization, along with the increasingly
alarmist association of multiculturalism with fragmentation and threats to
“social cohesion,” Pier 21 also responds to the federal government
imperative of building unity, of the need to construct places of national
pilgrimage as a unifying practice. As an institutional as well as a physical
and affective practice of place, the pilgrimage to Pier 21 thereby
interpellates (grateful) immigrants as Canadian citizens.
Pier 21’s articulation of place crucially implies a practice of borders,
linking the physical borders of the nation to the liminal spaces of national
identity. This articulation of the institutional to the subjective is achieved
through the dramatization of the “First Steps” on Pier 21 (as the first steps in
the nation). The Pier 21 theme song is only one of repeated instances in
which the “first steps” are dramatized. The romanticization and
mythification of this transformational moment is effected through the
testimonial focus on sensation and memory. The affective component of
this construction of place is continually evoked, not only through explicit
appeal to national memory, but to a vocabulary of senses, tastes, smells
(memories of the smell of Pier 21, the first food tasted, etc.) staged as the
moment of arrival into nationhood.13 The first steps in the new land are
mythologized and retraced as a threshold moment, a crossing of borders
that signals a ritual of national becoming.
28
If there is one critical function that Pier 21 serves as a particular
construction of place then, it is in the image of the national gateway as both a
marker of physical geography and national identity. The gateway and
border as a place of passage is constantly linked to the iconic moment of
assimilation and national becoming. Pier 21 becomes a gateway to a
federalist construction of national identity and citizenship. As the title of a
Macleans’Magazine column by Peter C. Newman announces, “Pier 21: the
place where we became Canadians” (Newman 1996). This is effected
through the continual focus on the physical passage through Pier 21 as a
romanticized moment of passage from an old life to a new life, from old
world to new, mythologizing the moment of arrival into nationhood. Based
on the strictures of celebratory nationalism, the narrative of this passage
becomes a narrative of national progress, of leaving behind old world
oppression, for a new, better life. Rooted in this official state nationalism,
Pier 21 offers an institutional articulation of immigrant citizenship as a
xenophilic and celebratory myth of national inclusion.
The Closed Door and the Writing on the Wall: The Politics of
Forgetting and the Counterpolitics of Canadian Intercultural
Video
While sites of memory (les lieux de mémoire) are often framed as attempts
to “block the work of forgetfulness” (Nora 1984, xxxv), the regulation of
memory enacted through official practices of memorialization simultaneously produce “les lieux de mémoire” as sites of a strategic and highly
regulated forgetting. I want to pursue this question of institutionalized
forgetting in the celebratory memorialization of Pier 21, a forgetting that
Renan argues is so central to the forging of national “unity.” Given that
Canada has never just opened its doors and let a nation walk in, as
proclaimed in Pier 21’s fairytale of inclusion, what are some of the
implications of this selective national memory? And what is strategically
forgotten?
By historically locating the key narrative of immigration mythology in
the era of 1928-71 as the exhibit does, and by geographically locating
Canada’s national historic soul in Halifax, Pier 21 centres this narrative of
the nation on white European immigration.14 This historical distancing
strategy obscures the ongoing structures of systematic exclusion in
contemporary immigration policy at the same time that it distances its prior
history. In framing this period as a story of Canadian nation-building, of a
“Pier Into Our Past” that shows the “future of Canada,” the racial and ethnic
legacies of immigration history are also recapitulated in the imagining of
the future nation. This founding myth simultaneously naturalizes and
“forgets” the legacies of settler colonialism and exclusionary social
structures in the national project of immigration. It tells a federalist tale of
unity that glosses First Nations perspectives on the roots of Canadian
immigration in colonial settlement, as well as the specificities and
29
complexities of immigration dynamics for French Canada and the
nation-building narratives of Québec. Through this staging of a xenophilic
myth of inclusion, the memorialization of Pier 21 as the nation’s gateway
obscures the xenophobic exclusions that have been and continue to be
central in defining the borders of the nation.
It is worth noting here that comparative analyses of memorials
addressing the specificities of immigration to Québec remain to be
conducted. For instance, in 1998, Parks Canada established a memorial to
Canadian immigration at Grosse Île, Québec, the quarantine station for the
main port of entry to Canada in an earlier wave of immigration, and the site
of a large-scale typhus epidemic that resulted in the death of thousands of
predominantly Irish immigrants in 1847.15 In the summer and fall of 1997,
the Musée de la Civilisation in Québec City held a major exhibition entitled
“Des Immigrants Racontent.” The exhibition focused on immigrant
integration into Québec society, reflecting a predominant theme through
which immigration tends to be framed in Québec.
Recent works by First Nations artists such as Mohawk artist Shelley Niro
have also strongly challenged the very terms of settler practices of
memorialization. In a November 2002 exhibit entitled “Memory Keepers,”
Niro reframes the Statue of Liberty, not as a celebratory symbol of freedom,
but as a marker of settler colonization and brutal displacement that brought
neither liberty nor freedom to her people. Over an image of the iconic statue
that oversees Ellis Island, Niro superimposes her own response: “In my
culture, there are no monuments, no man-made structures, no tourist sites;
one visits, burns tobacco, says a prayer” (Smoke-Asayenes 2002).
While space for the contestation of the dominant national narrative was
marginal at the actual physical site of Pier 21, I want to consider an
alternative site, a representational rather than a material site, where a
critical counterpolitics of national memory and a counternarrative of
immigration’s role in the nation is being articulated. Through the works of
such artists as Richard Fung, Leila Sujir, and Paul Wong, Canadian
independent video productions of the 1990s and 2000s have evolved as a
critical ensemble of sites through which the exclusionary histories
obscured and buried by Pier 21’s celebratory structures of feeling are
directly confronted and explored in terms of their implications for the
nation’s imagining of itself. I close by briefly considering how the video
practices of these three artists offer a challenging dialogue with and
contestation of the founding narratives of immigration espoused at Pier 21.
The works of these artists can be situated within a broader tradition of
intercultural cinema and politically committed art video that distinctively
emerged in the context of Canadian and Québécois independent video
production in the 1980s and 1990s (Gale and Steele 1996). In The Skin of the
Film, Laura Marks defines intercultural cinema as an emergent genre of
film and video largely based in the practices of diasporic, First Nations, and
30
migrant populations in the West. Suggesting a form that cannot be confined
to a single culture, intercultural works are often short (due in part to
production and funding constraints), formally experimental, often with a
distinctly activist bent, that confront the particular crisis arising from the
political discrepancy between official national histories and the personal
and collective memories of marginalized and racialized communities. As
Marks puts it, “Intercultural cinema moves backward and forward in time,
inventing histories and memories in order to posit an alternative to the
overwhelming erasures, silences, and lies of official histories … that result
from public and personal amnesia” (Marks 2000, 25). In this way,
intercultural cinema is rooted in acts of historical excavation, interrogating
the official archive, mining the gaps and silences of recorded national
history.
Marks argues that intercultural cinema often employs recollectionimages16–visual images, songs, material artifacts, and sensory experiences
that index forgotten histories, histories that have been silenced or erased in
the official historical archive (Marks 2000, 37, 50; Deleuze 1989, 47-50).
Since they cannot directly represent these pasts precisely because the
conditions for their direct representation have been politically thwarted or
destroyed, recollection-images bear the traces of buried events, occasioning a confrontation between that which has not been represented in official
histories and the private memories of disenfranchised communities. They
are often the basis for imaginative reconstruction and the creative
generation of forgotten histories in response to the challenge of
representing suppressed pasts for which the official modes of
representation have been destroyed or denied.
Fung, Sujir, and Wong use intercultural cinema as a way to confront the
buried histories of Canadian immigration, the kind precisely glossed over
by Pier 21. As space does not permit the kind of fully developed analysis of
the complex repertoire of images and themes each of the videos offers, I
focus on one particular recollection image each artist employs in a much
larger and more complex aesthetics of countermemory, an image that in
each case directly confronts the silences wrought in the official historical
narrative of Pier 21. In short, these videos constitute a representational site
of Canadian immigration history that produces a counterpolitics of national
memorialization. Given the challenges that Noiriel notes immigrant
populations tend to face in “leaving their own visible trace or forging their
own ‘places of memory’” (Noiriel 1996, 8), it is ironic yet somehow telling
that these traces are located in a representational site of recollection images
rather than a physical place replete with material markers of memory, such
as Pier 21.
Leila Sujir’s Dreams of the Nightcleaners (1996) employs a unique
experimental narrative to delve into the links between historical and family
secrets as they play out for three women whose lives have been indelibly
shaped by the history of South Asian immigration to Canada, along with the
31
ongoing racism confronted by these communities today in immigration,
labour, and cultural practices. The video explores how the untold and
buried stories of the past reappear, how history repeats itself and its
exclusionary legacies. It also considers how immigrant dreams seek to
create new stories out of these haunting pasts and the haunted present.
One of the characters, Jeanne, quite literally undertakes an act of
historical excavation, seeking to understand how the history of
exclusionary early twentieth century immigration policies echoes in the
present, and how it has shaped her life and the life of her deceased Indian
husband. Rummaging through the past, Jeanne scrolls through archival
microfilm of newspaper headlines on anti-Asiatic parades and the White
Canada policies of immigration. Amidst quotes from Mackenzie King’s
Report on Oriental Immigration that decreed the 1908 Direct Passage
Ruling as a policy of exclusion towards South Asians (Kelley and
Trebilcock 1998, 147-150), Jeanne declares, “It’s still the same story now,
the same things people are saying … [we] are finding out how the past is
haunting the present, the same stories being repeated again and again.”
Out of the perpetual scrolling images of anti-Asian newspaper headlines
on the screen, an electronically recreated image of the ship called the
Komagata Maru suddenly floats up off the screen and enters the room
inhabited by Jeanne. It acts as a recollection image of the infamous ship that
challenged the Direct Passage Ruling in 1914 and was forced to turn back
after two months moored in the Vancouver harbour–carrying over 300
Indian passengers back with it (Kelley and Trebilcock 1998, 150-152). This
electronic likeness is reconstructed in order to speak a suppressed history,
reactivating the legacies of these exclusionary policies and reanimating the
past to trace their continued operation in the present. In this way, Dreams of
the Nightcleaners confronts the celebratory official history of Canadian
immigration with the countermemories of those who bear the brunt of what
the film’s narrator/storyteller calls the “times of public darkness, where the
cameras have not gone.” In response to the suppression of an official
repertoire of images of this buried event, the video resourcefully employs
such recollection images as the electronic flying Komagata Maru to create
the traces of a shadow history of the nation that the official historical
narrative of Pier 21 structurally evades.17
Perhaps the starkest way to foreground the very questions that Pier 21
works to suppress is to contrast this so-called “front door” and gateway to
the nation with what would by implication be its back door. During the same
summer as the opening of Pier 21, this implied back door was the site of a
xenophobic counterpart to the xenophilic spectacle of Pier 21: the media
panic surrounding the landing of almost 600 Fujian Chinese refugees on the
shores of British Columbia (Lai 2000). How can we understand the
celebratory narrative of inclusion that played out on the nation’s east coast
in relation to the inflammatory xenophobia incited on the west coast? In
32
other words, what are the links between xenophilia and xenophobia in the
politics of national memory?
A telling picture emerges when one sets Pier 21’s Sobey’s Wall of
Honour against its shadow counterpart on the West Coast: the Victoria
Immigration Building, one of the primary gateways of East and South
Asian immigration. At the entrance of Pier 21, the Sobey’s Wall of Honour,
like the American Immigrant Wall of Honour at Ellis Island, stands as a
memorial vehicle for the inscription of personal histories into officially
sanctioned national history. For $200, individuals and families can have
their names installed on the Wall of Honour at the entrance of Pier 21,
answering the Pier 21 slogan “If these walls could talk” in a promotional
register.
But which walls speak and which walls are silenced in the politics of
national memorialization? In his 1996 independent video Dirty Laundry,
Toronto-based videomaker Richard Fung delves into the legacies of the
Chinese Exclusion Act (1923) (Kelley and Trebilcock 1998, 203-204). The
video opens with historical footage of a Canadian Pacific Railway train
entering a mountain tunnel, the CPR constituting the very locus of the
“national dream” as well, of course, as a monumental product of migrant
labour. Layered over this image of movement is a voiceover by historian
Nayan Shah (Shah 2001) that reveals the project of historical excavation
about to unfold: “Historical memory is full of mythologies, so its not
necessarily a matter of selecting which are the good and the bad ones, or
which is the one truth and all others false. It is a matter though of discovering
which mythologies aren’t allowed to speak because of the ways in which
conventional history has been written …” The video goes on to retrace a
kind of counter-memorialization of Canadian immigration history by
offering a lineage of dates of exclusionary legislation and practices: from
the 1885 and 1923 Chinese Exclusion Acts, to the 1903 introduction of the
Head Tax, to the 1885 criminalization of sodomy and such sexual “vices” as
homosexuality and prostitution. These pieces of legislation were all used as
tactics for the exclusion of Asian immigrants. Their narrative juxtaposition
in the video serves to emphasize the close links between sexuality, labour,
race and ethnicity in the exclusionary practices and legacies of Canadian
immigration.18
In one of several critical recollection images in the video, Fung reveals
the words of Chinese immigrant detainees furtively etched on the walls of
the Victoria Immigration Building in the detainment cells, words
recounting the mistreatment and racism they faced in seeking to enter one of
Canada’s other gateways where the doors were not so open. “What crimes
have I committed? Why am I locked up here like a prisoner?” These secret
inscriptions form a stark counterpoint to the official inscriptions of the
Sobey’s Wall of Honour.19
33
Confronting the contemporary politics of Canadian immigration, Paul
Wong’s Prisoner’s Lament (2000) is a provocative two-minute video
produced for an anti-racist campaign by the Canadian Race Relations
Foundation. The campaign has been broadcast as a series of television
commercials since 1999, which in itself is suggestive of the strategies
alternative video artists such as Wong are adopting to insert themselves into
more “mainstream” media sites and formats. A densely layered video
montage, Prisoner’s Lament intersperses close-ups of Canadian high
school students who came to Canada as refugees speaking of their hopes
and dreams. These mini-testimonials are overlayed with images of
historical newspaper headlines suffused with anti-immigrant and
specifically anti-Asian sentiments (in a similar aesthetic strategy to Sujir),
layered onto media images of the 1999 Fujian Chinese refugees being led
into detention by immigration agents. The connecting thread of the video is
a haunting recollection image, a song of lament sung by some of the women
detainees:
To come to this far away land, we suffered and risked our lives. In
this civilized country, I could not have imagined that we would end
up being treated this way. You saved us to be locked up in your
prisons. Is this your justice? I do not understand. How could I not
be sad? We are shuffled from here to there, days and nights turn
into months. We know no peace. My tears never stop. What is the
crime? I do not understand.
As a recollection-image of the refugee’s detainment, the prisoner’s lament
stands in stark contrast to much of the mainstream media representation of
the migrant’s landing, which in many respects strongly recapitulated the
historical legacy of anti-Asian racial panics on the West Coast.20 By
layering anti-immigrant headlines from these past historical events over the
images of the detainees being led away in chains, Wong effectively
foregrounds the continuity between these historic and current events.
Whereas much of the mainstream media evacuated all traces of the
refugees’ subjectivity by framing the event strictly in terms of the panic it
raised for the (far from neutrally coded) “Canadian public,” the prisoner’s
lament counters this dominant suppression by evoking the impact and
recounting the event from the perspective of the refugees themselves
through their own available forms of affective expression. As a stark
counter-image to the national narrative celebrated the same summer at Pier
21 (the self-proclaimed “front door” of the nation), it offers a very different
and far less celebratory trace of the history and current politics of Canadian
immigration (at the so-called “back door”).
Among the most significant and revealing of the links between official
narratives of immigration history and the current politics of nationality, the
founding myth of the open front door and the closed back door was central
to Citizenship and Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan’s introduction of
the new Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, Bill C-11, in February of
2001. As echoed in the title’s correlation of immigration with protection,
34
this restrictive act constructs immigration as a security risk. Many argue
that this overemphasis on “closing the back door” codifies an alarmist
criminalization of immigration into official policy (Canadian Council of
Refugees 2001), partially in response to the panic mobilized around the
Fujian Chinese refugee landings.21 As noted in the overview of Bill C-11:
“… the proposed Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its
regulations carry a dual mandate: closing the back door to criminals and
others who would abuse Canada’s openness and generosity while opening
the front door to genuine refugees and to the immigrants the country needs”
(Bill C-11 2001). This statement is telling in its structural linkage of the
xenophilia of the open front door (as a strategic national interest) to the
xenophobia of the closed back door.
Perhaps most hauntingly of all given the current political context, the
prisoner’s lament in Wong’s video eerily echoes the words inscribed on the
walls of the Victoria Immigration Building portrayed in Fung’s video.
“What crimes have I committed? Why am I locked up here like a prisoner?”
How can we think about the Sobey’s Wall of Honour in relation to the
recollection images of the detainee inscriptions and the prisoner’s lament?
In contrast to the memorialization of Pier 21 and its Wall of Honour, Fung
reveals in Dirty Laundry that the Victoria Immigration Building was
demolished in 1977, and its walls only speak through remaining archival
photographs and Fung’s video. Yet, ultimately, these walls also speak
volumes about the celebratory founding myths and the ongoing
exclusionary politics of Canadian immigration.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
The author wishes to thank Chantal Nadeau, Monika Kin Gagnon, and Mario
DeGiglio-Bellemare for their astute comments and generous critical engagement
with the substance of this article. I also want to acknowledge the support of the
Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Société et la Culture during the period in
which this article was prepared for publication.
Ellis Island Immigration Museum. Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation.
June 26, 2000. <www.ellisisland.com> and <www.ellisisland.org>.
“About Pier 21 Society”. Pier 21. Ed. Erez Segal. June 21, 2000. Pier 21 Society.
June 26, 2000. <http:www.pier21.ns.ca/about.html>. For the most recent version
of the Pier 21 website, see <www.pier21.ca>.
Jean Chrétien. Address. Pier 21 Opening Ceremonies, Halifax. 1 July 1999.
Lennie Gallant, Michelle Campagne, Connie Kaldor and James Keelaghan. Pier
21. Musical Performance. Pier 21 Opening Ceremonies, Halifax. 1 July 1999.
Ruth Goldbloom. Address. Pier 21 Opening Ceremonies, Halifax. 1 July 1999.
Hannah Gartner. Address. Pier 21 Opening Ceremonies, Halifax. 1 July 1999.
Under Director of Immigration Frederick Blair, it was designed to keep out all
“undesirables” (basically any non-British or white American), particularly Jews
at the height of the explosive refugee crisis that culminated in the Holocaust and
World War II. This exclusionary history is amply documented by Irving Abella
(Abella’s husband) and Harold Troper in None Is Too Many: Canada and the
Jews of Europe, 1933-1948. Furthermore, the Abella Commission’s findings
35
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
36
clearly demonstrated the ongoing nature of employment discrimination in
Canada as historically rooted in its exclusionary legacy.
One segment of the CBC Gartner-hosted special “Welcome Home to Canada” did
explicitly address the racialized past of Canadian immigration through the stories
of Gim Wong and the Uppal brothers, second generation Chinese and
Indo-Canadian men respectively. Yet the implications of these powerful stories
are contained in two ways: by stressing the successes and achievements of these
men (hence reinforcing a “bootstraps” narrative of overcoming), and by locating
these stories in the distant (pre-World War Two) past. Similarly, one Toronto Star
article also explicitly addresses the racialized history of immigration policy, only
to similarly distance it in the era prior to the policy reform of the 1960s (Schiller
1999).
See, for instance, Noiriel on French national amnesia about the massive historic
role played by immigration in the formation of the French nation (Noiriel 1996).
Some argue that xenophilic conjunctures in which “pro-immigration” economic
nationalist positions are strongest also occasion some of the most virulent
expressions of xenophobia (Biles 1999).
More recently, in the post-September 11th (2001) climate, the extremely limited
nature of this recognition is all the more evident in the highly intensified and
sometimes violent call for non-Western immigrants, particularly North American
Muslims, to testify to and declare their patriotic allegiance (see Fortier 2001).
Pier 21 had been used as an artistic venue by local artists for exhibition and studio
space, as well as a refuge for squatters and the homeless (Peck 1994). Yet
promotional literature continually claims that Pier 21 is a former abandoned shed.
This emphasis on the physicality of senses, smells, and tastes strategically
mobilizes the heightened sense memory that accompanies intercultural
migration. As Marks shows, cinematic narratives of migration also tend to rely on
sense memories of native cultures to evoke a physical sense of home for diasporic
communities. Yet in this case, the sense memories of arrival in Canada are
emphasized to evoke a sense of national becoming (for instance, the taste of the
white bread served to immigrants on their train rides from Pier 21, from which
derives the Italian Canadian idiomatic slang of mangiacake to denote Canadians).
For a critique of the racist whitewashing at work in Pier 21’s myth of immigration
and its elision of Black Nova Scotian history in particular, see Walcott (2001).
Yet even within the strictures of the European immigrant narrative that Pier 21
offers, there is a continual managing and silencing of the cleavages and
exclusions that have stratified British, white American, and North and West
Europeans settlers as preferred immigrants, while Jewish, South and East
Europeans were defined as non-preferred and were at various times and to
different degrees excluded from immigration. Indeed, the cohesion of whiteness
that defines Canadian national identity requires such suppressions. Such policies
as the Railways Agreement of 1925 demand further critical analysis in this regard
(Kelley and Trebilcock, 194-199, 210).
For more on Grosse Île and the Irish Memorial National Historic Site of Canada, see
http://www.parkscanada.gc.ca/parks/quebec/grosseile/en/frame_online_visit_e.htm.
The concept of recollection-images is drawn by Marks from Deleuze’s work on
cinema, which itself is influenced by Bergson’s theory of sensation and memory.
To date, the only official markings of this incident are two memorial plaques in
Vancouver, near the Gateway to the Pacific and at the Ross Street Gurdwara. The
Komogata Maru incident was the subject of a documentary directed by Ali
Kazimi entitled “Passage from India” (1998). It was produced as one episode of
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
the 52-part television series on Canadian immigration entitled “A Scattering of
Seeds: The Creation of Canada,” produced by Lindalee Tracey and Peter
Raymont. A feature film project on the Komagata Maru is also in development, to
be directed by Deepa Mehta (see http://www.komagatamaru.com/).
Indeed, the association of undesirable immigration with sexual degeneracy is a
deep-rooted one. Valverde has shown how fears of immigration and sexual
excess were linked in social purity campaigns against national degeneration
(108). Reciprocally, Roberts has shown how the evolving social categories of
sexual deviancy (from sexual “promiscuity,” prostitution, to homosexuality)
became a central focus of deportation practices in early twentieth century
Canadian immigration policy.
A similar politics of memorialization vis-à-vis European and Asian immigration
to the United States resulted in the establishment of the Angel Island Immigration
Station as a monument to Asian immigration in San Francisco in the 1970s. The
walls of the station, containing similar inscriptions of predominantly Chinese and
Japanese detainees, remain standing and have been transcribed into books of
poetry. Angel Island, however, is vastly underfunded relative to Ellis Island, and
is the subject of a revitalisation campaign as it has fallen into disrepair. See
<http://www.aiisf.org/>.
Several researchers are conducting comparative media analyses of the historical
media coverage of the 1914 Komagata Maru crisis and the 1999 media coverage
Fujian Chinese refugee landings. For instance, Biles notes strong connections
between the two conjunctures, particularly with respect to the rhetorical imagery
of racial panic mobilized in metaphors of immigration as an invasion or flood.
In the interim since this paper was first written, the xenophobic panic that
followed the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States have
rapidly accelerated the push to implement the most restrictive impulses behind
the Bill, particularly with respect to security and detention provisions. The new
Immigration and Refugee Protection Act came into effect on June 28, 2002.
Fung notes that the archival photographs exist due to a historian who happened to
learn of the demolition plans and documented the walls before they were
demolished. Pier 21 was, in fact, the last standing immigration shed in Canada.
Bibliography
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1933-1948. Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1982.
Abella, Rosalie. “A Refugee’s Triumphant Return to Pier 21.” Toronto Star 1 July
1999: A13.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. 1983. London: Verso, 1991.
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Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Essays on Sex and
Citizenship. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1997.
Biles, John. “A Ship Off the Old Block: A Comparison of Popular Reaction to the
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2000. Pier 21 Society. June 26, 2000. <http://www.pier21.ns.ca/cbc-pier21
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“History Key in Holiday Celebration.” Halifax Mail Star 2 July 1999: A1.
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Kelley, Ninette and Michael Trebilcock. The Making of the Mosaic: A History of
Canadian Immigration Policy. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1998.
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Canadian Imaginary.” Fuse 22.2 (September 2000): 30-40.
Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
Senses. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
Massey, Doreen. “The Conceptualization of Place.” A Place in the World? Ed. Doreen
Massey and Pat Jess. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.
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Halifax, Nova Scotia.” Association for Canadian Studies Annual Conference.
Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities (Quebec City, Quebec). May 26,
2001.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial
Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1995.
Mohanty, Chandra. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Indianapolis,
Indiana UP, 1991.
Newman, Peter C. “Pier 21: The Place Where We Became Canadians.” Maclean’s
Magazine 22 July 1996: 56.
Nora, Pierre, ed. Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.
Noiriel, Gérard. The French Melting Pot: Immigration, Citizenship, and National
Identity. Trans. Geoffrey de Laforcade. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Translation of Le Creuset Français: Histoire de l’Immigration XIXe-XXe siècles.
Paris: Seuil, 1988.
Passages 1.4 (May 1999). Halifax: Pier 21 Society, 1999.
Peck, Robin. “Ghosts: Sculpture Photographed at Pier 21.” C Magazine 4 (Spring
1994):18-25.
Pier 21. Ed. Erez Segal. June 21, 2000. Pier 21 Society. June 26, 2000.
<http://www.pier21.ns.ca>.
Pier Into Our Past and See the Future of Canada. Pamphlet. Halifax, Pier 21 Society,
1999.
Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi Bhabha. 1882.
Trans. Martin Thom. London: Routledge, 1990. 8-22.
Roberts, Barbara. From Whence They Came: Deportation from Canada, 1900-1935.
Ottawa: U of Ottawa P, 1988.
Schiller, Bill. “On Pier 21, Canada Opened its Doors and a Nation Walked In.” Toronto
Star 23 Jan. 1999, metro ed.: A1.
38
Shah, Nayan. Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown.
American Crossroads; 7. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Siddiqui, Haroon. “A Tribute to our Investment in Immigrants.” Toronto Star 27 June
1999.
––––––. “Wave the Flag for Canadian Mosaic.” Toronto Star 1 July 1999: A14.
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2002. http://www.rabble.ca/news_full_story.shtml?x=17187&url=.
Taylor, Charles. Multiculturalism and The Politics of Recognition. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1992.
Toughill, Kelly. “Where History’s Soul Remembers.” Toronto Star 1 July 1999: A3.
Valverde, Mariana. The Age of Light, Soap, and Water: Moral Reform in English
Canada, 1885-1925. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991.
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28-29.
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Oxford University Press, 1977. 128-135.
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Fung, Richard, dir. Dirty Laundry. Video. V-Tape, 1996.
Sujir, Leila. Dreams of the Nightcleaners. Video. V-Tape, 1995.
Welcome Home to Canada. Narrated by Hana Gartner. Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation. CBC Newsworld. 1 July 1999.
Wong, Paul. Prisoner’s Lament. Video. Video Out. 2000.
39
Johanne Devlin Trew
Conflicting Visions: Don Messer, Liberal
Nationalism and the Canadian Unity Debate
Abstract
In this paper, the popularity of commercial old-time fiddler Don Messer is
explored within the context of the emerging liberal nationalism of the 1960s
and the Canadian broadcasting system’s ‘nationalist project’ or mandate of
representing, promoting and even performing Canadian identity on the
airwaves. The author maintains that in the rush to establish new Canadian
symbols as a response to political concerns at home and the threat of
Americanization, the abrupt disposal of British symbols and the removal of
established media icons from the airwaves, as in the sudden cancellation in
1969 of Don Messer’s popular television programme, left a legacy of conflict
which has ultimately resulted in the suppression of traditional Canadian
culture in favour of elite culture. The apparent elitism of the CBC has likely
driven segments of the Canadian public to seek their viewing options and
cultural icons elsewhere, most likely on the American television networks.
Résumé
Ce texte se penche sur la popularité de Don Messer, violoneux commercial à
l’ancienne, dans le contexte de l’émergence du nationalisme libéral des
années soixante et du « projet nationaliste » du système canadien de
radio-diffusion, ou le mandat que celui-ci s’était donné de représenter,
promouvoir et même de mettre en scène l’identité canadienne sur les ondes.
L’auteure soutient que, dans la hâte d’instituer de nouveaux symboles
canadiens pour répondre aux inquiétudes politiques intérieures et à la
menace de l’américanisation, la disparition soudaine des symboles
britanniques et le retrait des ondes d’icônes médiatiqus établies, dont
l’annulation soudaine, en 1969, de la populaire émission de télévision de Don
Messer, ont laissé un héritage conflictuel qui devait ultimement mener à la
suppression de la culture canadienne traditionnelle au profit de la culture
d’élite. L’élitisme apparent de la CBC a probablement amené des segments
entiers du grand public canadien à se chercher des icônes culturelles et des
options télévisuelles ailleurs, soit, plus souvent qu’autrement, auprès des
réseaux de télévision américains.
A nation is an association of reasonable
beings united in a peaceful sharing of the
things they cherish; therefore, to determine
the quality of a nation, you must consider
what those things are.1
St. Augustine, The City of God
Canadian Broadcasting: “The Nationalist Project”2
In Canada, the obsession with national unity dates back to the establishment
of the country (1867), and perhaps even earlier. In the nineteenth century,
for example, completion of the coast-to-coast railway (by 1885) was
perceived as vital to unifying the widely-dispersed Canadian population,
thereby providing a sense of Canadian identity.3 By the 1920s and 30s,
coast-to-coast network radio broadcasting was viewed as the newest tool
for the propagation of national unity.4 It is significant then, that railway
companies figured prominently in the first trans-Canada radio broadcast in
1927.5 Canadian broadcasting legislation has from its earliest days put the
burden for the promotion of Canadian identity and culture firmly in the
hands of broadcasters and most particularly the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation (CBC), the country’s public broadcaster.6 This “nationalist
project” of preserving, fostering and promoting Canadian culture via its
public broadcaster is deemed by some to be an unfair burden on the CBC
and indeed an impossible dream doomed to failure.7
Since at least the time of the Aird Commission in 1928-29, there has been
a prevailing question concerning broadcasting’s role in the fate of Canadian
culture; will our culture be subsumed by the United States via our own
networks? Fear of the dreaded event has caused us to seize upon the obvious
culprit, to shoot the messenger, so to speak, as it is indeed the Canadian
broadcasting system and its regulating body, the Canadian Radio
Television Commission (CRTC), which enable the direct delivery of
messages from our neighbour to Canadian homes and Canadian minds. It is
most particularly the CBC as public broadcaster which has been cast in the
role of either traitor or saviour, this presumably depending on an outcome
yet to be determined.
Comparisons between the CBC and the often praised British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)–the supposed model for the CBC–have
engendered numerous discussions which reveal that despite apparent
similarities, the structures, financing and contexts for these two
broadcasters have little in common.8 The BBC, for example, has existed in
relative isolation from any other external English-language broadcaster,
has a single language mandate serving an English-speaking population
several times the size of Canada’s, and unlike Canada, this population is
contained within a relatively small geographic area. As a former world
power with a long history, Britain exudes a cultural confidence not yet
found among its former colonies. While the BBC, ITV9 and Sky networks
42
Conflicting Visions: Don Messer, Liberal Nationalism and the Canadian
Unity Debate
have made certain concessions to minorities in their programming and
personnel, British television has not faced serious external competition for
its audience.10 It is countries which neighbour world powers, such as
Canada and Ireland, that have had to contend with a barrage of available
foreign channels in addition to the foreign programming already on their
own networks, where even the advertising segments sell products with an
imperial accent.
External competition from American channels, and Canadians’taste and
possible preference for them (Collins 1989, Raboy 1990, Feldthusen 1993,
etc.) are factors which have continued to fuel “the nationalist project” over
the last forty years, as regulatory bodies have consistently struggled to
provide us with the illusion that the Canadian public exerts some measure of
control over its own broadcasting. I would argue that continual changes to
Canadian content regulations and Canadian programming occur largely as
a reaction against Americanization, rather than out of a concern for public
service and cultural democracy. But as Ross Eaman points out in his study
of CBC audience research, “The CBC has seldom been associated with the
idea of cultural democracy … because cultural democracy is usually
identified with the lowest common denominator, which is thought to be
alien to the ideal of public service broadcasting” (1994, ix-x). Richard
Collins argues that Canadian broadcasting policy may in fact be a process
by which “the state institutionalises elite prerogatives under a rhetoric of
Canadianisation” and that this “elite capture of Canadian broadcasting
institutions” (1989, 48) may have strongly contributed to the high
consumption level of American programs by Canadian audiences.
During the 1950s and 60s, pre-cable era television network broadcasting
took on an important role in producing and reinforcing Canadian culture
and identity. The restriction of viewing options on television at that
time–usually limited to one or two channels–also guaranteed the
pre-eminence of particular programmes. The flood of American television
programmes via cable by the late 1960s signalled a change in television
broadcasting. Characteristics of American culture were highlighted,
especially its futurist orientation with things new and modern highly
value.11
Enter Don Messer
Canadian fiddler Don Messer (1909-1973) exerted an enormous influence
on Canadian culture in the twentieth century as a result of his massive
exposure made possible by the development of radio and television
broadcasting and commercial recordings. Key to Messer’s success was the
creation of an audience across the country. His television show, Don
Messer’s Jubilee, was so popular in the 1960s that there was a sense that
almost everyone you would want to know was also watching Don Messer.
This imagined space or geography created by the Messer broadcasts
produced a sort of imaginary “communitas” or sense of community across
43
the country. From Nova Scotia farmhouses to middle- class Toronto living
rooms, the ratings show that Canadian families all across the country were
first listening to, and later watching, Don Messer.12
To believe that Messer’s wide exposure was the only reason for his
tremendous popularity is to seriously underrate his appeal; separate from
the music was Messer the man. He did not possess the star qualities that one
would normally associate with a public figure; indeed, his shyness was
almost crippling. Messer was concerned at all times with the public image
of his band and, although he was a fair bandleader, he was also
uncompromising in the strict discipline he enforced. Band members were
neatly but not ostentatiously dressed and were not particularly goodlooking. They looked, in fact, just like the people back home. Messer’s
personal image as a good, clean, simple and ordinary family man was
reflected in the programmes he put together. Singers Marg Osburne and
Charlie Chamberlain, for example, sang hymn duets as a regular feature of
the programme. Simple down-home goodness with plain music and clean
humour was the package Messer offered–one which the Canadian public
was only too eager to embrace with tuned-in radio and television sets.
Messer’s own qualities as a quiet, unassuming, polite and even boring man
matched the stereotypical qualities of the average Canadian as portrayed in
even more recent times by popular television series such as Due South.13
And while Canadians may chuckle at the caricature, they also recognize and
are strangely proud of the partial truth of it. Canadians do not give offence;
they are tolerant and reasonable, peace-loving people. Or so the story goes.
Messer then had exactly the right persona to be a smashing media success in
Canada. He may not have fared so well in the United States.
Another aspect of Messer’s success was based in the bridging of old-time
and modern music, which he achieved in a number of ways (Rosenberg
1994). First of all, his very playing style incorporated classical (e.g. trained,
hence modern) techniques into old-time music. Messer carefully balanced
the musical content of each programme, regularly repeating older
favourites and adding contemporary numbers (Rosenberg 2002). The
instrumentation of his band, which in various periods included saxophones,
brass, bass and drum kit, and the addition of vocalists enabled the
performance of an expansive repertoire of music from old-time to jazz band
material. The names of his various groups also bridged the past and the
modern (Rosenberg 1994). During the early years, for example, Messer’s
group assumed a variety of names; the larger group was known as the New
Brunswick Lumberjacks and a smaller touring ensemble was called The
Backwoods Breakdown, but they were also occasionally advertised as Don
Messer’s Radio Orchestra or Don Messer’s Old Tyme Dance Band, among
others. Messer’s various ensembles had names that were made up of three
or four significant parts (Rosenberg 1994). The first part indicated the
presence of the leader himself (e.g. “Don Messer and his …”); frequently
part of the name alluded to an image (e.g. Lumberjacks, Backwoods or
44
Unity Debate
Oldtyme) which linked it with the rural origins of the music and the sense of
an idealized past; another part of the name frequently alluded to place (e.g.
New Brunswick or Islanders); and lastly, the type of ensemble was
sometimes specified (e.g. Orchestra or Band). “Orchestra” implied a more
refined and traditional ensemble while “band” denoted a more modern
sound.
As a commercial figure with the right rural pedigree, Messer
successfully managed to represent traditional old-time culture and values to
a large segment of the Canadian public who saw him as one of their own,
while continually introducing newer modes and sounds in his programmes.
Messer often showcased gifted young performers14 on Jubilee and even the
hemlines of the costumes of the Buchta Dancers rose to miniskirt level.
“Messer thus continually claimed both sides of the line: old-time and
modern” (Rosenberg 1994, 29). His professional demise–signified by the
cancellation in 1969 of his popular CBC television programme–was, I
believe, largely brought about by the new vision of Canada which emerged
during the 1960s as projected by successive Liberal governments of the
period; a vision generated not only in response to the threat of
Americanization, but also due to new political challenges at home.
Canada’s new image: English-Canadian nationalism and the
Quiet Revolution
The first steps toward the creation of Canada’s new image were largely
influenced by the initiatives of Lester B. Pearson (1897-1972) who, in his
role as Deputy Minister (from 1946) and then Minister (from 1948-57) of
the Canadian Department of External Affairs, promoted the country as a
world leader and was instrumental in Canada joining NATO in 1949. His
most notable achievement was in proposing a United Nations peacekeeping
force during the 1956 Suez Crisis, a plan that won him the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1957. The presentation of Canada as a world mediator and
peacekeeper contributed to a developing sense of Canadian nationalism,
particularly in English Canada (McRoberts 1997).
The election in Quebec of the Jean Lesage government in 1960 marked
the beginning of what became known as the Quiet Revolution (la
Révolution tranquille). This new movement of liberal nationalism looked
to the creation of a modern society where French-Canadians could take
charge of their own economy and cultural affairs, and to this end, successive
Quebec governments during the 1960s increasingly demanded rights to
administer their own institutions.15 French Canada sought parity of esteem
with English Canada, harkening back to Henri Bourassa’s concept of
dualism,16 and perhaps ultimately back to the Quebec Act of 1774.17
During Pearson’s reign as Prime Minister (1963-1967), he sought to
assuage the demands of Quebec nationalism and thus to moderate tensions
which could otherwise strengthen the separatist agenda promoted by
45
several political groups. Accordingly, he undertook a series of initiatives in
order to create and promote his vision of Canada. The selection of the
Canadian flag, approved in 1965 after rancorous debate, was a response to
developing Canadian nationalism, while it simultaneously discarded a
symbol (the Union Jack) considered offensive by Quebec nationalists.
Significantly, the new flag bore no trace of resemblance to the old one. The
1967 adoption of Quebec composer Calixa Lavallée’s song, O Canada as
the new national anthem–a song already well-known throughout French
Canada by the title Chant national18–put another important national unity
symbol firmly in place. Pearson’s most important initiative, however, was
the establishment of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and
Biculturalism in 1963.19 The concept of duality, of two equal founding
peoples, was fundamental to the purpose of the Commission which
published a series of reports,20 leading to the adoption of the Official
Languages Act in 1969 (Canada 1969).21 In general, successive Trudeau
governments steadily continued Pearson’s campaign of reducing the use
and visibility of British symbols and replacing them with new Canadian
ones where possible.22
The 1960s also witnessed the expansion of the ‘serious’ arts due to the
provision of government funding through its newly established Canada
Council (est. 1957).23 Arts centres were built24 and many dance companies,
theatre groups and symphony orchestras were established across the
country. If Canada was to take its rightful place on the world stage–and it
had shown its potential to do just that in its leadership role in international
politics during the Suez crisis–the old colonial image had to be discarded.
Canada was in serious need of a makeover. To this end, the establishment of
national symbols and centres of ‘serious’ culture, and the introduction of
domestic policies of biculturalism and even multiculturalism were
consistent with the new image of Canada envisioned by the Liberal
governments of Pearson and Trudeau, perhaps even extending back to the
Louis St. Laurent era.25 At the same time, the government of Quebec had
firmly embarked on its project of modernity.
The Messer Affair
In 1969, Don Messer’s Jubilee was suddenly cancelled. Precise reasons for
the cancellation were never made clear. A telegram to Messer from Doug
Nixon, Director of CBC entertainment programming, referred to the
cancellation as a “necessary change” in order to “inject a fresh new element
into the winter time sked and to provide a younger look and younger
orientation” (Sellick 1969, 88). The public outcry over the cancellation was
unprecedented in the history of Canadian broadcasting. Just one month
after the cancellation was announced, the CBC had already received over
21,000 pieces of mail in the form of letters, petitions and protest coupons
clipped from newspapers (Sellick 1969).
46
Unity Debate
Two demonstrations took place on Parliament Hill, one in the form of a
musical festival led by fiddler Graham Townsend along with a host of
entertainers. Placard-waving crowds thronged the Hill,26 enthusiastically
supporting the musicians and dancers. Various questions concerning the
cancellation were raised in the House of Commons and the issue was
discussed at a meeting of the Standing Committee on Broadcasting, Films
and Assistance to the Arts.27 These events were to no avail as the CBC
maintained its decision to cancel the show. The network appeared
completely unprepared for the extent of public outrage expressed, however,
and only added to its credibility problem when, in a desperate attempt at
self-defence, “the Corporation seemed perfectly willing to bend the truth
publicly when it claimed ‘diminishing size and nature of the program’s
audience’ as the reason for the show’s cancellation” (Pevere and Dymond
1996, 138). While the Messer show was almost immediately picked up by
the competing CTV television network, broadcasting the programme out of
Hamilton, Ontario, the abrupt cancellation of Messer by the CBC after over
thirty years on radio and television networks without adequate explanation
was difficult for Messer and many others to accept. Some thirty years later,
the issue of the cancellation remains unresolved.28
The idea that there was some kind of movement afoot in the CBC or the
government of the time to rid the airwaves of Don Messer has some
currency among traditional musicians and the general public.29 The
enduring rift between ordinary Canadian viewers and CBC management
exemplified by the Messer cancellation is, as Geoff Pevere (himself a CBC
radio host) describes,
… one of the more revealing contradictions in Canadian TV
culture: the fact that while Canada’s viewing public has
traditionally had a large rural, conservative and working-class
base, most of Canada’s broadcasting executives have been
well-heeled, urban hipster wannabees. They work in Toronto with
their eyes on L.A. (Pevere and Dymond 1996, 136).
Neil Rosenberg, professor of folklore at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, has reported a discussion he had in 1974 with a Halifax
CBC arts producer who described to him her intense dislike of the Messer
programme:
I assumed that she shared my belief that Messer was an important
symbol of Maritimes folk culture … What she gave me was not an
expression of idiosyncratic personal bias but an articulation of the
conventional perspective of middle-class Halifax about the
hinterland culture of the Maritimes which surrounds and is
dominated by it (Rosenberg 1996, 154).
The persistent cancellation of popular Maritime “fiddle and twang”
programmes such as Don Messer’s Jubilee, 1959-69; Country Hoedown,
1956-65; Singalong Jubilee, 1961-74; Countrytime, 1970-74; The Tommy
Hunter Show, 1965-92; and Rita McNeil & Friends, 1993-98, when all were
47
highly popular in the ratings, only to be replaced by another program of
similar genre due to the persistent demand of the Canadian public, is
symptomatic of a “long-running conflict of cultural values … in a certain
corner of Canadian popular culture”(Pevere and Dymond 1996, 141); the
public’s battle with the CBC continues.
In October 1998, Ontario fiddler George Linsey launched a Canadawide petition and letter campaign reminiscent of the Messer cancellation
protest, requesting that the CBC broadcast a one-hour weekly radio
programme of fiddle music. The petition led to the formation of a group
calling themselves the “Friends of Canadian Old Tyme Fiddle Music”
(FCOTFM), which made a verbal and musical presentation in Sudbury,
Ontario at the March 1999 CRTC public hearings regarding the renewal of
the CBC’s radio and television broadcast licences. In April 1999,
representatives of the group met with senior radio producers at the office of
the president of the CBC English-language radio network, where they
delivered their petition of 11,000 signatures. A few months later, with no
positive response received from the CBC, the group decided to direct a
postcard/letter campaign along with their petition to the Minister of
Canadian Heritage, Sheila Copps, again requesting that the CBC broadcast
‘our heritage music’on its networks. In all, some 22,000 pieces of mail were
delivered to the Heritage Ministry in addition to the petition. At the time of
writing, the campaign is still ongoing with the group currently organizing a
fundraising concert for the production of two half-hour television pilot
programmes “along the lines of the hugely successful and popular Don
Messer show” (Linsey 2000).30
Yet in the particular case of the Messer programme, the question still
unanswered is: why was the show cancelled?31 Don Messer and his
down-home programme represented a white, Anglophone, conservative,
rural, working-class, British Isles-origin culture, which strongly resisted
calls to bilingualism, biculturalism and multiculturalism. Messer himself
was not in favour of bilingualism and although his programmes were
popular among French-Canadians, his extensive Canadian Centennial tour
of 1967 included few Quebec dates (Sellick 1969).32 Messer objected to the
bilingual posters that Festival Canada had produced for the tour and had
English-only posters produced which Festival Canada then refused to pay
for (Reynolds 1995). Messer did not support multiculturalism and he was
not particularly pleased with the new Canadian flag, preferring the old
Union Jack.33 Nor was he unusual in his opinions; he represented, I believe,
the consensus of the majority of English-Canadians of the time, and
particularly of those who lived in rural areas.34 His views and the image of
Canadian life which his programme projected and, arguably, helped to
reinforce, were, however, in direct conflict with the new liberal nationalism
emerging both in Quebec and the Canadian federal government and its
agencies, including the CBC. In short, I believe that his popular
programme, Don Messer’s Jubilee, did not project (or perform) the new
48
Unity Debate
image of Canada envisioned by the Canadian government and by
extension, the CBC.35 Just as the new Canadian unity symbols were put
firmly in place, Messer was taken off the airwaves. Viewed from this
perspective, it begins to look as though Messer’s tremendous popularity
may, in fact, have worked against him and led to the cancellation of his
programme.
“Canadian Culture, Colonial Culture”36
The CBC’s lack of support for Messer had been evident throughout his TV
years. As Messer’s former manager, Ken Reynolds, has explained, despite
Messer’s incredible popularity, the CBC kept him on thirteen-week
contracts and when the show was cancelled, Messer received no pension.
Similarly, despite record attendance at the shows and the evident popularity
of the Messer group, Festival Canada barely subsidized the Centennial tour,
while funding 50 percent of the cost for the touring New York Philharmonic
Orchestra.37 Seemingly, the Canadian government was more willing to
support an American orchestra rather than Messer’s version of Canadian
culture. The lack of support for traditional or popular culture and its art
forms in Canada is a legacy of the liberal nationalism of the Pearson and
Trudeau eras–a casualty of their various attempts at dealing with Canada’s
post-colonial situation and the threat of Americanization. In 1992, a year
that was to feature intense wrangling over Canadian unity leading to the
defeat of the proposed Charlottetown Accord38 in a national referendum,
Canadian country musician Charlie Angus, in an article in the Globe &
Mail, lamented this legacy:
It’s Saturday night in Toronto. The dance floor is packed, the fiddle
has just gone into the Saint Anne’s Reel and the fate of the nation
hangs in the balance. From my vantage point on stage I look over
the crowd of young and energetic faces, hoping for some sign of
recognition … Sometimes there is a glint of recognition and
sometimes not. And I find myself wondering what kind of a
country would fail to recognize its own heritage? (Angus 1992).
In December 1997, well-known Quebec writer Roch Carrier, upon his
retirement as Director of the Canada Council, stunned the Canadian arts
community by stating that the funded arts in Canada are elitist.39 Carrier’s
statement was not welcomed by arts organizations but ironically,
statements from some arts groups only appeared to support Carrier’s
position by the tenor of language they used. In response to Carrier, for
example, Keith Kelly, the director of the powerful arts lobbying
organization the Canadian Conference of the Arts, was quoted in the
Ottawa Citizen as saying, “Certainly, there is a role for arts with broad
popular appeal but I think the danger is we flirt with ‘dumbing down’ the
arts to the lowest common denominator” (Gessell 1998b). While Carrier’s
criticism was apparently unexpected in the cultural milieu, others have
voiced these same concerns over the years. In 1981, for example,
49
University of Ottawa philosophy professor Leslie Armour in his book The
Idea of Canada and the Crisis of Community, made the following
observation regarding the elitism inherent in the Canadian cultural scene:
It is important not just to support the most talented creators but also
to see to it that it is possible for people to express themselves to
each other. We have spent much effort creating a class of
professional creators of culture–a class which tends to be drawn
from the other professional groups … But we have spent rather less
effort in helping people from the more general public to establish
their own identity (Armour 1981, 140).40
The criticism of Canada’s cultural policies has not only come from the
popular arts sector. Over the years, internationally acclaimed Canadian
composer R. Murray Schafer has regularly voiced his concern that
Canada’s preoccupation with shedding its colonial image has had
detrimental effects on the development of its own culture. He points a finger
specifically at the CBC:
The discouragement of Canadian music on Canadian radio has
been intentional and systematic. The aspirations of Canadian
composers and performers have been blocked by a colonial
administration that is blind and gutless, and which, like all things
colonial, will have a temporary evanescence before it is
overturned, perchance violently (Schafer 1994, 230).
Schafer blames the colonial regime’s “margin-centre view of culture”
(Schafer 1994, 234) as the principle at the base of policy decisions which
result in the allocation of federal funding to the largest arts organizations
which, in turn, present almost exclusively imported foreign culture in their
concert programmes and on the airwaves. And while Schafer cannot be
seen as representative of traditional Canadian culture, it is interesting, if
rather ironic, that his views from the perspective of a contemporary ‘high
art’ composer find resonance among current fans and players of old-time
music.
In Canada the search for identity continues. The Pearson and Trudeau
visions of Canada have not been entirely successful and there is a sense in
the country that their continued existence is in question. Canada’s political
insecurity is also cultural; it has resulted in the promotion of alien culture
over local culture without seriously evaluating the merits of either. The
promotion of “world class” imported culture over the past thirty years to the
neglect of traditional Canadian culture has, in my view, contributed to the
current malaise. After all, at the turn of the millennium, in a world beat
environment where cultural heritages can be tried on and discarded at will,
“if we need roots, we can take [them] from more exotic locales than
Arnprior” (Angus 1992).41
In post-war Canada’s rapidly changing society, Messer bridged old-time
and modernin in his performances, and thus successfully reflected and
50
Unity Debate
reproduced Canadian values as being firmly anchored in the past but also
looking toward the future. This strategy eventually failed to be persuasive
with the pundits at the CBC in 1969 who looked only to the new symbols
(including a newly elected, youthful “playboy” prime minister) and placed
their focus solely on the future. Messer’s modern was no longer modern
enough. Thus the new Canada shed its old British symbols, opting for a
modern, youthful, urban and, arguably, more Americanized image and
delivered this to the people principally via the broadcasting system with its
‘nationalist project’ mandate. But if, as Bruce Feldthusen has so aptly
pointed out, “Television is as influential through what it does not portray as
through what it does” (1993, 46), then I believe that the Messer cancellation
did little to help the cause of cultural sovereignty and Canadian unity.
Rather, by so blatantly disregarding public opinion in what was a blow to
cultural democracy, the CBC’s apparent elitism served only to alienate a
significant segment of the Canadian public and probably drove it to look to
other sources (likely American) for its cultural icons.
Despite the continued lack of official recognition and support, and
perhaps even because of it, traditional culture in Canada continues to thrive
due to the meaning it holds for ordinary people. Nonetheless, this does not
relieve the various levels of government in the country of their
responsibility to preserve, protect and promote it (e.g. via the public
broadcasting system). Academic institutions and educational funding
agencies also bear a responsibility in this regard. It is to be hoped, therefore,
that research in traditional culture will be encouraged and supported in the
future, as it has not been in the past.42 I would argue that studying the culture
in our own backyard is imperative, for it contributes not only to our
understanding of our individual roots and our collective past but also to life
lived today and ultimately of the way we envision the future.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
Epigraph printed in the report of the Massey-Lévèsque Commission (Canada.
Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences
1951, xxiii).
So named by Collins (1989).
The construction of the coast to coast railway has become almost legendary in the
Canadian consciousness, at least in part due to the popular CBC television series,
The national dream: building the impossible railway (1974), which was based on
Pierre Berton’s popular histories (1970, 1971).
In its section on radio broadcasting, the report of the Massey-Lévèsque
Commission refers to the railway as key to Canadian unity stating that it has
“been generally accepted that Canada’s complex and costly railway system is the
essential material basis of national existence” and referring to the report of the
Royal Commission on Radio Broadcasting [Aird Commission] (edited by John
Aird, Ottawa: F.A. Acland, Printer to the King, 1929), it states “… the [Aird]
Commission saw in radio a great potential instrument of general education and of
national unity” (Massey-Lévèsque Commission, 24). The more recent Citizen’s
Forum on Canada’s Future, Report to the people and Government of Canada
51
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
52
[Spicer Commission], reported that rail and radio are still perceived by Canadians
as fundamental symbols of Canadian identity. “The funding cutbacks in recent
years to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and VIA Rail [CN] were raised
over and over by many participants as heavily symbolic of the lack of sensitivity
to national symbols” (Canada 1991, Part II. 3). See also Martin Stokes (1994), for
a discussion of the control of media systems by states as a tool of social control.
A transcontinental radio broadcast celebrating Canada’s sixtieth birthday on 1
July 1927. See Robert Cupido’s article in this issue.
Broadcasting Act, 1991 (S.C. 1991, c.11), Section 3 (b) states, for example, that
the Canadian broadcasting system “provides, through its programming, a public
service essential to the maintenance and enhancement of national identity and
cultural sovereignty …”
Boardman and Vining (1984), Collins (1989, 1990), are among those who
challenge the validity of “the nationalist project.” Feldthusen (1993) deftly
explores the rationale of “the nationalist project” while proposing concrete
alternatives. Goldfarb (1997) has shown the extent to which external factors limit
Canada’s control in this area, regardless of legislation.
An interesting series of articles on the subject has appeared in the pages of
Canadian Public Policy. See Hoskins and McFadyen 1982, 1984; and Boardman
and Vining 1984.
Independent Television Network.
While satellite television will ultimately change the landscape of competition for
viewing audiences, it is still via cable systems that the overwhelming majority of
the Canadian and British public currently receive their television programming.
Canadian viewers have complained over the years that Quebec and Canadian
television programmes have portrayed reality too closely and come across as
old-fashioned and negative. In comparison American television portrays wealth,
dreams and hopes for the future (Collins, 1989, 52).
During its ten-year tenure on the CBC television network (1959-1969), Don
Messer’s Jubilee frequently led the network ratings; for three of its seasons even
outranking the enormously popular Hockey Night in Canada. At worst, Jubilee
came in at number eleven in the network ranking (Pevere and Dymond 1996).
Due South, a popular television series (1993-1998) created and produced by Paul
Haggis and starring Paul Gross as Mountie Constable Benton Fraser. Fraser is
sent as a special envoy to work out of the Canadian Consulate in Chicago. He is
incredibly polite, courteous, chivalrous and even naïve, but armed with fantastic
skills which come from his almost mystical knowledge of the natural
environment. With the help of his dependable husky dog, Diefenbaker, he is able
without the use of guns to always ‘get his man.’ Paul Gross, the series star, in an
interview on the BBC webpage for the show, describes typical Canadian
characteristics as “polite, honest, deferential, patient, etc.” The series (one pilot
plus sixty-six episodes in total) won numerous awards over the years,
broadcasting in 160 countries worldwide. At time of writing it is still being shown
on the BBC. There is an official website, fan club for Gross and series
merchandise (www.duesouth.com/) and, no doubt due to the show’s tremendous
popularity in the United Kingdom, BBC2 has its own Due South webpage
(www.bbc.co.uk/cult/duesouth/).
By way of examples, fiddler Graham Townsend and step-dancer Donnie Poirier.
For example, nationalization of the hydro-electric system, administration of its
own pension scheme, etc.
Unity Debate
16. Henri Bourassa (1868-1952), leading Quebec intellectual and politician, founder
and first editor of Le Devoir, was the grandson of Louis-Joseph Papineau
(1786-1871), leader of the 1837 Rebellion in Lower Canada (Quebec). Through
his newspaper editorials, Bourassa fervently advocated a vision of Canada which
portrayed English and French Canadians in equal partnership, remaining distinct,
but cooperating in a fruitful alliance (McRoberts 1997).
17. After the British conquest of New France in 1763, the Quebec Act, adopted in
1774 taking effect in 1775, formally guaranteed in law the rights of French
Canadians to keep their religion, language, seigniorial system of land tenancy,
tradition of French civil law and entitled them to hold public office.
18. First performed in 1880.
19. Co-chaired by leading Quebec intellectual and editor of Le Devoir, André
Laurendeau, and the president of Carleton University, A. Davidson Dunton.
20. Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, [Reports] (Canada,
1965-70). The last of the Commission’s reports (Book IV), entitled The Cultural
Contribution of Other Ethnic Groups (1970), was brought about by the
dissatisfaction of non-Anglophone, non-Francophone Canadians with the
concept of Canadian duality in which they saw no place for themselves. Pierre
Elliott Trudeau (1919-2000), who had taken over from Pearson as Canadian
Prime Minister in 1968, responded to this last report by adopting a policy on
multiculturalism in 1971.
21. Official Languages Act. 1st session, 28th Parliament, C-120, 1969.
22. Shortly after taking office, for example, Trudeau discarded official use of the
designation “Dominion of Canada”; the term heard daily on the CBC radio and
television networks until that time, disappeared from the airwaves almost
overnight (McRoberts 1997).
23. The Canada Council was established on the recommendation of the MasseyLévèsque Commission, 1951.
24. For example: Place des Arts in Montreal, 1963, The National Arts Centre,
Ottawa, 1967, etc.
25. Another Liberal Prime Minister, Louis St. Laurent (1882-1973) whose term in
office spanned 1948-1957. Lester Pearson served in St. Laurent’s cabinet as
Minister of External Affairs. St. Laurent’s government instigated important
cultural initiatives such as the Massey-Lévèsque Commission, 1949-1951.
26. The placards featured slogans such as “Canada needs Don Messer, not the CBC,”
and “Save Don Messer.”
27. A transcript of this meeting is reprinted in Sellick (1969).
28. That nostalgia for Messer remains strong is evident by the newspaper articles
which still appear from time to time; witness the headline: “The night the music
died: rural Canada has never forgiven CBC for killing Don Messer’s Jubilee”
(McDonald 2001). Commemorative musical shows continue to flourish; witness
the recent four-year tour of the musical Memories of a Don Messer Jubilee
Christmas; and the summer 2000 production of Don Messer’s Violin at the
Jubilee Theatre in Summerside, PEI. Well-known playwright John Gray also
produced the musical show Don Messer’s Jubilee back in 1985. In a recent
documentary about Don Messer in CBC’s Life & Times television series, the
issue of the cancellation is glossed over, including only the briefest footage of the
protest showing Canadian fiddler Graham Townsend speaking with the media on
Parliament Hill. Townsend is not even identified in the footage (Gregg 2001).
29. The CBC, the CRTC and its predecessor the Board of Broadcast Governors
(BBG), have all had to carry the heavy burden of defender of our national identity
53
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
54
and culture in the context of political pressures and partisan politics. And while it
is sometimes difficult to document an absolute connection between a
programming decision and political influence, as in this case, Frank Peers
(1979), Andrew Stewart and William Hull (1994), and David Taras (1997, 1999)
have all documented several instances of political interference in CBC
programming decisions over the past forty years, including an infamous case
having to do with the cancellation in 1966 of the CBC news programme This
Hour Has Seven Days. The protest mounted to support Seven Days was driven
primarily by professionals (CBC journalists, employees and the Association of
Television Producers), and their campaign generated a mailing of some 3800
telegrams; significant, but much less than what the public’s campaign for Don
Messer a few years later amassed in just one month.
Information on the campaign is available on the website (www.fiddle.on.ca/
federalfiddle.htm). The campaign met with some success recently when a
two-hour fiddle special including highlights of the Shelburne Fiddle Contest
along with fiddler interviews, was broadcast on CBC Radio One on August 31,
2001. No regular programme of fiddle or “old time” music has yet been promised
by the CBC.
During extensive fieldwork interviewing carried out between 1994 and 1997
throughout the Ottawa Valley region, almost everyone I came in contact with
spoke about the sudden cancellation of Jubilee as if it had happened last month
and not thirty years ago. This paper grew out of my informants’ sense of injustice
about the cancellation and indeed my own curiosity to understand the reasons
behind the decision.
Messer himself had apparently contacted the Centennial Commissioner, John
Fisher, with the proposal for a Centennial tour. He made a point of including a
number of French songs and tunes in his Quebec shows.
“The Canadian flag? Well, personally I prefer the Union Jack. I’m not too happy
with the design of the present flag” (Messer quoted in Sellick 1969, 137).
Arguably, many Canadians still view government multiculturalism policies and
programmes in a negative light. The Spicer Commission reports, “While
Canadians accept and value Canada’s cultural diversity, they do not value many
of the activities of the multicultural program of the federal government. These are
seen as expensive and divisive in that they remind Canadians of their different
origins rather than their shared symbols, society and future.” (Canada. Citizen’s
Forum on Canada’s Future 1991, Part III.5). Neil Bissoondath (1994), has also
criticised the Federal Government’s multiculturalism policies as being tokenistic
in nature.
As Martin Stokes has pointed out, “Just as musical performance enacts and
embodies dominant communal values, it can also enact in a powerful, affective
way, rival principles of social organisation. Control of media systems provides
the state with the means by which this might be countered” (1994, 13).
Title borrowed from Schafer (1994).
NYO’s daily cost was $12,000 (Reynolds 1995).
The Draft Legal Text, 9 October 1992 [Charlottetown Accord], was a package of
constitutional reform attempting to achieve Canadian unity by persuading the
government of Quebec to sign the Canadian Constitution (Quebec Premier René
Lévèsque had refused, on behalf of the province of Quebec, to sign the 1982
Constitution Act). The Accord also responded to demands from English Canada
for reform of the Senate and contained significant changes to the division of
powers between the federal government and the provinces. It was soundly
Unity Debate
39.
40.
41.
42.
defeated in a national referendum held on October 26, 1992 (McRoberts 1997;
with Patrick Monahan 1993).
“… many Canadians do not benefit from government investment in the arts or
from the national talent pool … To date, subsidized art has been mainly elitist. It
is time to establish programmes aimed at popular audiences … Subsidized art
needs to be less elitist, and the way to do it is to go where it has not yet reached, to
places where the practice of art could be socially beneficial” (Carrier 1997,1).
Carrier’s statement is backed up by recent statistics. The Culture Statistics
Program of Statistics Canada has recently reported, for example, that between
1992 and 1998, classical music, opera and theatre events in Canada have all
experienced a significant drop in attendance. By 1998, only 9 percent of the
population had attended a classical music concert in the past year, 19 percent a
theatre performance, and only 3 percent had been to the opera. Family income
spent on attending both commercial and not-for-profit arts events decreased by 13
percent between 1986 and 1996. Figures also show that an average night out at a
performing arts event increased in cost by 56 percent during the same decade. The
authors suggest that the more well-to-do baby boomers are likely those that have
continued to be able to afford to attend performance events (Cromie and
Handelman 1999).
Armour’s sentiments in fact echo the recommendations of the 1979
Pepin-Robarts Commission report on Canadian unity. Recommendation 11.1
specifically states: “The provinces should take the primary role in supporting
local and regional cultural and artistic development, particularly by encouraging
the participation of the people generally in cultural activities, and by the
establishment where they do not exist of provincial arts councils to assist in this
process” (Canada. Task Force on Canadian Unity 1979).
Arnprior, Ottawa Valley town, 56km west of the city of Ottawa, population 7113
(1996 Census).
The establishment in 2002 of a Canada Research Chair in Traditional Music and
Culture of Newfoundland and Labrador at Memorial University, a post recently
filled by Dr. Beverley Diamond, is a significant step.
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57
Ryan Edwardson
Narrating a Canadian Identity: Arthur R.M.
Lower’s Colony to Nation and the Nationalization
of History
Abstract
Released in 1946, Arthur R.M. Lower’s Colony to Nation is one of the most
popular Canadian history texts ever produced. It informed and educated a
generation of English Canadians with its exciting story of heroes and victims,
triumphs and tragedies, and a colony that developed into a nation. It was
more than an historical text however; it was Lower’s attempt to unite English
and French Canadians in a shared, historically-rooted identity. Emplotting a
selective nationalist narrative, Colony to Nation was a combination of
history, storytelling and manifesto. As a relic of Canadian nation-building, it
serves as an example of how history can be used to tell the past while
attempting to shape the future.
Résumé
Publié en 1946, l’ouvrage d’Arthur R.M. Lower « Colony to Nation », était
appelé à devenir l’un des livres d’histoire canadiens les plus lus qui aient
jamais paru. Il a informé et formé une génération de Canadiens anglais grâce
à ses récits exaltants qui mettaient en scène héros et victimes, triomphes et
tragédies, et contait l’histoire d’une colonie qui était devenue un pays. Par
ailleurs, l’ouvrage était plus qu’un simple livre d’histoire : Lower tentait, en
effet, de réunir les Canadiens anglais et les Canadiens français dans une
identité partagée et enracinée dans l’histoire. En employant un discours
narratif nationaliste et sélectif, Colony to Nation combinait des éléments
empruntés à l’historiographie, au conte et au manifeste. Une relique du
développement du Canada, ce livre demeure un exemple de la façon dont
l’histoire peut servir à raconter le passé tout en tentant de façonner l’avenir.
“Canadians have little choice; they must
either be nationalistic or stand by to wind up
the Canadian experiment.”—Arthur R.M.
Lower (1967, 139-140)
National historical narratives inform, teach, and provide a sense of place,
identity, and belonging. They mythologize and construct but, in their
selectivity, they also exclude. Colony to Nation, Arthur R.M. Lower’s 1946
history of Canada, is one of the most popular Canadian historical narratives
produced. Exciting and dramatic, it uses literary tropes and techniques to
create a story of figures and events, heroism and adventure, struggle and
growth. Canada, Lower argued, was the product of an English- and
French-Canadian “antithesis,” a division between the two “races,” the “two
peoples, [with] two languages, and two predominant religions” (1950, 75;
1946, 66). This division was reinforced by English-Canadian colonialism
and the Canadian government’s failure to develop a strong national
identity. Lower was determined to unite Canadians through an inclusive
national narrative, which moved beyond ethnic and religious loyalties.
Containing material that best facilitates national unity and using literary
techniques to engage the reader in its conception of Canada, Colony to
Nation is a powerful example of how a nationalist narrative history not only
constructs a story but can also aim to influence the national direction. This
article explores Lower’s nationalism, Colony to Nation as a text, and how,
while popular, it existed as an exclusive nation-building narrative, which
was not so much the history of the Canadian people as it was the history of
Canadian hegemony.
Highly acclaimed by both academia and the general public, Colony to
Nation affirmed Lower’s place as one of Canada’s pre-eminent historians.
In his 1947 Canadian Forum article “A Canadian Philosopher-Historian,”
Frank Underhill argued, “one cannot too strongly emphasize that [Colony
to Nation] is the most mature and philosophical history of Canada that has
yet been written” (83). Time magazine and the Calgary Herald both called it
“the best Canadian history yet,” a sentiment expressed by numerous
popular publications, from the Journal of Economic History to the Globe
and Mail (Lower, Box 26, File B691). Colony to Nation won the 1946
Governor-General’s Literary Award for non-fiction, the Imperial Order of
the Daughters of the Empire award, and the Royal Society of Canada’s
Tyrell Medal (CBC, 1946). A number of English-Canadian post-secondary
institutions added the text to their curriculum, including Queen’s
University, Carleton College, University of Saskatchewan, Acadia
University, and Sir George Williams College in Montreal, to name but a few
(Lower, Box 26, File B691). Yet Colony to Nation was also tremendously
popular outside of academia—the Arthur R.M. Lower archive collection
contains numerous letters from citizens across Canada thanking him for
writing the book, and the publisher, Longmans Canada, had difficulty
keeping up with requests for it (Lower, Box 26, File B691, B692). The book
was in such great demand that it was printed five times in three editions
within the first ten years of publication (Berger, 202). Historians have more
recently reflected on its “resounding success,” and how it “marked [Lower]
as a major intellectual force” (Berger, 202; Heick, 19).
Appearing at the end of the Second World War, Colony to Nation was a
timely release that appealed to an English-Canadian readership emerging
from several years of patriotic wartime propaganda and internal ethnic
division. The book engaged and reflected upon issues of national identity
and gave voice to the concerns and questions of many Canadians. While it
60
Narrating a Canadian Identity: Arthur R.M. Lower’s Colony to Nation and
the Nationalization of History
did not establish any new forms of historical enquiry or research, and often
relied more on passion than on facts–historian and former Lower student
Margaret Prang called it the “most opinionated and provocative general
history of Canada” (15)–this was part of its appeal. Underhill argued that it
was a “noteworthy advance in Canadian history-writing” because it
restored to life … the actual human beings who constitute the
people of Canada. [Lower] makes their aspirations and strivings,
their loves and hates, significant to us. … [Colony to Nation] seems
to me on nearly every page to say just the things that adult
Canadians who seek true insight into the development of the
national life should want to have said to them (83).
Howard Vernon, a historian at the New York State College for Teachers,
expressed the prevailing view of the time when he noted that Lower was “in
danger of causing Canadian history to become interesting and alive”
(Lower, Box 1, File A29). Colony to Nation was but one of several general
Canadian narrative histories published during the mid-1940s, including
D.G. Creighton’s Dominion of the North (1944) and Edgar McInnis’
Canada: A Political and Social History (1947). Yet Colony to Nation stands
out because of its humanized and entertaining qualities–many Canadians
wrote to Lower in praise of the book’s passionate and nationalist approach
(Lower, Box 26, File B691). As Carl Berger noted in The Writing of
Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian Historical Writing Since
1900, “some of Lower’s contemporaries tried to mask this personal element
with detached irony, an involuted and desiccated prose, or the jargon of
scientific objectivity. But with Lower a personal approach to history
writing was undertaken without inhibitions, indeed with enthusiasm”
(113).
Lower readily admitted that he was more concerned with writing a
national narrative than he was with historical research. He told one reader
that Colony to Nation was not about detailing events or “documented
reporting” as much as it was about profiling “the growth of a community”
(Box 1, File A28). This approach, however, left the text open to criticism.
C.P. Stacey’s 1947 review for the Canadian Historical Review called
Colony to Nation “hardly so much a history of Canada as it is a series of
reflections upon the history of Canada; the element of commentary is more
prominent than that of chronicle, and the author, though always ready to
instruct, is less anxious to inform” (194). Stacey found it to be
“opinionated,” “a pretty monumental piece of carelessness,” and overly
negative about the British connection that Stacey saw as important to
Canadian identity (195, 196). He did concede, however, that Lower was
tremendously aware of the nation’s problems and was sincere in helping
Canadians overcome them. “The book’s great value is its ability to
stimulate,” Stacey remarked. “It has made, and will make, many readers
think” (196).
61
Lower’s Nationalism and Sense of Place
Born on August 12, 1889, in Barrie, Ontario to English immigrant parents,
Lower graduated with his Bachelor’s degree from the University of
Toronto in 1914, served in the English Royal Navy during the First World
War, and worked as a civil servant in Ottawa. His nationalism was sparked
while serving in the navy, a reaction to what he called the “complete
indifferen[ce]” England had for Canada (1967, 139). Receiving his
doctorate from Harvard in 1929, he accepted a position at United College in
Winnipeg and focused on economic history. It was “a reasonably safe
field,” Lower recalled, “for few people were going to attack one for
discussing the square-timber exports from the port of Quebec in the 1850s”
(1967, 180). In less than a decade he produced Select Documents in
Canadian Economic History (1929) with Harold Innis, Settlement and the
Forest Frontier in Eastern Canada (1936), and The North American
Assault on the Canadian Forest (1938). As well, among his articles were
“Three Centuries of Empire Trade” (1932) and “Lumbering” (1936). While
these works detailed economic elements of the lumber trade, they also
reflected an interest in the wilderness as a force of national identity and
social democracy. Lower was an avid outdoors enthusiast who felt a
tremendous affinity with the land and its impact on the Canadian identity
(Berger, 115-121).
The divisive impact of the Second World War on Canadian society,
especially the English-Canadian pressure for forced French-Canadian
enlistment, fostered Lower’s desire to forge a united identity among the
country’s citizens. Conscription, a reality in the First World War and a
looming threat throughout the Second, ostracized and isolated French
Canadians. Forced enlistment infuriated Lower not only because of its
damage to Canadian unity, but because it was “the most drastic invasion of
civil liberties imaginable” (1967, 261). Acivil rights activist who was made
president of the Winnipeg Civil Liberties Association in 1940, Lower
described himself as someone “who believes passionately in freedom and
justice, and sees the best guarantees of freedom and justice in the unsullied
maintenance of the institutional” (Box 26, File B693). The state was to
protect the rights of the individual and ensure Canadian unity, but instead
allowed colonial sentimentality to further divide Canadians.
It is not surprising that Lower turned to history as a way of uniting
Canadians in this divided climate. Predating the publication of Colony to
Nation by three years, his 1943 Canadian Historical Association
presidential address entitled “Two Ways of Life: The Primary Antithesis of
Canadian History” was a passionate expression of his desire for a united
Canadian identity: “We have not lived together for nearly two centuries
merely to see the Canadian experiment fail,” Lower argued (1943c, 60).
Characterizing the division as one of English-Canadian materialism and
French-Canadian spirituality, he had faith that the two groups could learn
62
from each other and come to accept their shared identity. Differences would
remain, but, as in the familial analogies Lower often made, the differing
personalities and conflicts between two siblings did not make them any less
a family. Canadians needed to focus on what they shared, not on what made
them different. As Lower put it in “Two Nations or Two Nationalities,” “[i]t
seems to me that the mould of history has shaped what may be called a
Canadian people, a people of two wings to be sure, French and English, but
nevertheless a people” (1943b, 204). It was an “integrative” nationalism, an
attempt to weld two parts together by focusing on the elements that they
shared (Smith, 1986, 25). Lower understood Canada, a civic and ethnic
national hybrid, evolved from and exclusive to the two founding ethnic
groups. While Canada was largely a civic state, it was still tied to the type of
lingering ethnic hegemony that sociologist and national identity theorist
Anthony D. Smith has called “ethnic moorings” (Smith, 2000, 19). Lower’s
English and French dualistic approach was not out of place in a
pre-officially multicultural Canada which accepted non-traditional
immigrants only as necessary, and which actively sought to assimilate them
into the mainstream; their heritage and ethnicity were not to be celebrated
but overcome. The language-based “English” and “French” descriptions
were not inclusive to all who spoke the languages, of course, but were
merely the common way of identifying the dominant Anglo-Celtic and
Franco-Canadian populations. Those of other ethnicities—or, in the
discourse of the time, “races”—who may have spoken English and/or
French were nevertheless largely excluded from these racially-constructed
but linguistically-defined groups.
Lower’s nationalism was an elitist “top-down” indoctrination of the
populace, which reinforced the institutionalized identity and dominant
hegemony. He felt it was the duty of the nation’s leaders to teach and
integrate Canadians into the national culture—indeed, to teach Canadians
what it meant to be “Canadian.” This task was especially important for
historians, as “by its history a people lives” (1946, xiii). While, as Smith
notes in Modernism and Nationalism, such nationalism “from above” is
ineffective if not “complemented by a popular perspective ‘from
below’,”(1998a, 95) popular history was a way of engaging and shaping the
public imagination towards such nationalist goals. For Lower, nationalism
was a functional force which could be used for social good, helping the
populace find a sense of place in a confusing, divisive world. Such a
nationalist weltanschauung usually involves a series of beliefs which, as a
general ideology,
holds that the world is divided into nations, each of which has its
own character and destiny; that an individual’s first loyalty is to his
or her nation; that the nation is the source of all political power; that
to be free and fulfilled, the individual must belong to a nation; that
each nation must express its authentic nature by being
autonomous; and that a world of peace can be built upon a world of
nations (Smith, 1995, 55).
63
Consequently, nationalism often exists as a “taken-for-granted frame of
reference,” one that can take the place of religious faith in filling the
emotional and communal gap left in the wake of modernity and
industrialization (Anderson, 12; Hobsbawm, 46). While Lower disliked
“metropolitanism” and the excessive impacts of modernity, (Berger,
120-123) his nationalism did not take the place of religion as much as it
operated as one. Berger has noted how Lower “spoke of nationalism in the
language of religion, and it is clear he expected that a nationalist faith could
be embedded in the consciousness of Canadians as deeply as the old
Methodism” (Berger, 135-136).
Lower’s skills as a historian merged well with his nationalism. “History
for Lower,” as Berger has argued, “became a search for a nationalist creed
that would at once satisfy his own deep-seated need to belong to a
homogeneous community, a ‘motherland’, and be an instrument that would
aid that community in its ongoing process of self-determination” (Berger,
112). It is common for nationalist narratives to emerge from such
explorations, as the material provides a sense of “national self” and
reassures the collective by laying out a distinctive “tableau of the past”
(Smith, 1986, 148, 191, 180). Indeed, as Smith has argued, “nationalism’s
peculiar myth of the nation may be see [sic] as a particularly potent and
appealing dramatic narrative, which links past, present and future through
the character and role of the national community” (Smith, 1998b, 2).
Colony to Nation was Lower’s attempt to correct the lack of
nation-building historical narratives. Canadian history had been “stodgy,”
Lower recalled in 1967, because “those who wrote it had not been
completely and unreservedly Canadians” (1967, 265). In Colony to
Nation’s introduction, Lower complained that Canadian historical writing,
much like the nation itself, had been hindered by division. English- and
French-Canadian histories “hardly seem to refer to the same country,”
while economic, constitutional, political, and biographical histories,
although “useful,” were not “fused into life” (1946, xi). Canadians required
a national narrative, which was inclusive and expressed the “colour” of
Canadian history. “If people find Canadian history dull,” Lower explained,
“it must either be because they are dull themselves or because the Canadian
historic scene has not yet been painted in its own bold colours. How could a
history full of grandiose projects, startling contrasts, stark antitheses, be
dull?”(1946, xii) The Second World War reinforced the need for a unified
history, one exciting and passionate enough to grab the readers’ attention
and to encourage their nationalism. Lower recalled that Colony to Nation
came easily to him, as “under the emotional surge of war, it represented the
pitch of my concern for my country, calling out such imaginative and
literary powers as I possessed” (1967, 265).
64
A National History: Creating the Narrative
Colony to Nation was a carefully constructed narrative that provided a
specific and calculated account of Canadian history. Lower selected certain
events and characters and set, or “emplotted,” them into a story with a fluid
beginning, middle, and end—an effective way of creating a powerful
narrative (see White, 1973). Such selectivity, however, required
emphasizing certain material and interpretations while ignoring others. The
past is so “full,” Smith explains, that “nationalists must prune it for their
purposes and use a very selective memory for the tale they wish to
impart”(1986, 177). The information is then portrayed in specific ways to
impart a sense of national solidarity and shared history, what theorist of
national identity Benedict Anderson called “reshaping the imagination”
and constructing a “reassurance of fratricide,” as in remembering the
American civil war as a war “between brothers” rather than “two sovereign
nation-states” (199-203). For Lower, the English and French Canadians
were the brothers needing to be reminded of their fraternal link, the
Conquest the moment of their coming together, and the history which
followed their lives together.
While Colony to Nation was constructed as a national history, it was
inherently limited by its focus on an English-Canadian readership. Yet this
was part of the teaching process, as English Canadians had to better
understand French Canadians and how the Conquest had been “a type of
slavery” (63). Characterizations were an effective way of constructing the
players in the saga. The book described English Canadians as aggressive
bullies who misunderstood the simple, passionate, spiritual, and sensitive
French Canadians. “It is as a very womanly woman that such a feminine
people as the French should be treated,” the readers were told. “Such a one
could be wooed, but all the English Canadian can do is to shout” (213, 268,
467). These stereotypes and gendering were an attempt to evoke sympathy
for French Canadians, as one might for the wife of an aggressive husband.
While questionable today, this approach received high praise in Underhill’s
1947 review of the text: “Perhaps it is relevant to inquire at this point how
long it will be before a French-Canadian historian appears who shows
anything like the same sympathetic understanding of English Canada
which Professor Lower shows of Quebec” (84). Ged Martin is quite
accurate in noting that “by the standards of 1946,” Colony to Nation is “a
sympathetic attempt by an English Canadian to bridge the country’s great
internal divide, but it reflects stereotypes of culture and gender which
would now be widely regarded as too embarrassing to even discuss” (3).
Narratives–historical and otherwise–use literary tropes and techniques,
including metaphor, repetition, and questions, to reinforce the story’s
direction and efficiency (see White, 1978). Colony to Nation did this quite
effectively, engaging the reader in an exciting historical story. Canada was
founded through a metaphoric struggle in which “the French attacked the
wilderness,” as a harsh frontier like Canada, the book argued, needed “not
65
manners but muscle” (43, 41). The Loyalists provided the next influx of
population, exchanging their “aristocratic” American homes for new
British North American “forest homes” in a difficult transition “of last
resort.” “Having been cast out of heaven,” Colony to Nation explained,
“men could not at once give their hearts to hell” (120). The book also
adopted phrases and symbols of one ethnic group for another as part of
portraying a common history. World War One pilots, for example, took “to
the air as the coureur de bois had taken to the woods” (457). It is the
construction of something new out of parts of the old, emplotting a sense of
shared history, an evolution from coureur de bois to airplane pilots. Finally,
questions created suspense and drew readers into the narrative: “How were
two such different families to live in this one house?”; “Would the English
surrender provoke another Pontiac’s rebellion?”; “Would the ferment in the
old mother country affect its daughter?” (66, 138, 152).
“Race,” an outdated term used to express ideas referring to ethnicity and
heritage, existed in Colony to Nation as something which could be
“disrupted,” provide a “rallying point,” be “betray[ed],” and be a “first
loyalty” (77, 233, 402, 450). Likewise, “blood” was a powerful way of
expressing symbolic and emotional connections between populations.
French Canadians were “a band of blood brothers” with their “first loyalty
… to the race and to the church,” while Canadian foreign policy in 1919
“was still the call of the blood”—meaning colonial and imperial (402, 481).
Canada was also described in biological terms, with emigration, for
example, causing a “blood-letting” that “lowered its temperature, made
people more ‘set in their ways,’ less imaginative, less creative” (407).
According to Lower’s “maturation thesis” of development argued in
Colony to Nation, Canada was a young nation, having recently been “born”
(348). A metaphorical child of Britain, Canada was an infant struggling to
grow into its own identity, learning from its parent until it became an
individual with its own thoughts and direction in life (441). “The French
had left children behind them in America,” Colony to Nation explained.
“Now with the Revolution, old France was gone. There was no motherland.
They were alone” (62, 154). Together the English and French formed a new
nation, a new entity, growing into modern Canada. The English-Canadian
attachment to Britain, however, especially their British-based foreign
policy, perpetuated the division between the “siblings.” Colony to Nation
characterized the English-Canadian reaction to the Boer War, for example,
as one of the colonial-minded “young lions, bounding to the aid of the old
lion without inquiring the cause or justice of the quarrel” (444). While
Canadians had shown signs of independence and familial growth in the
decades that followed it, they fell back into their role as colonial “children”
of the imperial “parent” during the Second World War (557).
Concerned about the Canadian government’s unwillingness to develop
distinctly national symbols and an independent foreign policy, Lower used
Colony to Nation as a forum to express his nation-building interests. In the
66
final section of the book, “Reflections,” Lower attacked the Liberal
government for giving into the “spirit of colonialism” and for failing to use
the Second World War to promote a distinct national identity (559). “The
government of the day, with all its good points, was singularly lacking in the
creative imagination which might have given form, balance and purpose to
the English Canadian people and encouraged both them and the French to
understand their common destiny,” Lower complained. “No Churchillian
speeches came out of Ottawa. No national symbols were born from that
source, no national pageantry set going” (558). Consequently, the nation
lacked what Smith described as the mental rallying-points, which distill a
shared sense of history and heritage (1986, 49).
Canada was, of course, still a very British country at this time with a
strong sense of colonial identity. Lower knew better than most that the
attachment was historical, as Canadians “were dependent for so long on the
mother country for nearly everything, government, and even to some
considerable degree, finance and culture (what there is of it)” (Cook, 27).
Lower’s own childhood was shaped by such colonialism, his father being
an “English exile” who longed for his British “home” (1967, 4). While
colonial affection had hampered the creation of a united Canadian identity,
it had, Lower conceded, been beneficial as a counterweight to American
influence (1946, 441). As he wrote in a piece of 1947 correspondence,
“pushed around by somebody, we shall certainly be. But if we could only
find something within ourselves, we might at least resist some of the
pressures” (Box 26, File B691).
Colony to Nation used the nation-building technique of creating and
characterizing heroes and villains, great men and fools, to engage the
reader’s interest. Those of power and national consequence were selected
and described as characters in a story: General Louis Joseph de Montcalm
was “a man of great ability and nobility of soul” while General James Wolfe
was “a gallant officer without any great genius”; John A. Macdonald was
the “prophet” of the Liberal-Conservative party while Oliver Mowat was “a
man of integrity and Christian principles” despite “weakening the structure
of the Dominion” (61, 290, 378). Such figures are part of the nationalist
“cult of great men,” people held up as the examples of communal values and
achievement, figures to model oneself after, and inspirations for continuing
the national project (Smith, 1986, 26, 193). “I don’t want to rob the ordinary
man of his honourable share in the big things that have been done in this
country,” Lower explained in 1953, “but it was not the ordinary man who
worked out our system of government, achieved Confederation, dreamed
the C.P.R. into existence. The men who did these things were not second
bests–but they were few!” (160). Such elitism was part of Lower’s
weltanschauung. Two of his former students, Margaret Prang and Welf H.
Heick, described how Lower believed that “cultural philistinism … was
one of our country’s worst features,” and that “ninety-nine per cent of …
people are Philistine by nature and he, a member of the remaining one per
67
cent, sees it as his duty constantly to berate and goad the ninety-and-nine
toward higher standards” (Prang, 16; Heick, 29).
In the narrative construction of national identity, wars and rebellions can
serve as important building blocks of defeat and triumph, struggle and
victory. They are valuable as turning-points and stages in national
development and as symbols to foster national unity. As Jonathan F. W.
Vance explained in Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World
War, “the memory of the war could act as a citizenship primer for children
and immigrants, providing a means of Canadianization unlike any other. It
could even reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable and forge the basis of
unity between Canada’s founding peoples” (227). Indeed, Smith has argued
that war myths “possess a long-term power to shape distant reactions that
far outweigh and surpass the episodes themselves” (1986, 38-39). Using
military events as signposts of change and national growth, Colony to
Nation created a chronological story of a community gradually gaining
nationhood through conflict and bloodshed. Upper Canada, for example,
“emerged from the war of 1812 a community, its people no longer
Americans or solely British subjects, but Upper Canadians. The essence of
the war of 1812 is that it built the first story of the Canadian national edifice”
(179). The 1837 rebellions followed as “blessings in disguise, the corner
stones of Canadian nationhood” (256). By the First World War Canada was
still a colony, “a mere piece of Britain overseas,” but “she was forging
visibly ahead to a nationhood. It was good to be a Canadian” (457). Canada
did not come out of the war still a colony, however: “In the trenches of
France and Flanders, the spirit of Canadian nationalism was born. It was
carried back to Canada in the knapsacks of Canadian troops and there,
taking firm hold, hastened the slow process by which a community comes to
self consciousness” (460).
Economic and staples history, dominant in Lower’s earlier work, was
still an important part of his approach to Canada as an entity which grew
from a colony into a nation through its resources. “The country had
flourished on fur, it had flourished on lumber, now it was to flourish on
wheat, the third of the great staples,” Colony to Nation explained (423).
Harold Innis, F.J. Turner, and Adam Smith figured prominently as
influences in the text. Land, however, was not only about resource
exploitation–Colony to Nation heralded it as a source of identity that
transcended the divisions of “race,” “blood,” and “heritage.” Canadians
needed to embrace their geographic “homeland” as a source of identity and
uniqueness: “from the land, Canada, must come the soul of Canada” (560).
Indeed, in “If We Joined the U.S.” for Maclean’s magazine, Lower credited
the land with shaping Canadian characteristics, in effect ‘making’
Canadians, and called for land to be regarded as a cherished national symbol
(1948, 199).
68
Whose National History?: Acknowledging the “Other”
Canadians
Narrating one historical story inherently requires the exclusion of other
possible tellings. By largely excluding the experiences of non-traditional
immigrants, workers, women, and natives in favour of the few figures and
institutions that dominated the nation, Colony to Nation was more a history
of the national hegemony than of the people. This is not surprising, as the
celebratory nationalist narrative is designed to reinforce and extend the
structures of institutionalized power. In writing National Dreams: Myth,
Memory, and Canadian History, Daniel Francis was shocked by the extent
to which major Canadian myths were constructed for the benefit of the state
and its economic institutions. His experience is worth citing at length:
I discovered that the story of Canada, as it was taught to me, was a
fraud, or at least only part of the story. Time and again when I
traced one of the important narratives back to its source I
discovered that it was invented by some large corporate body for
its own purposes. The myth of the RCMP, for instance, has been
used for years to obscure the coercive power of the state. The CPR
turns out to have inflated a railway into a national dream as a highly
successful public relations ploy, and incidently to have created the
myth of the mosaic to increase its tourist potential. The myth of the
North and the myth of the master race were used to secure the
pre-eminence of Canada’s British heritage while minimizing the
role of other cultural groups. I am not suggesting that these myths
were imposed by groups of shadowy conspirators. I recognize that
they were willingly embraced by generations of Canadians as our
national dreams, the truths of our history. … The master narrative
excluded many people, however, who did not see themselves
reflected in the stories; or worse, felt belittled by them. These
people–Aboriginals, minorities, working people, women–have
had to force their way into the story of Canada by inventing
narratives of their own (172).
Those outside the ethnic mainstreams were largely excluded from
Colony to Nation’s narrative. As was common among many in a
pre-officially multicultural Canada, Lower viewed them as a barrier to
Canadian unity and advocated a melting-pot approach of assimilation. The
answer to the nation’s problem laid in homogeneity, not diversity (Corlett,
52; Lower, 1943a, 170). Lower worried that a cultural mosaic would lead to
conflicting loyalties; the English-Canadian devotion to Britain was
problematic enough. It was a fear of a “dual attachment” or “dual
orientation” in which members of a community are torn between identities,
a situation that can erupt into a “vicarious nationalism” and disrupt the
national project (Smith, 1986, 151, 152). Consequently, Colony to Nation
treated non-traditional immigrants–these figures who toiled on Canadian
soil, laboured for others, ran small shops and businesses, and died
constructing what the “great men” had dreamed up (including the
railroad)–as less Canadian than the Anglo-Celtic and Franco-Canadians.
69
Their part in the Canadian project goes largely overlooked, briefly
described as “strangers,” a temporary “cheap labour force” which “built the
railroads and they bought the farms. … [and] when, being no longer needed,
they obligingly took themselves off again” (424-425). While Colony to
Nation made an effort to deal with Asia–perhaps more so than any other text
of the period–the open racism in many communities and the legal
limitations and discrimination faced by those who came to Canada to settle
are largely ignored. In fact, the 1923 Chinese Immigration Act was not
mentioned. The “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with Japan, on the other hand,
was hailed as a “successful” arrangement and its subsequent renegotiation
occurred “without any rude blow between the eyes such as the United States
delivered in 1924 with its Japanese Exclusion Act” (479). It is a statement
that leaves out just how much discrimination was required to constitute a
“rude blow.”
Nation-building requires placing the whole before the part, or, in Colony
to Nation’s case, the federal before the provincial. Regionalism and
provincialism were deemed a threat to the national cause, a barrier to unity
and a hurdle that needed to be overcome. The multiple identities were to be
merged into a national melting-pot, eliminating “communities” in favour of
a single Canadian “community” (108, 403). Oliver Mowat’s fight for
provincial rights at the expense of Macdonald’s federalism, for example,
was condemned for weakening the nation. The text went so far as to argue
that corruption, if it aided federalism, was acceptable, as “there was more
hope of [a united Canada] coming about out of the constructive corruption
of Macdonaldism than out of the legalism and righteousness of Mowatism”
(378-379).
The focus on ‘great men’required a superficial treatment of ‘the masses’.
Assessments of economic prosperity, for example, focused on national
development with little regard for the living conditions many Canadians
had to endure to create it. While industrialization had led to cities which
were “large and imposing, their level of comfort and civilization high”
(342), such a statement is more applicable to the business owners than the
working class. Moreover, non-traditional immigrants were excluded from
Colony to Nation twice, first because of their ethnicity, and second because
of their largely working-class status.
Women were also largely excluded from the “great men” narrative. The
one lengthy passage that described their experiences was misleading and
limited in scope and content:
Europeans have always been surprised (and shocked) at the
freedom prevailing between the sexes in North America. There has
never been occasion for their being shocked, for freedom is simply
a reflection of pioneer simplicity and equality. They might well be
surprised, for the reverse has been true in older countries, where
woman has had no scarcity value. … In Canada no such “feminist
70
movement” as later developed in England could get under way,
simply because there was not the requisite resistance to it (412).
Lower’s statement ignored the 1886 founding of the Toronto’s Women’s
Literary League (Canada’s first suffrage organization) and the 1927
“Persons Case” fight, led by Emily Murphy, for women to be identified as
“persons” in the B.N.A. Act. The text also ignored women being denied the
federal and provincial votes until the 1916-1925 period, and that it took
until 1940 to get it in Quebec.
The problem with Lower’s antithesis is that it excluded native ‘Indian’
Canadians as a founding people. Focusing on white views of natives but not
native views of whites, the narrative was concerned with native experiences
only insofar as they involved Europeans. As a history of Canada, Colony to
Nation was a history of Europeans arriving in Canada; it was one that “must
begin, as it were, pre-natally. The country of today was not born until
generations of Europeans had trampled across the face of the New World”
(1). While it was a “New World” for Europeans, it was far from new for the
previous occupants. Canada existed, then, not as a geographical entity but
as a European historical one.
Perhaps even more evident was Lower’s dismissal of the possibility of a
French-Canadian nation, one as shaped by destiny as the unified Canada he
conceptualized. The Conquest was not to be rectified by reversing
French-Canadian colonialism but by eliminating the French identity–an
even greater form of conquest. Lower did, however, expect English
Canadians to surrender elements of their identity to a distinct Canadian one
as well. His call for an end to colonialism was certainly one of the major
manifestations of this. “As long as French are French and English are
English,” Colony to Nation explained, “the memory of the Conquest and its
effects will remain. Not until that great day comes when each shall have lost
themselves in a common Canadianism will it be obliterated” (64).
Colony to Nation: A People’s History?
The exclusion of many Canadians from the narrative, the voicelessness of
those who were not the “great men building a nation,” did not damper
Colony to Nation’s popularity. One had little expectation for anything other
than a grand narrative of Canada’s past at this time in historical writing–the
social history of the 1960s and 1970s did not yet exist. Tapping into
post-war questions and concerns about national identity, Colony to Nation
had what it took to be popularly received. It was comforting, exciting,
passionate and, importantly, easily accessible by those without advanced
academic reading skills. In a number of ways, Colony to Nation gave shape
to a community that many Canadians were trying to “imagine.” Lower
explained in his autobiography that a historian “must have some of the gifts
of the novelist,” including the “capacity to express himself well, to
understand the psychology of his characters, to see the logic of human
71
situations.” As well, a historian should be to some “extent a poet,” “since he
is fusing dull facts into something new, accomplishing a genuine act of
creation, using his imaginative and evocative gifts to fashion a
reconstruction of the past” (1967, 295). History was “a branch of literature”
which required “a spark of the divine fire” (1975, xii-xiii).
Despite its popularity, it did not take long for Colony to Nation’s
impressionism to seem outdated. By the 1960s and 1970s a greater
emphasis was placed on research, publication, and specific niches of
enquiry. In the foreword to History and Myth: Arthur Lower and the Making
of Canadian Nationalism, Lower reflected on this shift in historical
research:
Today we have the elaborate apparatus of professionalism
surrounding the cult of history–vast archives and libraries,
historical journals, graduate schools, publishing houses–all the
formidable apparatus provided by a society that approves of
professional expertise. There is little doubt that as a result the
writing of history has moved forward. The past has become much
clearer than it was: there are fewer misinterpretations, myths have
been disintegrated, truth has come to prevail over wider areas.
Those who write history today, and for a good many years past,
know how to observe the great canons (the first of which is no
falsification), how to do their research, how to tuck their footnotes
in, how to dot all the “i’s” and cross the “t’s.” They may not write
brilliantly but in general they write well (xiv).
Lower warned, though, “not [to] take the scholarly historian or the
scholarly anything too seriously” (Cook, 37). There was a difference
between a useful historian and an expert one: “if a man comes to be an
expert, he is in peril. He may cease to be much else. I hope that our Canadian
school of history will not bog down in mere professionalism, mere
expertise, but that it will retain the creative spark of life” (1975, xiv).
Lower wrote at a time when academic and popular history were often one
and the same, with academics producing reader-accessible material, which
reached a large audience. The combination of both academic and popular
history that Lower achieved in Colony to Nation has since been, more or
less, divided into two. Academic historians, Berger noted, have
increasingly come to “prize analysis over narrative and description; their
most original books do not tell a story but answer questions” (268). In turn,
authors and journalists, including Pierre Berton and Peter C. Newman,
produce wide-selling narrative stories fused with entertainment, literary
devices, and humanized characters which engage the reader’s attention and
empathy.
There was also a new generation of historians emerging during the 1960s
and 1970s as people of diverse social, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds
entered academia and brought with them new interests and approaches.
More research was done on neglected areas of history, including gender,
72
immigration, and working-class experiences–historian Steven Maynard
has gone so far as to credit Lower’s 1958 Canadians in the Making: A Social
History of Canada as an early manifestation of this change in focus. While
the national and political master narratives have declined over the past few
decades, not everyone has accepted this change. J.L. Granatstein’s Who
Killed Canadian History? is but one recent condemnation of academic
historians for using history, “or their version of it, to cure white males of
their sense of superiority” (59). The attempt to explore neglected areas,
Granatstein complained, came at the expense of national and political
history–the “basic nuts and bolts of Canadian historical knowledge”–and
national identity suffered because of it (11-12). It was a call for a clear return
to the earlier nation-building purpose; to have a nation one needs a national
narrative, and history should serve that goal.
In his 1972 speech “Always the Same and Always His Own Man,” given
at a dinner in Lower’s honour, historian Frederick W. Gibson noted that
“there are many people who still regard [Colony to Nation] as the most
searching and the most sparkling general history of Canada” (2). While the
text was largely out of use by then, perhaps Gibson’s acclaim reveals
Colony to Nation’s true value. A generation of English Canadians was
taught an exciting and gripping story of Canada’s growth from a colony into
a nation, with heroes and events they could understand and empathize with.
It was a narrative that many Canadians could see themselves in, and it
fostered a national sense of place and identity. This appeal, however, was
also Colony to Nation’s undoing. Few Canadians at the turn of the
twenty-first century can find themselves in the narrative. Indeed, even
when it was published a number of Canadians, especially immigrants,
women, natives, and workers, had difficulty seeing themselves in it. Yet
Lower was driven by a desire for national unity, dreaming of a nation where
Canadians felt a sense of security and belonging. His sincerity cannot be
doubted. “My concern has been that the Canadian people should be a
family,” he explained in his autobiography, “which term predicates all those
unspoken, unformulated, but powerful bonds and modes of communication
that knit a family together” (1967, 165). Part history, part storytelling, and
part manifesto, Colony to Nation gave life to Canadian history and provided
many Canadians with a sense of community and national identity. It was
Arthur R.M. Lower’s magnum opus.
References
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1991)
Berger, Carl. The Writing of Canadian History: Aspects of English-Canadian
Historical Writing Since 1900, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1986)
Calgary Herald, January 16, 1947
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), “The Readers Take Over,” Dec. 15, 1946.
Transcript. Arthur R.M. Lower Fonds, Box 26, File B693
Cook, Ramsay. The Craft of History, (Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
1973)
73
Corlett, Kristi. “A Dream of Homogeneity: Arthur Lower’s National Vision and its
Relationship to Immigrants and Immigration in Canada, 1920-1946,” (Kingston,
Ont.: M.A. Thesis, Queen’s Univ., 1995)
Francis, Daniel. National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History,
(Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997)
Gibson, Frederick W. “Always the Same and Always His Own Man,” in Welf H. Heick
and Roger Graham eds., His Own Man: Essays in Honour of Arthur Reginald
Marsden Lower, (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1974)
Globe and Mail, December 28, 1946
Granatstein, J.L. Who Killed Canadian History? (Toronto: HarperCollins Pub. Ltd.,
1998)
Heick, Welf H. “Character and Spirit of an Age: A Study of the Thought of Arthur R.M.
Lower,” in Welf H. Heick and Roger Graham eds., His Own Man: Essays in
Honour of Arthur Reginald Marsden Lower, (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1974)
Hobsbawm, E.J. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality,
(New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990)
Journal of Economic History, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Nov. 1947): 237-8
Lower, Arthur R.M. Collection, Queen’s University Archives (Boxes), (A.ARCH
5072)
————. 1943a. “National Policy … Revised Version,” in Welf H. Heick ed., History
and Myth: Arthur Lower and the Making of Canadian Nationalism, (Vancouver:
Univ. of Brit. Col. Press, 1975)
————. 1943b. “Two Nations or Two Nationalities,” in Welf H. Heick ed., History
————. 1943c. “Two Ways of Life: The Primary Antithesis of Canadian History,” in
Welf H. Heick ed., History and Myth: Arthur Lower and the Making of Canadian
Nationalism, (Vancouver: Univ. of Brit. Col. Press, 1975)
————. 1946. Colony to Nation: A History of Canada, (Toronto: Longmans, Green,
& co.)
————. 1948. “If We Joined the US,” in Welf H. Heick ed., History and Myth:
Arthur Lower and the Making of Canadian Nationalism, (Vancouver: Univ. of
Brit. Col. Press, 1975)
————. 1950. “Religion and Religious Institutions,” in Welf H. Heick ed., History
————. 1953. “Canadians: ‘Good Second Bests’,” in Welf H. Heick ed., History and
Myth: Arthur Lower and the Making of Canadian Nationalism, (Vancouver: Univ.
of Brit. Col. Press, 1975)
————. 1967. My First Seventy-Five Years, (Toronto: Macmillan)
————. 1975. Foreword to Welf H. Heick ed., History and Myth: Arthur Lower and
the Making of Canadian Nationalism, (Vancouver: Univ. of Brit. Col. Press,
1975)
Martin, Ged. Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837-67, (London:
Macmillan, 1995)
Maynard, Steven. “The Maple Leaf (Gardens) Forever: Sex, Canadian Historians and
National History,” Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer 2001):
70-105
Prang, Margaret. “The Professor and ‘Relevance’,” in Welf H. Heick and Roger
Graham eds., His Own Man: Essays in Honour of Arthur Reginald Marsden
Lower, (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press, 1974)
Smith, Anthony D. Theories of Nationalism, (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983)
————. 1986. The Ethnic Origins of Nations, (Oxford, New York: B. Blackwell)
————. 1995. Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era, (Cambridge: Polity Press)
————. 1998a. Nationalism and Modernism, (New York: Routledge)
————. 1998b. “The Myth of the ‘Modern Nation’ and the Myths of Nations,”
Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, Jan.
74
————. 2000. The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity
and Nationalism, (New England: Brandeis Univ. Press)
Stacey, Charles P. Review of Colony to Nation, Canadian Historical Review, vol. 28
no. 2 June 1947
Time magazine, January 13, 1947
Underhill, Frank. “A Canadian Philosopher-Historian,” Canadian Forum, July 1947
Vance, Jonathan F.W. Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning, and the First World War,
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1997)
White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe, (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973)
————. 1978. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press)
75
Andrea Kunard
Relationships of Photography and Text in the
Colonization of the Canadian West: The 1858
Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring
Expedition
Abstract
The Canadian government first used photography in the 1858 Assiniboine
and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition. Humphrey Lloyd Hime (18331903) was hired to accompany the survey team in order to provide images of
the area’s land and peoples. The expedition’s leader Henry Youle Hind
(1823-1908) published an account of the expedition, complete with
illustrations, as he intended his work to have broad public appeal. The 1858
expedition is exemplary for the manner in which both image and text operated
in tandem to confirm the values of the dominant British culture in face of an
“alien” land and its native people.
Résumé
Le gouvernement canadien s’est servi pour la première fois de la
photographie lors de l’expédition d’exploration de l’Assiniboine et de la
Saskatchewan en 1858. Humphrey Lloyd Hime (1833-1903) avait été
embauché pour accompagner l’équipe d’arpentage, et rapporter des images
du territoire et des nations de la région. Le chef de l’expédition, Henry Youle
Hind (1823-1908) en a publié un compte rendu, assorti d’illustrations, car il
voulait que son travail rejoigne un vaste public. L’expédition de 1858
demeure exemplaire, pour la façon dont tant l’image que le texte ont conspiré
à confirmer les valeurs de la culture britannique dominante confrontée à un
pays « étranger » et à ses peuples autochtones.
Photographic images played a significant role in the opening up of the
Canadian West to white settlement. The nineteenth century’s belief in the
medium as a neutral and objective transcription of the real supported the
interests of a variety of groups who aligned the camera with ideas of
technology as progress, and the positivist, material approach to the natural
world. Yet even though the camera produced a clear and detailed visual
record of its subject matter, interpretation of the image’s meaning was
anything but precise. The Canadian government’s1 first use of photography
in the 1858 Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition provides
an excellent opportunity to investigate the complex manner in which
photographs generated multiple, sometimes contradictory meanings, and
the consequences of such processes within the larger project of white settler
colonialism. A close examination of the expedition’s imagery reveals that
various forms of cultural expression, especially those drawn from artistic
and literary sources, affected both the choice and presentation of subject
matter, in particular that of native life and culture. In addition, interpretation
of a photograph’s meaning was influenced by the context in which it was
found. The relationship between image and text is especially significant as
in some cases interpretation of the image’s meaning was supported by its
textual component, and in others, contested. As will be argued, the
fluctuation of meaning of text and image is indicative of British colonizers’2
attempt to articulate their experiences of an unknown area and its culture
within the inherited framework of their beliefs. The fit was, by necessity,
imperfect and reveals the uncertain and sometimes anxious nature of
colonial processes in general.
The 1858 Expedition was directed to explore the central and southern
regions of what are now the provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan. The
expedition’s photographer, Humphrey Lloyd Hime (1833-1903)3 of the
Toronto firm Armstrong, Beere and Hime, Civil Engineers, Draughtsmen
and Photographists, was hired by the government to accompany the
expedition in order to “furnish a series of Collodion Negatives for the full
illustration of all objects of interest susceptible of photographic
delineation.”4 Although much has been written on the history of the Red
River settlement, now the city of Winnipeg, little critical discussion has
been had as to how Hime’s images functioned as culturally expressive
documents.5 Within the projects of colonial expansion, Hime drew upon
numerous sources to make visually intelligible the relatively unknown
region of the Canadian interior. For members of the scientific and business
community, Hime’s photographs provided factual records of the Red River
community and its surrounding area. Yet his work also entered a larger
project undertaken by the expedition’s leader Henry Youle Hind
(1823-1908).6 Hind reproduced Hime’s work as engravings in his
Narrative of the Canadian Red River Exploring Expedition of 1857 and of
the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition of 1858. The
Narrative, which derived from several government reports,7 was published
in two volumes in 1860 by Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts of
London, England. Another account, also illustrated by engravings,
appeared in The Illustrated London News on 2 October 1858 and 16
October 1858.8 Hind intended that his experiences as an explorer reach a
broader audience. In this context, public interpretation of Hime’s
photographs was affected by the drama of other exploration images and
writings of the time.
As cultural documents, Hime’s photographs operated on the level of both
objective fact and artistic expression. In terms of their artistic qualities, the
formal and iconographic basis of the photographs and engravings aided in
luring settlers and investors to the area.9 Through Hime’s choice of subject
78
Relationships of Photography and Text in the Colonization of the Canadian
West: The 1858 Assiniboine and Saskatchewan Exploring Expedition
matter and his attentiveness to formal arrangements, subtleties of tone and
studio conventions, a British audience could be transported to an area which
had already been made familiar. The aesthetic appeal of his photographs
made them marketable. The J. Hogarth establishment of London
reproduced and distributed the photographs as a portfolio of thirty prints.10
Hime’s work was also displayed in the Fine Arts Section of the 1859
Provincial Exhibition in Kingston.11
Artistic traditions were also a factor in the photographs’ reproduction as
engravings for both the 1860 London publication12 and The Illustrated
London News.13 The public viewed Hime’s images within a context of
writings dedicated to conveying the immediacy and exoticism of the
exploration party’s experiences. Through the hyperbolic language of the
written text, the audience could experience the mystery and awe the prairie
landscape provoked in an attuned spectator. When the photograph failed to
match the imaginative drama of the text, the engravers supplemented the
image. Figures were added, or the photograph was redrawn in order to
express the necessary symbolism a Victorian audience needed to appreciate
the feats of the expedition.14
Hime’s photographs were important elements in the construction of the
Canadian West as a new region to settler colonialism. To fully understand
how text, photographs and engravings served expansionist interests, it is
necessary to provide a brief historical context of both the exploration party
and the Red River community. This is particularly useful in understanding
Hime’s depictions of the settlement’s churches and his portraits of the
native populace.15 Both had an essential role to play in the establishment of
government power in the area.
By placing the photographs within their larger social context, one can
also examine how prevailing attitudes towards the purity of races informed
a Victorian audience’s reception of Hime’s images.16 The photographs, in
this sense, were not fixed, but rather ambiguous in meaning. Because
British society was fractured by the competing interests of various groups,
Hime’s work could elicit a variety of responses.
On 29 April 1858, the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan exploring
expedition set out from Toronto to explore the region west of Lake
Winnipeg and the Red River. It collected information about the geology,
natural history, topography and meteorology of the area. It also assessed the
suitability of the land for settlement, which was considered a priority by the
British and Canadian governments in order to establish sovereignty in the
west.
Several factors pressured the Canadian government to delimit the
geography of the region. The western expansion occurring in the 1850s in
the United States was a potential threat to the isolated communities of the
Western interior. With the increased importance of the west coast to British
interests in Asian trade, the Canadian and British governments considered
79
links to the area essential.17 Finally, the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly
in the interior was to expire in 1859. The Canadian government, wishing to
expand its jurisdiction into the area, challenged the request of the company
to extend its monopoly.
The appearance of exploration teams in the interior was the result of
government and financial interests which demanded measurement of the
land; natural phenomena were to be tabulated and organized as data of
scientific discourse. The camera provided a practical means to record
information about the area’s topography, peoples and patterns of
settlement. In this context, Hime was expected to maintain the working
standards of his craft. The technical basis of the medium required
exactitude in the proper measurement and disposition of chemicals.
However, there was the added problem of using the technology in the field.
Hime had to cope with the problems of hordes of mosquitoes and flies, the
lack of suitable water, and the rigours of exploration which both restricted
the number of photographs he could take and imposed time limits on the
ones he could manage to set up.18 When he finally settled in the Red River
community, during the months of September through November, he
succeeded in creating more clear and technically controlled photographs.
His work, in this respect, satisfied the demands of government, investors,
and a scientific community that would be looking at the images for their
exposition of facts.
However, both the photographic work of Hime and the writings of Hind
represent a dissatisfaction with the limitations of such a materialist
approach. Within the project as a whole, expression constantly shifts
between fact and metaphor, the two modes of representation being fluidly
combined. The role of photography, in this case, was ambivalent. In certain
cases, the photograph provided evidence of a relatively unknown area,
while in others it imbued a scene with a fictive content. Photography as a
medium fluctuated between scientific record and artistic expression; both
fact and metaphor were tools of cognition.
As Hind intended to popularize the expedition, Hime strove to satisfy the
level of metaphor that a Victorian audience expected of art. In one case,
Hime staged his photograph with the classical memento mori still-life
elements of skull and bone, as seen for example in “The Prairie looking
west, September-October, 1858.” In other cases, his skill at manipulating
studio conventions served to exoticize the native and mixed-blood
populace.
Cultural expectations and artistic conventions were further imposed on
the illustrations reproduced from the photographs by the engravers of both
the London publishers of the report and The Illustrated London News. The
engravers, influenced by an academic artistic tradition, represented the
subject matter within the parameters of their training. For example, in The
Illustrated London News engraving entitled “Ojibway Encampment near
80
Figure 1.
Ojibway Encampment near the Falls of the Rainy River,
May 24, 1858.
the Falls of the Rainy River, May 24, 1858” (Figure 1), the Ojibwa appear
peaceful, either at work or engaged in civilized conversation. They assume
the attitudes of gentlemen and appear very similar to neo-classical
representations of Romans in togas as seen in the works of Benjamin West,
John Flaxman, Jacques-Louis David and Dominique Ingres. The
accompanying account of this scene confirms such a view of “noble
savage” propriety:
Among them [the Ojibwa] men of tall stature and faultless form are
not uncommon. The Engraving represents a part of an encampment at the falls of Rainy River. … On the right a squaw is
engag[ed] in suspending sturgeon on poles to dry; and in front is a
warrior holding in his hand a stone pipe, and gazing at the white
men who are quietly taking his photograph.19
Imperial domination over the land and its native inhabitants was
dramatized by visual and verbal means. Even hardships were expressed in a
fashion that excited the imagination. The description of natural phenomena
emphasized both their beauty and awesome power. Hind’s Narrative
offered descriptions of the land and the forces that passed over it: thunder
and hailstorms, prairie fires and plagues of insects. The writings and the
photographs portrayed the land as open space or as a tangle of alder and
poplar wood; it was traversed by horse or canoe. Hail storms appear
suddenly and with such violence that the stones seriously damage the
canoes.20 Hind compares the “awful splendour” of prairie fires to “a
81
volcano in full activity.”21 Clouds of grasshoppers descend upon the party
and voraciously consume clothing, saddles and leather bags.22 Hind
equates the “infinite army of insects” with the “Egyptian scourges” and the
“wonderful exhibitions of Almighty power in the creation.”23 The land was
a stage upon which the exploration party, with its latest technological
devices, struggled heroically. An audience’s familiarity with both biblical
passages and the period’s grandiose landscape paintings allowed them to
participate in the epic feats of the expedition.24
Throughout the Narrative, Hind speaks of the land with messianic
fervour. For Hind, the forces of the “Almighty,” that move and shape the
raw materials of nature to fulfil the greater plan of creation, allude to the
powers of Victorian science that will mold the elements to its imperious
purposes. The land will be made fruitful with the “coming” of Victorian
technology.25
Hime’s exploration photographs also fluctuate between fact and
metaphor as seen in “The Prairie, on the banks of the Red River, looking
south” and “The Prairie looking west.” The first is a view of the flat
character of the land stretching to the horizon. The sky, which occupies
two-thirds of the photograph, appears immense. A dirt track cuts across the
foreground and indicates human presence. The photograph demonstrates
the suitability of the area for agriculture. Rocks, trees and vegetation are not
evident and the land appears ready for the planting of crops. The photograph
is evocative; it lures the viewer with possibilities of cultivation and the
land’s availability for individual development.
The Canadian government had in fact asked Hind to assess the
agricultural potential of the area. He reported that with proper development,
through husbandry informed by Victorian science, government and
investors could rest assured that the area would be profitable and thus draw
settlers. Even the “plagues” of grasshoppers posed a minimal threat to the
area’s few cultivated fields. As he wrote in the first volume:
On the night of the 15th September, we stayed at the house of Mr.
Geo. Flett. … Mr. Flett’s turnips had been altogether consumed by
the grasshoppers, but his wheat was safe and good … On the
morning of the 16th we paid a visit to Mr. Gowler. … A small
stack-yard was filled with stacks of wheat and hay; his barn, which
was very roomy, was crammed with wheat, barley, potatoes,
pumpkins, turnips and carrots.26
The land was potentially cornucopian. Hind reinforced this idea by noting
that Mr. Gowler had more than enough fields to cultivate but “found it
useless to crop it, as no market for surplus produce existed.”27 The area,
thus, had need not only of cultivation and settlement, but of investment in
transport, such as roads and railways to move the produce to markets.
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Figure 2.
The Prairie looking west, September-October 1858.
The photographs and report worked not only as documents and lures to
settlers and investors, but also represented the region as firmly imbued with
cultural values their viewers would immediately recognize. With such
portrayals, values of Western culture were embedded in a landscape few
Easterners or Europeans had ever seen or experienced. Hind’s account and
the means by which Hime chose what to photograph and how the camera
framed the shot, reinforced possession of the land. Public response to
Hind’s Narrative confirms this. A reviewer in the Glasgow Herald of 26
December 1860 stated that although this area is unknown, “the day is
evidently not far distant when these fertile lands will become the
enterprising communities of civilized men.”
Yet both Hime and Hind recognized that citing and representing the facts
of agricultural potential were not enough to satisfy the Victorian
imagination. The second prairie photograph, “The Prairie looking west,
September-October, 1858” (Figure 2) is dramatic in its depiction of the
land. The photograph contains a human skull and possibly human bone.
The skull was probably one that Hime had found during an exploration trip
earlier that year in the Souris Valley area, which is now an area of southern
Manitoba near the Saskatchewan border. In his diary on 29 June 1858, he
wrote “found a skull close to grave on prairie—it was all pulled about by
wolves—kept the skull which was apparently that of a squaw.”28 It is likely
83
that the photograph represents Hime’s recreation of this scene during his
stay in the settlement.
As such, the photograph depicted the drama of Hime’s experiences. Yet
to a Victorian audience its symbolism was ambiguous. For example, in the
engraving made from this photograph, which appears in the first volume of
Hind’s Narrative, the skull has been moved down and to the right from its
central position in the photograph. The second bone has disappeared.
Vegetation is more evident, and clouds have been added to reflect the glow
of light from the setting sun. Birds also appear, their peculiar v-shaped flight
pattern29 designed to draw the eye from the horizon to the top middle ground
of the print. This combination of skull, cardinal direction of west, and
setting sun suggest a powerful evocation of death in European artistic
traditions based on Christian iconography.30
Yet the accompanying text conversely expounds the glories and
fecundity of the prairie landscape:
Here, stretching away, until lost in the western horizon, the belts of
wood on the banks of the Assiniboine rise … while … the north is
again an uninterrupted expanse of long waving prairie grass,
sprinkled with herds of cattle. … The vast ocean of level prairie
which lies to the west of Red River must be seen in its
extraordinary aspects, before it can be rightly valued and
understood in reference to its future occupation by an energetic
and civilized race, able to improve its vast capabilities and
appreciate its marvelous beauties.31
Hind continues for another page in this aesthetic appreciation of the prairie.
In the Narrative, the engravers reinforced the Christian themes of death
present in Hime’s photograph in order to show that the land contained the
possibility of reincarnation through nineteenth-century materialism. The
text surrounding “The Prairie looking west” represented the land in terms of
a potential which could be fulfilled by a culture which had the necessary
means to bring its dormant capacities to fruition. In terms of cardinal
directions, the west represented the direction of civilization and
development. Biblical passages connected the east with the coming of the
Son of man on the Day of Judgement.32 As the exploration team originated
from the east, civilization is associated with the power of redemption.
The placement of the engraving in this section of the book, and thus the
original staging of the elements in the photograph, can be understood as
having mythical purpose. The appearance of the skull in the photograph is
also tied to the fascination of nineteenth-century society with indigenous
methods of burial. However as the photograph’s caption did not establish
with certainty that the skull belonged to a native, the image could provide
contrary interpretations. On the one hand, there was the risk that viewers, on
seeing this work, would anxiously interpret it as representative of a
landscape containing the possibility of their own death and hardship. The
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Hogarth Company in London excluded “The Prairie looking west” when it
published the photographic portfolio of Hime’s work; the presence of death
threatened Victorian faith in the power of their technology. Only the
photograph “The Prairie looking South” was made available.
On the other hand, for members of a Victorian audience familiar with
representations of the native, the photograph would confirm their belief in
the intimate connection of the native to the land. Victorians expressed both
fascination and horror of the practice of certain native groups which left the
body to decompose in the open.33 Hind devoted a section in chapters four
and thirty in the first volume to a discussion of native burial rites. Hime
photographed two such sites,34 which appeared in the latter chapter,
reproduced as engravings. Throughout Hind’s writings, death was
associated with the native. He consistently portrayed the native population
and culture as being incapable of dealing with the adversities of nature. He
reported that the native’s resource-based existence was precarious;35 the
native could only survive with settlement and proper agricultural training.
In this sense, the skull would not be associated with a white person. A
Christian would receive a proper burial; his or her body would not be
photographed in a state of decomposition.36 Certainly, no Christian grave
would be desecrated for the sake of photographic props. Therefore, within
the context of the writings, members of a Victorian audience would
associate the skull as representing the passing of native culture. The death of
this culture was not to be mourned as it would be reborn through the
workings of Victorian progress. Hind had the future interests of business
and government in mind when he spoke of the actual and potential
agricultural wealth of the prairie. Through metaphor, the text, photograph
and engraving assuaged the guilt of the intruding Easterners.37 The realities
of development and exploitation by civilization were therefore
conveniently tempered by the same civilization’s capacity for aesthetic
appreciation.
Hime’s photographs also linked colonization and settlement with
religious conversion. Victorians would view his images of the human skull
and native graves either as curiosities or as evidence that the native had not
been completely Christianized. In the latter case, viewers needed to be
reassured that their values predominated. The religious assimilation of the
native was a priority. The reasons were both spiritual and practical: there
was a concern for the salvation of the native soul, and an interest in
providing a means to establish a stable and thus economically viable
community.
In this respect, Hime’s photographs confirmed the presence of European
religious values in the Red River community. His five photographs of the
main churches in the settlement—St. Boniface (Roman Catholic); St.
John’s, St. Paul’s and St. Andrew’s (Anglican); and a Presbyterian
church—can be viewed as expressing such intentions. Hime photographed
85
the churches in a straight-forward manner, the foreground corresponding to
the distance needed to contain the entire building in the viewfinder. In terms
of the settlement’s white populace, the solidity of the churches and the sense
of order and stability they conveyed would indicate that this was not a
godless country. The photographs thus substantiated authority for future
residents; they set a standard of expected behavior.
In this respect, the native had an important role to play. The Christianized
native provided evidence of the tempering effect of religion in both the
writings and the images. As Hind wrote in his Narrative, the native
appeared “subdued” within the context of the church and its rituals.38 With
conversion, the native would settle into an agricultural lifestyle.39
Throughout his report, Hind contrasted the unchristianized and
Christianized native in order to champion the latter as the progressive and
responsible representative of his or her people. The resistance of the native
(and thus the threat he or she posed) to the incoming white culture could
then be discounted.
The role of photography in this latter respect was essential in verifying
the power of white values in the area. Hime’s work continued the historical
project of white settlers who recounted their efforts in establishing a
successful colony. As it is likely that Hime had read such accounts in
preparation for his trip to the settlement, his understanding of the
community would have been influenced by such writings. He would have
arrived with presuppositions that would be further enforced in his
photographs.
In particular, Hime’s choice of subject matter affirmed the views of
Alexander Ross (1783-1856), who had settled in the area in 1825, and
published an account of its history in 1856. Ross’s writings on the
development of the community included the description and history of
buildings and peoples. He recounted with particular pride the establishment
of houses built with stone which were more permanent than those of wood
constructed in the early days of the settlement.40 Hime’s photographs of the
“Quarters of the Expedition at Red River,” the “Residence of Chief Factor
(the late Mr. Bird)” and the “Residence of Mr. Bannatyne” represent such
structures. In the latter photograph, Mr. Bannatyne sits with his son and
native wife in front of his home; its neat thatch roof, glass windows and lime
facade connote domestic harmony and civility. Ross also recounted the
construction of the Stone Fort (or Lower Fort Garry which was located
down river to the north of the settlement), whose acreage, he stated, was
comparable to that of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The fort and its
buildings constituted a “neat and compact establishment.”41 Hime’s two
photographs of the Stone Fort, and two of its principal buildings (the “Hon.
Hudson’s Bay Company’s Officers quarters” and the “Fur Store”) visually
reinforce Ross’s account. The windmills of the area, as seen in Hime’s
photograph “Farm-houses and windmills, Middle Settlement,” were also
86
mentioned by Ross who attributed their construction and maintenance to
the “ingenuity” of the workmen of the settlement.42
Yet the Red River community was not as harmonious as either Ross’s
writings or Hime’s photographs indicated. It is particularly important to
examine the representation of the mixed-blood population, whose
community was comprised of two basic groups: those who followed the
French Catholic faith and those converted to Anglican and Presbyterian
faiths. Religious values had become firmly ensconced in the community
through the work of Anglican missionaries. The establishment of schools
and churches had imposed a more settled lifestyle on some native groups.
White Anglican and Protestant leaders viewed the English speaking
Christianized mixed-blood as amenable to further assimilation. They
regarded other mixed-bloods, especially the French Catholics, as unwilling
to leave their former native ways behind. Their forefathers’ hunting rituals
were still of primary importance. At certain times of the year, they left the
settlement and travelled far into the interior to pursue buffalo herds and
engage in the hunt.43
Religious leaders understood such activities as disruptive to community
life. With the increased probability that the area would either be annexed to
Canada or made into a Crown colony, the confirmation of British-based
values was essential. Both Hime’s photography and the writings of Hind
served this purpose. Hime’s photographs of churches reflected the power
which the Anglican and Protestant clergy and congregation displayed in the
area. The other Catholic churches, Saint-François-Xavier (French Métis),
and Saint-Norbert, were more modest44 and were not photographed. In the
ninth chapter of the first volume of his report, Hind devotes just over a page
to a description of the Catholic community. The rest of the discussion
centres largely on the Anglican parishes and their success in education,
agriculture, and the religious conversion of natives.45 Of the religious split
in the community, Hind offers only this understated comment: “There is a
distinct and well-preserved difference in faith between the populations of
the different parishes into which the settlement is divided.”46
Divisions within the Red River settlement also occurred along class
lines. British bourgeois values had created a class system that pivoted on
notions of respectability. An individual’s success was determined by his or
her social status and material wealth. Increasingly, both officers of the
Hudson’s Bay Company and members of the business community justified
their affluence and rank against those who had not attained such
advantages. The “less respectable” individuals, which included natives and
mixed-bloods, were prevented from advancing and worked as labourers,
guides and canoemen.47
Thus, although Hime’s photographs presented the mixed-bloods as
conforming to white values, their social progress within the community
was severely limited. This created consternation for whites who suspected
87
Figure 3.
An Ojibway Woman with Baby, September-October 1858.
native parentage, as their native roots could restrict their social mobility.48
Divisions in the community were further upheld by the ethnological
literature of the time. White advantage was attributed to white racial
“superiority.” Such beliefs affected a larger Victorian audience’s
interpretation of Hime’s photographs. For some, the native was seen as
being in the process of assimilation to white ways, in this case through
inter-marriage. For others, the presence of mixed-blood peoples raised
questions as to whether the “purity” of the white race was being
maintained.49 Although it is difficult to ascertain whether Hime or Hind
subscribed to this view, their representations of mixed-blood peoples
reinforced prevalent ethnological theories. Certain members of their
88
audience would see the necessity of strengthening a European presence in
the area to ensure the proper establishment of the white race.
The photographs and their captions, therefore, could both reassure and
raise doubts in a larger audience’s mind as to the presence of mixed-bloods
with respect to white culture.50 On the one hand, Hime’s photographs
depicted the native peoples within a European portraiture tradition, and as
such represented their demeanor as conforming to European standards. On
the other hand, that same portraiture tradition was reserved for the
ennoblement of the white race.51 The photograph, when viewed with this
latter idea in mind, would only broaden the schism between the native,
mixed-blood and white races. It would more strongly define the white race
against the native and mixed-blood races since the two latter groups were
never presented as equal to Europeans.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Hime’s portraits of Letitia,
Wigwam and the unnamed Ojibwa woman and child. The two latter
photographs were taken in an improvised out-of-doors studio Hime had set
up with a buffalo blanket thrown over an ox cart wheel for a backdrop. The
subjects pose in, and thus affirm, the tradition of European portraiture. Yet,
the presence of elements associated with the native disputed that same
convention. For example, in the photographs “An Ojibway Woman with
Baby, September-October, 1858” (Figure 3) and “Wigwam; an
Ojibway-Métis, Lake Superior, September-October, 1858” (Figure 4)
formal elements firmly anchor the subjects in the picture plane. The natives
are centrally positioned. The shallow space created by the improvised
studio gives them greater presence within the photographic frame. The dark
and sombre colour of the buffalo skin contrasts with the play of light across
facial features and articles of clothing. There is also an interplay of texture
with the juxtaposition of smooth human skin and rough animal hide.
Hime posed the native woman in the tradition of mother and child. She
kneels beside and gazes upon her child who is securely wrapped on its
cradleboard. Such a sentimental representation would reassure a Victorian
audience that the native was conforming to “proper” methods of child
raising. But that very tradition would also be challenged by the
photograph’s conspicuous rendering of the woman’s facial features and
manner of dress which harkened her back to her “savage” roots.
The photograph of Wigwam is also ambiguous. Hime represented the
mixed-blood with a calm and noble demeanor.52 The combined vertical
pose of Wigwam and the placement of his gun across his knees creates a
central visual axis. Through such artistic devices, there is an impression of
solidity and strength–romantic qualities which Victorians sought in the
native or “half-breed.” His race is shown as having subsumed civilizing
notions of propriety. His gun decoration and manner of dress, however,
denote a mixed-blood heritage. Through portraiture, such elements work
89
Figure 4.
Wigwam; an Ojibway-Métis, Lake Superiror, SeptemberOctober 1858.
both as accents and curiosities, and secure Wigwam’s lifestyle as belonging
to that of an “inferior” race.
The assimilated native who manifested both “civilized” and exotic
qualities was also depicted in Hime’s photograph of Letitia. The caption
“Letitia: a Plain-Cree half-breed, September-October, 1858” (Figure 5)
established her mixed-blood origins for a European audience who might
not have readily associated her facial features with that of a native. She
wears a “proper” western dress and is suitably passive in her pose. Resting
90
Figure 5.
Lelitia, a Cree Halfbreed, September-October 1858.
on an animal skin against a tree, in the woods, with native accessories, she
does not confront the camera; in fact, it is pointed down at her and represents
a compromise of her relation with the photographer. Again, formal
elements anchor her presence. The strong vertical cluster of trees counters
her horizontal, languid pose. The whiteness and patterning of her dress
emerge from the black colour of the hide which, both through its placement
and tonality, visually links the animal skin with the darkness of her hair. She
is exotic as a native, yet she has acquired enough trappings of white
civilization to be seen as non-threatening.
The sexual role of such young women in the Red River community was a
complex matter. To a male European audience, these women were seen
more as a vehicle for fantasy, however their position as wives of respectable
members of a community was questionable. At this point in time, Red River
society increasingly frowned upon the taking of a native or mixed-blood
wife; a Canadian or British white woman of middle-class social standing
was preferred as she would both support and entrench the values of a
“superior” culture.53 Young white men were encouraged to marry women
of their racial and social group in order to affirm their standing and thus
respectability within the settlement. As Red River society restricted native
91
and mixed-blood women from inter-marrying, their presence and
participation in the white community was increasingly marginalized.
Although Hime’s photographs indicated the presence of natives within
the community, pictorial traditions strategically locked them within the
values of white culture. Through such portrayals, Victorians compared and
confirmed their culture at the expense of the native culture. The manner in
which they were represented imposed silence on their fate even though
within the history of mixed-blood and native culture, resistance to foreign
incursion took more active forms in rebellion and non-assimilation. The
ability of Victorians to colonize, therefore, was not simply a matter of
technological prowess. Their success was also a product of long-standing
visual and literary traditions that structured both their religious beliefs and
scientific inquiry.
Hime’s photographs, therefore, are documents of cultural values. When
placed within their historic context, they reveal the manner by which
Victorian society consolidated its beliefs through its interaction with other
cultures. The “objective” nature of photography also entered this project.
Through staging or the engraving process, the information the photograph
contained was overwritten to both satisfy an audience’s expectation of
drama and affirm the presence of a dominant culture. This process was
further supported by the narrative traditions of the surrounding text.
As the imagery entered a number of contexts, its meaning shifted, thus
revealing a society fractured by competing interests and beliefs. Any one
interpretation could be destabilized as the image and text moved among
various groups. Within such a context, photography and language remain
ambiguous in their meaning. Hime’s work, therefore, cannot be viewed in
isolation. To do so only ignores the larger historical, political and social
processes that intertwined the lives of both the members of the expedition
and the Red River community.
Notes
1.
2.
92
Canadian government refers to the single government and legislature established
in 1841 which united the former provinces of Upper and Lower Canada. In terms
of the exploration survey under consideration, the latter part of the 1850s was
crucial. Nation building went hand-in-hand with industrial capitalism. Ties
between government and business increased, especially in the construction of
railways. The Toronto business establishment, eager for expansion of trade,
considered settlement of the North-West a priority. The Canadian government
also wished to confirm the agricultural potential of the interior, as shortage of
land in Upper Canada had resulted in an exodus of farmers to the United States to
homestead.
The term “British” is used as most of the people representing both the government
and the exploratory team were of British origin. In this respect, they would have
brought with them the values of that specific culture. The term “Canadian” is used
when the exclusive interests of the Canadian government are being represented.
3.
The photographs referred to throughout this paper are found in the National
Archives of Canada, Humphrey Lloyd Hime Collection (1936-273) and the
Geological Survey Collection (1970-088).
4. National Archives of Canada (NAC), Record Group (RG)5, C1, Vol. 578-579,
No. 761. It should be noted that another expedition into this area, funded by the
British Government and under the command of Captain John Palliser (18171887) had commenced a year earlier. In addition, Palliser had applied for a
photographer to accompany the expedition. Unfortunately, his request was
considered financially excessive and turned down. (Irene Spry, The Papers of the
Palliser Expedition, 1857-1860, Toronto: Champlain Society, 1968, 510, n. 3.)
5. The historical circumstances which led to the use of photography in this
expedition have been described both by Richard Huyda in Camera in the Interior,
and by A. J. Birrell, Into the Silent Land: Survey Photography in the Canadian
West, 1858-1900, Ottawa: Information Canada, 1975. Readers wishing to
familiarize themselves with the various views on the history of this area can refer
to both the articles and bibliographies included in The Prairie West: Historical
Readings, 2nd. ed., R. Douglas Francis and Howard Palmer, eds., Edmonton:
Pica Pica Press, 1992.
6. Henry Youle Hind was born in England into an upper middle-class family, and
arrived in Canada in the winter of 1846-47. His career brought him in contact with
many of the powerful political figures of the time such as Sir Sandford Fleming.
In 1857, Hind wrote to Sir William Logan, director of the Geological Survey of
Canada, to seek support for an appointment on the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan
exploring expedition. He was accepted and accompanied the expedition in the
role of geologist and naturalist. In 1858, Hind took charge of the second
expedition into the area. Hind requested that a photographer also accompany the
expedition in addition to the party’s artist John Fleming (brother of Sandford
Fleming). For further biographical information on Hind see W.L. Morton, Henry
Youle Hind 1823-1908, Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1980.
It is interesting to note that Hind’s younger brother was the Canadian artist
William George Richardson Hind (1833-88). William accompanied his brother
on the Labrador Exploring Expedition of 1860. Henry reproduced his brother’s
pencil sketches and watercolours depicting scenery and native life in his
Explorations in the Interior of the Labrador Peninsula, the Country of the
Montagnais and Nasquapee, London, 1863.
7. The reports were written under the authority of the Provincial Secretary of
Canada, T.J.J. Loranger. For a listing of Hind’s reports that comprised this work
see Morton, Henry Youle Hind, pp. 147-148 and The Travellers: Canada to 1900:
An Annotated Bibliography of Works Published in English from 1577, compiled
by Elizabeth Waterston with Ian Easterbrook, Bernard Katz, and Kathleen Scott,
Guelph, Ont.: University of Guelph Press, 1989.
8. Yet another unillustrated account, written by an anonymous author (most likely
Hind), was published as “A Cruise on the Winnipeg to Red River” in the 14 June
1862 edition of the British magazine The Leisure Hour: A Family Journal of
Instruction and Recreation.
9. For a formal analysis of Hime’s work see Peter Galassi, Before Photography:
Painting and the Invention of Photography, New York and Boston: Museum of
Modern Art, 1981 and James Borcoman, Magicians of Light: Photographs from
the Collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa: National Gallery of
Canada, 1993.
10. Huyda, Camera in the Interior, 26.
93
11. Huyda, Camera in the Interior, 25.
12. The Narrative included seventy-six woodcuts and twenty whole-page chromoxylographs or coloured plates. Fascination with this particular work continues into
the present century. It was republished as the Narrative of the Canadian Red
River Exploring Expedition of 1857 and of the Assiniboine and Saskatchewan
Exploring Expedition of 1858, 2 vols., New York: Greenwood Press Publishers,
1969. The Narrative was again republished in 1971 in a one volume edition by the
Charles E. Tuttle Company, Inc. This edition includes colour plates whereas the
Greenwood Press publication does not.
13. The work of the party’s artist, John Fleming, was also included in both the book
publication and The Illustrated London News. The practice of employing both a
photographer and an artist on one survey expedition was somewhat unusual, and
is more associated with the American expeditions of the post Civil War period.
For example, the artist Sanford Gifford (1823-1880) and photographer William
Henry Jackson (1843-1942) were both employed on Ferdinand Hayden’s 1869
survey of Wyoming. Both Jackson and Thomas Moran (1837-1926)
accompanied Hayden’s 1871 geological survey into the Yellowstone area. For
more on this subject, see Peter B. Hales, William Henry Jackson and the
Transformation of the American Landscape, Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1988.
14. For a study of the interaction of text and image in nineteenth-century photography
see Martha A. Sandweiss, “Undecisive Moments: The Narrative Tradition in
Western Photography” in Photography in Nineteenth-Century America, Martha
A. Sandweiss, ed., Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1991, 98-129, and Alan
Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew
Brady to Walker Evans, New York: Hill and Wang, 1989.
15. I use the term “native” throughout this essay in a general sense to describe the
aboriginal populace. In some cases, the term also includes the mixed-blood
peoples as a British Victorian audience would view such individuals within the
larger grouping of the “Indian” race (regardless of the even further tribal divisions
the aboriginals had for defining their origins and culture). In other words,
although the mixed-bloods had both native and white parentage, they would still
be seen by Victorians as non-European or non-white. When specific issues arise
surrounding the use of the latter group as photographic subjects, I will use the
term “mixed-blood” to establish them as an independent race.
16. For more on the relation between artists, their written accounts of their travels,
and the cultural biases expressed in the literature of travel see Ian MacLaren’s
article “‘I came to rite thare portraits’: Paul Kane’s Journal of his Western
Travels, 1846-1848,” in The American Art Journal, Vol. XXI, No. 2 (1989): pp.
7-21. In this article, MacLaren argues that discrepancies between Kane’s journal
and the final version of his book, Wanderings of an Artist (1859) are sometimes
so significant that it can only be concluded that Kane had help writing his
manuscript. Moreover, changes in the text were often made to affirm the period’s
views of the area Kane visited, and its native populace. In terms of the latter,
where Kane wrote respectfully about aboriginal peoples, the published text
changes his wording to characterize the native in a derogatory manner.
17. Huyda, Camera in the Interior, p. 3.
18. Huyda, Camera in the Interior, 18-20.
19. The Illustrated London News, vol. XXXIII, no. 941 (16 October 1858), 366. The
whereabouts of this photograph is at present unknown. It should be noted that at
this point, the reproduction of photographs in publications such as The Illustrated
94
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
London News could only be achieved through engravings, as the half-tone
process had yet to be invented.
Hind, Narrative, vol. 1, 286.
Hind, Narrative, vol. 1, 297-98.
As seen in the panoramic paintings of American artists associated with the
Hudson River School such as Asher B. Durand (1796-1886) and Thomas Cole
(1801-48). The works of the Canadian artists Paul Kane (1810-71) and Peter
Rindisbacher (1806-34) also dramatized the western interior with their depictions
of native life. Kane was especially well known to a Canadian audience as his
works had been exhibited in Toronto on 9 November 1848, and in the 1852 Upper
Canada Provincial Exhibition in Brockville. Appreciation of Hind’s Narrative
would also have been heightened by Kane’s Wanderings of an Artist, published in
1859, in addition to other accounts of the west, most importantly Georges Catlin’s
Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Condition of the North
American Indians, published in 1841. For more on this subject, see J. R. Harper,
Paul Kane’s Frontier: Including Wanderings of an Artist among the Indians of
North America, by Paul Kane, Toronto: University of Toronto Press for Amon
Carter Museum, 1971.
One of the purposes of the expedition was to determine whether the American
desert extended into the land of the North-West. Hind indicated on his map that
the “Great American Desert” was located in the southern plains area, but that a
“Fertile Belt” ran the length of the country to its north. (R. Douglas Francis,
Images of the West, 6.) For a further discussion on Hind’s characterization of this
area, and its relation to the western expansionist movement, see Chapter 3 of
Doug Owram’s Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the
Idea of the West 1856-1900, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980, 59-78.
Both Hind and his audience associated the desert with the wasteland of the Old
Testament. For a study of the wilderness and its biblical symbolism see John
Rennie Short, Imagined Country: Environment, Culture and Society, London and
New York: Routledge, 1991.
Hind, Narrative, vol. 1, 148-49.
Hime diary, N.A.C. MG 24 H87.
The birds are flying in a common v-shape, except that there is a sudden ninety
degree shift in the flight. Birds do not fly this way as a group. The path depicted is
a formal artistic one.
The tradition of associating the cardinal direction of west with death began in the
thirteenth-century with the building of cathedrals. Gothic architects positioned
the portals to the setting sun. Theologians associated this direction with the Day
of Judgement. As Émile Mâle explains: “The medieval doctors, with their
curiously bad etymology, connected occidens with the verb occidere, and the
west became for them the region of death.” Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image:
Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, New York, Evanston, San
Francisco, London: Harper & Row, 1972, 6.
“For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so
shall the coming of the Son of man be.” Matthew 24:27.
Another example of Victorian anxiety in this respect can be found in the
photographs of the Royal Engineers taken during the North American Boundary
95
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
96
Commission of 1872-75 (NAC Beach Collection 1973-011). Several
photographs entitled “Dead Crow Indians” appear. The natives who had died in
battle were left unburied, and the photographs reveal their bodies in various
stages of decay.
Plate 30, “Indian graves, covered with split sticks. An enemy’s scalp is usually
suspended from the thin poles overhanging the grave, September-October,
1858,” and plate 31, “Indian graves, covered with birch bark (the patch of white
in the foreground is snow), September-October, 1858.”
Hind reported that the natives were in a state of despair with a poor wild rice and
fish harvest. “With a partial failure in the rice, and a great scarcity of fish … the
anticipations of the coming winter on the part of those who cared to think of the
sufferings of the wretched Indians of the Winnipeg, were gloomy indeed.” Hind,
Narrative, vol. 1, 119.
At this period, photographs of the dead were largely confined to post-mortem
depictions. The unburied remains of a dead white person would not be
photographed. Such subject matter first entered wide circulation during the
American Civil War (1860-65) through the works of photographers such as
Timothy O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner.
Hind’s writings display a mixture of concern, criticism, sympathy and
paternalism towards the natives. At one point in the Narrative, it is evident that he
understands how increased exploration of the interior will directly affect the
future of native existence. He quotes a native leader who explained his position
with respect to the presence of the white man: “We have hearts, and love our lives
and our country. … We do not want the white man; when the white man comes he
brings disease and sickness and our people perish; we do not wish to die … we
wish to love and to hold the land our fathers won. … Tell men this, and the talk is
finished.” Hind, Narrative, vol. 1, 100. Hind also included this section in the
government reports.
Hind contrasts native and Christian ceremonies in such terms in his first volume
when he describes attending a service at St. James Church in the Red River
settlement area. Beyond the boundaries of the community, a native ritual is taking
place: “A wonderful contrast do the subdued Indian worshippers in this mission
village present on Sunday, to the heathen revellers of the prairies, who perform
their … ceremonies within a mile and a half from some of the Christian altars of
Red River.” Hind, Narrative, vol. 1, pp. 201-02.
For example, in the second volume, Hind and his exploration party attend a
service at the Fairford Mission (near Lake Manitoba on a tributary of the Little
Saskatchewan): “There were forty persons present, consisting of Indians and
Half-breeds. … There were one hundred and twenty Christians, adults and
children, at this Mission. The houses … are in excellent order. … We were
supplied with potatoes, onions, turnips, fresh bread, and butter, and otherwise
hospitably entertained. …” Hind, Narrative, vol. 2, 36-38.
Alexander Ross, The Red River Settlement and its Rise, Progress, and Present
State, With Some Account of the Native Races and Its General History to the
Present Day, London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1856, 140.
Ross, The Red River Settlement, 142.
Ross, The Red River Settlement, 145.
In some cases, however, the continuance of hunting rituals was part of a larger
social and cultural phenomenon. For example, Gerhard Ens argues that the fur
trade had become increasingly profitable after the breakup of the Hudson’s Bay
monopoly in the 1840s. The Métis in particular took advantage of this situation,
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
leaving the colony for long periods of time in order to hunt buffalo and prepare
the hides for market. For more on the relationship between this industry and its
affects on the Red River colony see his article “Dispossession or Adaptation?
Migration and Persistence of the Red River Metis, 1835-1890, in The Prairie
West, Historical Readings, ed. R. Douglas Frances and Howard Palmer, 2nd. ed.,
Edmonton: Pica Pica Press, 1992, 136-161, and his book Homeland to
Hinterland: The Changing Worlds of the Red River Metis in the Nineteenth
Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
Frits Pannekoek, A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance of
1869-70, Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer Publishing, 1991, 36-37.
Hind, Narrative, vol. 1, p. 209.
Hind, Narrative, vol. 1, p. 208.
Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History, Toronto and London:
University of Toronto Press, 1984, 95.
For a specific study on this subject see Sylvia M. Van Kirk’s “‘What if Mama is
an Indian?’: The Cultural Ambivalence of the Alexander Ross Family” in The
Developing West: Essays on Canadian History in Honour of Lewis H. Thomas,
John E. Foster, ed., Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1983.
Such was the view of Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau who wrote Essai sur
l’inégalité des races humaines (1853-55) which was translated into English as
The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of the Races (1856). De Gobineau argued
that the Aryan race had allowed itself to be “contaminated” through interbreeding
with “inferior” races.
For more on how images of native peoples in the post-1870 period were
manipulated or placed in textual contexts that supported colonial interests, see
Sarah Carter, Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in
Canada’s Prairie West, Montreal & Kingston: McGill University Press, 1997.
As seen, for example, in the works of Hill and Adamson.
It is very possible that Wigwam viewed himself in such a manner, and had some
say as to the final outcome of the photograph. However, what is at issue in this
essay is how the general Canadian and British public would interpret his portrait
within the context of the period’s understandings of native peoples. In terms of
Hime’s photography, it is unknown how he interacted with his native subjects as
his diary does not include entries for the period between September and
November when these photographs were taken. (His diary does note, however,
that an expense of 24¢ was incurred for a “squaw sitting” on 26 October 1858.)
See Pannekoek’s fourth chapter entitled, “A Little Britain in the Wilderness,” in A
Snug Little Flock, 78-95. Sylvia M. Van Kirk also describes the social
significance of the introduction of British women to the colony, and its
consequences for native and Métis women, in her article “The Impact of White
Women on Fur Trade Society,” in Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian-White
Relations in Canada, J.R. Miller, ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991,
180-204. For a more extended study on the circumstances of native women in
Western Canada see the same author’s book Many Tender Ties: Women in
Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670-1870, Winnipeg: Watson Dwyer
Publishing, 1980. The complex relationship between race, culture and gender is
also explored by Erica Smith in her article “‘Gentlemen, This is no Ordinary
Trial’: Sexual Narratives in the Trial of Reverend Corbett, Red River, 1863,”
Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native History, Jennifer S.H. Brown and
Elizabeth Vibert, eds. Peterborough, Ontario; Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview
Press, 1996, 364-380.
97
Legend of illustrations
Illustrated London News, p. 6, Ojibway Encampment near the Falls of the Rainy River,
May 24, 1858.
Humphry Lloyd Hime, The Prairie Looking West, September-October 1858, NAC
C-017443.
Humphry Lloyd Hime, An Ojibway Woman with Baby, September-October 1858,
National Gallery of Canada (NGC) 30041.
Humphry Lloyd Hime, Wigwam; an Ojibway-Métis, Lake Superiror, SeptemberOctober 1858, NGC 30040.
Humphry Lloyd Hime, Lelitia, a Cree Halfbreed, September-October 1858, NAC
C-001732.
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Goodman Lectures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983.
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————. “The North America Boundary Commission, Three Photographic
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Huyda, Richard J. Camera in the Interior, 1858: H.L. Hime, Photographer, the
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Smith, Erica. “‘Gentlemen, This is no Ordinary Trial’: Sexual Narratives in the Trial of
Reverend Corbett, Red River, 1863,” Reading Beyond Words: Contexts for Native
History, Jennifer S.H. Brown and Elizabeth Vibert, eds. Peterborough, Ontario;
Orchard Park, N.Y.: Broadview Press, 1996, 364-380.
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————, ed. The Papers of the Palliser Expedition, 1857-1860. Toronto: Champlain
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Promises: A Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, J.R. Miller, ed.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991, 180-204.
————. Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-trade Society, 1670-1870. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.
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————. “‘What if Mama is an Indian?’: The Cultural Ambivalence of the Alexander
Ross Family,” in The Developing West: Essays on Canadian History in Honour of
Lewis H. Thomas, John E. Foster, ed., Edmonton: University of Alberta Press,
1983,123-136.
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————. Land of Promise, Promised Land: The Culture of Victorian Science in
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————. Inventing Canada: Early Victorian Science and the Idea of a Transcontinental Nation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987.
100
Robert Cupido
The Medium, the Message and the Modern:
The Jubilee Broadcast of 1927
Abstract
The article explores the use of radio by pan-Canadian nationalists to advance
the nation-building project of the interwar period through a detailed study of
the historic coast-to-coast broadcast of July 1, 1927 to mark the Diamond
Jubilee of Confederation. The pioneering broadcast, which formed the
highlight of the Dominion-wide Jubilee observances, was universally hailed
as a triumph of national cooperation and unity. It was lavishly praised by
organizers as both a symbol and catalyst of the common, distinctively
Canadian national identity they hoped to awaken through the commemorative
rituals of the Jubilee. The Jubilee Broadcast, now largely forgotten,
represented an important milestone in the growth of “technological
nationalism,” defined by Maurice Charland as the construction and
legitimation of a nation-state through publicly funded and sponsored
transportation and communications systems. An analysis of the planning,
organization, content and popular reception of the broadcast, which included
the inaugural performance of the Carillon of the Peace Tower and “a great
national program” of patriotic ceremonies and entertainments from
Parliament Hill, suggests both the possibilities and limitations of radio and
other modern mass media as vehicles for nation-building in an intractably
pluralist society.
Résumé
Cet article se penche sur l’utilisation de la radio par des nationalistes
pancanadiens qui voulaient promouvoir le projet de développement du pays
de l’entre-deux-guerres. Plus précisément, il s’agit d’une étude détaillée sur
la diffusion historique, d’un océan à l’autre, de l’émission de radio du 1er
juillet 1927 visant à souligner le Jubilé de diamant de la Confédération
canadienne. À l’époque, l’émission d’avant-garde, qui constituait le clou des
célébrations du Jubilé partout dans le Dominion, a été universellement saluée
comme un triomphe de la coopération et de l’unité nationales. Ses
organisateurs ne tarissaient pas d’éloges envers cet événement qu’ils
regardaient tant comme un symbole que comme un catalyseur de l’identité
nationale canadienne commune et distincte qu’ils espéraient faire émerger
grâce aux rites commémoratifs de la célébration du Jubilée. L’émission de
radio du Jubilée, aujourd’hui presque totalement oubliée, a représenté une
étape importante dans l’essor du « nationalisme technologique » tel que
Maurice Charland l’a défini, soit la construction et la légitimation de
l’État-nation par des systèmes de transport et de communication financés et
parrainés par les pouvoirs publics. Une analyse de la planification, de
l’organisation, du contenu et de l’accueil réservé par la population à cette
émission, lors de laquelle le Carillon de la Tour de la Paix a retenti pour la
première fois, ainsi qu’un « grand programme national » de cérémonies
patriotiques et de divertissement en direct de la Colline du Parlement, est
révélatrice tant des possibilités que des limites de la radio et d’autres moyens
de communication de masse à titre d’instruments de construction d’un pays à
l’intérieur d’une société irréductiblement pluraliste.
The radio announcers of the 1920s would have urged listeners to close their
eyes and visualize the following scene. The place is Ottawa. The date is July
1, 1927. The time is one minute before noon on a glaringly bright and sultry
summer day. An enormous crowd of over forty thousand men, women and
children in their holiday finery–photographs show a sea of silk parasols and
straw boaters–has gathered on Parliament Hill. A “surging mass of
humanity” jostles for a vantage point in the neighbouring streets, and the
windows and rooftops of nearby buildings are lined with “eager and curious
onlookers.”1 Their attention is directed towards a large temporary podium,
festooned with garlands of maple leaves, Union Jacks, the Dominion and
provincial coats of arms, and surmounted by the dates 1867 and 1927, that
has been erected at the base of the still uncomplete Peace Tower. (The last
pieces of scaffolding had been removed on the previous day from the
soaring Gothic memorial to the dead of the Great War.) The podium is filled
with such “notable public men” as the recently appointed Governor General
Lord Willingdon, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and the
Acting Conservative Leader of the Opposition T. C. Guthrie, in morning
suits and Windsor uniforms. A festive atmosphere, overlaid by a sense of
mounting excitement, prevails. The hands of the four-sided clock at the
apex of the tower finally meet, and the deep, reverberating note of a single
great bell tolls the hour from the upper recesses of the tower. An expectant
hush falls over the crowd, almost instantly shattered by the report of the
noonday gun and a blaring trumpet fanfare. Before its last echoes have died
away across the river, the tall, patrician figure of Willingdon, with a
vice-regal flourish, presses a button presented to him by the Minister of
Public Works, sending an electric signal to twenty-five year-old Percival
Price, a noted young musician from Montreal, who is sitting hunched over a
curious arrangement of keys and pedals in a cramped cubicle just below the
workings of the great clock. And the first ethereal notes of O Canada,
played for the first time on the fifty-three newly installed bells of the
National Carillon–delivered from a Birmingham foundry and hoisted to
their perch during the past few weeks of frantic preparations–waft over the
forty thousand upturned faces on Parliament Hill.2
The inaugural performance of the Carillon was also registered by
specially designed microphones strategically placed on the exterior fabric
of the Peace Tower by Bell Company of Canada engineers; was carried to
banks of powerful transmitters installed in the antechamber and committee
rooms of the House of Commons; and from there relayed through 23,000
miles of telephone and telegraph wires and a hastily improvised network of
102
twenty-two private radio stations, to virtually every corner of the
Dominion. At precisely the same moment, from Cape Breton to Vancouver
Island, in bustling cities and isolated fishing villages, in lonely prairie
homesteads and northern mining camps, Canadians clustered around their
Marconi radio sets felt a synchronized surge of patriotic emotion at hearing
the pure tones of the great bells in their parlours and kitchens, as distinctly,
many of them claimed, as if they too were present with the assembled
multitudes on Parliament Hill. Such, according to contemporary accounts,
was the dramatic impact of the first nation-wide radio broadcast in
Canadian history.
The Dominion Day broadcast was only one of the more spectacular
public events that were staged throughout the country to commemorate the
Diamond Jubilee of Confederation. The 1927 Jubilee represented the first
major attempt by the federal state to foster social and political unity,
inculcate modern notions of democratic citizenship, and develop a distinct,
pan-Canadian sense of national identity through the use of commemorative
ritual. Its explicit purpose was to direct the primary loyalty of Canadians to
the nation as a whole, to national institutions, symbols and authority
structures.
In March 1927, a national committee was created by Act of Parliament to
develop plans for a Dominion-wide celebration and to encourage and
coordinate the efforts of local communities. It was chaired by George
Graham, a senior Liberal senator, former Minister of Railways under
Laurier and King and a leading figure in the Canadian Club movement. The
Committee recruited dozens of experts from business, industry, the federal
civil service and the universities to deal with particular aspects of the
commemoration. Especially elaborate celebrations were planned for the
nation’s capital, in keeping with the determination of the King
administration to transform Ottawa into the geographical and emotional
focus of national sentiment for all Canadians. However, the commemorative ceremonies and patriotic entertainments staged in Ottawa on July 1
could hardly have made a decisive contribution to the nation-building
process if their influence was confined to the tens of thousands of local
residents and tourists who were physically present on Parliament Hill on
July 1. Press reports after the fact, regardless of their thoroughness or
vividness, could not hope to reproduce the emotional and psychological
impact of collective ritual. At an early stage in its deliberations, therefore,
the National Committee decided to arrange a radio transmission that would
“allow the citizens of Canada from ocean to ocean … to participate in the
altogether worthy and inspiring” Jubilee programme from the capital.3 If
the highly experimental attempt succeeded, the Committee predicted it
would form “the most interesting and important feature of the
celebration.”4
More than any other medium, radio established a peculiarly intimate
relationship with individual listeners who, especially in the early years of
103
development before much of the novelty had worn off, often referred to the
uncanny impression that the disembodied voices emanating from the
receiver were speaking directly to them. In 1927, the Dominion
government was confident in its ability to exploit the possibilities of this
unmediated intimacy between the medium of communication and its
audience for nation-building purposes. The Jubilee Broadcast, now largely
forgotten, represented an important milestone–the completion of the
transcontinental railway was another–in the growth of “technological
nationalism,” defined by Maurice Charland as the construction and
legitimation of a nation-state through publicly funded and sponsored
transportation and communications systems.5 A study of the official
“program of commemoration” broadcast from Parliament Hill on July 1,
1927, and the public responses that it generated can illuminate important
aspects of the “politics of culture” during the transitional decade of the
1920s, and more particularly serve to reveal both the uses and the
limitations of modern media as vehicles of nation-building in an intractably
pluralist society.
Live From Ottawa: Transmitting the New Nationality
There were few allusions to such limitations in the hundreds of press reports
that represented the inauguration of the Carillon, in the most extravagant
terms, as a potent symbol of Canadian nationhood. As O Canada was
succeeded by the familiar strains of The Maple Leaf Forever and God Save
the King, the invisible radio waves forged, in the words of one observer, “a
union in spirit and sentiment undreamed of by the nation’s founders.”6 The
Toronto Star reporter breathlessly described how, when “the clarion blast
of trumpets” suddenly pealed from the heights of the Peace Tower, a
momentous hush fell over the waiting multitude, succeeded by the notes of
single, “great, deep-toned bell” striking the hour, and at the same time
marking the attainment of sixty years of national existence–“an
extraordinary living symbol of a united Canada.”7 The music of the
Carillon, floating over the crowd with “all the melody and delicate shading
effects of a great organ,” was eulogized by Saturday Night as “the paean of a
people proud of their country, grateful to the men who laid its foundations,
and determined to carry forward their ideals.”8 According to another
contemporary editorial, the peal of the great bells represented “the heart
throbs of the nation,” heard and felt throughout the length and breadth of the
country, “from the furthest east to the furthest west,” forging an instant and
common communion. Distance was “annihilated,” geographical barriers
“rendered of no account.”9 Or so, at least, the nationalist elites responsible
for organizing the broadcast devoutly hoped.
Mackenzie King was convinced that the broadcast had contributed
decisively to the creation of a modern, overarching sense of national
identity, destined to subsume older, more traditional loci of collective
allegiance found in the British Empire or the province of Quebec. In a
104
speech delivered at the opening of the Canadian National Exhibition in
August, King quoted the sceptical views of Christopher Dunkin, expressed
during the Confederation Debates, on the dim prospects for the emergence
of a new Canadian nationality in 1867: “We have a large class whose
national feelings turn towards London, whose very heart is there; another
large class whose sympathies centre here in Quebec … But have we any
class of people who are attached or whose feelings are going to be directed
with any earnestness to the city of Ottawa, the centre of the new nationality
that is to be created?”10 Both Mackenzie King and the National Jubilee
Committee ventured to believe that such a class of people had been brought
into being on July 1, 1927, claiming that “After many years this doubt has
been dispelled and the question has been answered by the voice of the
Canadian people united in the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee of
Confederation.”11
King exulted in the belief that “on the morning, afternoon and evening of
July 1, all Canada became, for the time being, a single assemblage, swayed
by a common emotion, within the sound of a single voice …”12 The Jubilee
broadcast had supposedly created a public of passive listeners directly and
personally connected to the voice of its political leaders in Ottawa:
For the first time in the history of Canada the word spoken on
Parliament Hill … was carried instantaneously in all parts of this
vast Dominion. Never before was a national program enjoyed by
the citizens of any land over so vast an area. It is doubtful if ever
before … the thoughts of so many of the citizens of any country
were concentrated upon what was taking place at its capital, or
whether those in authority were brought into such immediate and
sympathetic personal touch with those from whom their authority
was derived.13
King also candidly expressed his belief in the potential of modern
communications technology for legitimizing a new centralist vision of
national culture and citizenship, stating that “Hitherto to most Canadians
Ottawa has seemed far off, a mere name to hundreds of thousands of our
people, but henceforth all Canadians will stand within the sound of the
carillon and within hearing of the speakers on Parliament Hill.”14 But would
they choose to listen?
The Broadcasting Sub-Committee that was hastily assembled on April 1,
a scant twelve weeks before Dominion Day, included the senior executives
of leading electrical and communications firms, as well as officials from the
Department of Marine and Fisheries, which at this time was responsible for
the regulation of all forms of radio transmission in Canada. The most active
and effective members consisted of the Chairman, Thomas Ahearn, a
vice-president of the Northern Electric Company; the vice chairman, J. E.
Macpherson, a leading professional engineer and Vice President of the Bell
Telephone Company of Canada; and A. R. McEwan, Director of Radio for
Canadian National Railways. Commander C. P. Edwards, Director of
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Radio for the Department of Marine and Fisheries served as Secretary, and a
sub-committee under the chairmanship of John W. Clarke, Chief
Transmission Engineer of the Bell Telephone Company of Canada, was
appointed to survey and requisition the vast extent of uncoordinated
telegraph and telephone lines needed for the broadcast.15
A number of major technical challenges had to be overcome, using
improvised solutions. The national broadcast was transmitted over the
circuits and lines of nine separate systems characterized by incompatible
circuits and transmitting equipment. In order to link them all together to
form a single temporary nationwide chain, the Committee had to “beg,
borrow and steal amplifying and repeating equipment from every available
source on the continent.”16 Over 1,100 miles of telephone circuits and 1,200
miles of telegraph wire, out of a total of 23,000, had to be supplied by
American companies to span the sparsely populated wilderness of
northwestern Ontario between Detroit and southern Manitoba.17 A circular
letter was sent to virtually every municipality in the Dominion, offering to
make public address systems available from the Northern Electric
Company free of charge for the use of local Jubilee committees that wished
to incorporate the national broadcast into their community celebrations.
Accounts of the Broadcast Committee’s activities repeatedly stressed the
“extreme difficulty” of its achievement. An immense quantity of intricate
amplifying equipment was collected and shipped to Montreal, assembled,
mounted and then distributed to dozens of communities throughout the
Dominion. The Committee had to coordinate transmitting circuits with
widely differing specifications, creating a temporary national network by
stringing together available telephone lines from one end of the country to
the other. In a number of stretches–between Levis and Moncton, and
Sudbury and Winnipeg, for example–where few telephone lines existed,
crucial gaps were filled using the resources of the CNR and CPR telegraph
networks. The telephone and telegraph facilities of twenty-six different
companies were cobbled together to create a makeshift chain of stations
stretching across the Dominion, requiring the design and manufacture of
special devices for integrating incompatible pieces of the participating
systems. A largely female army of telegraphers acted as the nerves of the
system. The entire experiment involved a series of “complicated
adjustments, balances, coordinations and equalizations,” performed under
intensive time pressure, that was acclaimed “a triumph of whole-souled,
nation-wide cooperation.”18
Thomas Ahearn received most of the credit for the technical success of
the broadcast.19 He was presented as the familiar type of heroic, visionary,
strong-willed entrepreneur, who “absolutely refused to recognize obstacles
of whatever sort … insisting on the quick accomplishment of the impossible.” Through his personal connections and appeals to the patriotism and
professional pride of other industry executives, he was able to obtain the
required equipment and labour at a minimal cost. Electrical apparatus,
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transmission lines and skilled labour were made available for the broadcast
which, if mounted on a commercial basis, would have cost the National
Committee a prohibitive $3 million. The “weeks of labour, the sleepless
anxiety” of those responsible for the broadcast were triumphantly
vindicated by a success that was “beyond their fondest hopes.”20
The conclusion of the brief inaugural performance of the National
Carillon was greeted with a royal salute fired by the noon gun, the joyful
pealing of church bells, the blast of factory whistles and the thunderous
roars of the crowd. The dedication of the Carillon was followed by the more
prosaic ritual planting of a “Confederation Maple Tree” on Parliament Hill,
on behalf of the women of Canada, by Viscountess Willingdon, and the
mass singing of God Save the King by the assembled crowd, as the viceregal
couple departed the scene.21
Commentary throughout the day was provided by two experienced
announcers, A. W. Ryan of the Ottawa CNRO station and Jacques N. Cartier
of CKAC in Montreal–a direct descendant of the famous explorer–from
their improvised studio in the East Block of the Parliament Buildings. Their
detailed script, delivered alternately in French and English, might strike
modern listeners as long-winded and dull; it did, however, serve the official
purpose of underlining the bilingual nature of the occasion, and by
extension of the new Canadian nationality that was being proclaimed from
Ottawa.22
The afternoon portion of the program began at three o’clock in front of an
estimated sixty thousand spectators, by far the largest crowd ever seen in the
capital. The participants and special guests, positioned in front of the main
entrance to the Parliament Buildings and surrounding the speakers’
pavilion, included units of the Ottawa Garrison, contingents of veterans
representing the Canadian Legion and other organizations, Boy Scouts,
Girl Guides and high-school cadets, ten thousand schoolchildren in red,
white and blue sashes, the Centenary Choir of one thousand voices, and the
band of the Governor General’s Foot Guards. Press reports exhausted their
store of superlatives in striving to convey “the moving and brilliant pageant
of music and oratory,” which “captured the imagination of the entire
capital.”23
The proceedings began with imperial pomp and ceremony, with the
arrival of the Governor General and his consort in a carriage of state
accompanied by a troop of horse guards. Resplendent in his Windsor
uniform, Willingdon read the official Jubilee message from George V,
carefully worded to avoid bruising nationalist sensibilities, which affirmed
the close and imperishable ties of loyalty and affection between the King
and his Canadian subjects. Willingdon went on to note with satisfaction that
on this day the citizens of Canada–“men and women of many different
races”–were gathering together “to proclaim their loyalty to their sovereign
King George and their devotion to the land of their birth or adoption.”24 Sir
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Lomer Gouin then stepped to the microphone to read the original resolution
passed by the House of Commons in February, proclaiming the Diamond
Jubilee of Confederation, expressing faith and confidence in Canada’s
future progress and prosperity, and its continuing political development as
a self-governing member of the British Commonwealth of Nation25: “We
trust that this commemoration will lend added inspiration to the patriotic
fervour of our people and afford a clearer vision of our aspirations and
ideals to the end that from sea to sea there may be developed a robust
Canadian spirit and in all things Canadian a profounder national unity.”26
Gouin went on to recite selections in French and English from some of the
more explicitly nationalist speeches of the major Fathers of Confederation,
including Macdonald, Cartier, Brown and D’Arcy McGee. The dominant
nationalist note struck by Gouin was reinforced by the singing of O Canada
in both official languages by the Centenary Choir and several thousand
Ottawa schoolchildren.27
There followed a “dramatic recitation” by Margaret Anglin, a celebrated
actress and daughter of a former Speaker of the House of Commons, of
Bliss Carman’s specially commissioned poem, Dominion Day 1927.28
Carman’s verses expressed the pan-Canadian vision of “one sacred land”
from Grand Pré “with its brimming tides” to “our Western gate on Georgia
Strait” and echoed Mackenzie King’s religious sense of Canada’s destiny as
a force for world peace: “The din of nations on the march / Resounds. We
wait the Voice / That shall to every living soul / Proclaim the mightier
choice / The reign of brotherhood wherein / The man-god may rejoice.”29
Anglin’s “splendidly impressive” performance, described as “one of the
supreme moments of the day,” was widely praised for its “majestic diction”
and the “rich, cultured and expressive tones” in which she read Carman’s
rather cryptic verses. A rendition by massed choirs of the chorus of The
Maple Leaf Forever–tactfully omitting its awkward references to Wolfe the
dauntless hero–was followed by the speeches of two descendants of
well-known Fathers of Confederation, who had themselves achieved
prominence in public life: L. P. D. Tilley, a Conservative cabinet minister
from New Brunswick, and Thomas Chapais, a Liberal Senator and a former
Minister of Public Works under Laurier.30
Chapais, speaking as a representative of Quebec, studiously avoided any
reference to the British Empire, dwelling instead on the theme of national
unity and Canada’s evolution as a prosperous, wholly autonomous North
American nation. After 1867, “a national spirit was born, formed of various
elements, and thus this Confederation has grown and become in northern
America a political, economic and social entity to be reckoned with by the
nations of the two continents … May Canada, our beloved country,
gloriously fulfill its destiny and become one of the happiest and greatest
nations of the world!” He obliquely defended the national aspirations of
French Canada while at the same time reconciling it with the wider horizons
of patriotism that opened in 1867: “Everywhere there is the little homeland,
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nearer, more intimate and beloved. But it does not preclude love of country.
On the contrary, the first sentiment is the most solid foundation for the other
and gives it warmth and force. That is why we have in Canada what I would
term a “provincial” and a “federal” patriotism. Both are justified. They need
not clash nor exclude each other. Rather they should unite and harmonize to
work together.” His conception of dual loyalties, however, does not extend
to British imperialists, who are gently and indirectly chided for their
allegiance to Great Britain.
Those of the majority of my countrymen come from the old, ever
honoured British Isles … But through their free choice and the will
of God, they are, they must be, above all Canadians. Our country is
not beyond the seas, it is here, on this blessed, Christianized,
civilized soil–a soil enriched by our pioneers, our missionaries and
our martyrs. Our country is Canada, the land of the maple, of the St.
Lawrence, of lofty mountains and giant lakes.31
Chapais’ nationalist confession of faith was countered by Tilley’s
reassertion of imperial loyalty, in which Canada was described as a “nation
within a nation,” the powerful and united “right arm of the British
Empire.”32
The singing of Canada My Home in English and French preceded the
keynote speeches of Mackenzie King and Hugh Guthrie, the Leader of the
Opposition. King’s long, disjointed keynote speech, criticized in some
quarters for excessive length, was praised by Saturday Night for its
“eloquence in conveying the nobility of the country’s past and … the glory
of its future.”33 King’s potted history of Canada, beginning with the arrival
of Cabot and ending with his triumphant assertion of Canadian sovereignty
at the 1926 Imperial Conference, tactfully acknowledged the continuing
ties of Empire, but at the same time emphasized how attenuated they had
become since 1867 by repeatedly referring to the nation-building initiatives
of the postwar period. “From a parent state with colonial possessions, the
British Empire has become a community of free nations in no way
subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external
affairs,” united solely by a common allegiance to the Crown.34 He proudly
pointed to Canada’s independent participation in the peace negotiations of
1919 and the work of the League of Nations. And the process of nationbuilding was far from over. Canada’s status as a nation had never been so
clearly defined. But problems relating to nationhood and Empire remained
to be resolved by present and future generations. A larger Canada,
“emerging from obscurity and shade,” was set to “take her place in the sun
among the powers of the world” by–a typical sentiment–losing itself in the
service of others. There was inevitably a great deal of fervent and cloudy
rhetoric about “the vision splendid” and the “righteousness that exalteth a
nation.” King, like every other Jubilee orator, never actually succeeded in
defining this vision of Canada that both “the humblest and the highest” had
glimpsed, and in the absence of which “the people must perish.” But it
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obviously had very little to do with what remained of the British
connection.35
The much briefer address of Hugh Guthrie, the Conservative Leader of
the Opposition, described Confederation as a successful experiment in
imperial policy and affirmed, despite occasional disagreements and
controversies, that the “absolute loyalty of the people to the Dominion and
to the British Empire has never for a moment been challenged or doubted.”
His peroration pointedly rejected the nationalist interpretation of
Confederation as the first step on the road to constitutional autonomy and
eventual independence, stating that “These Fathers of Confederation
always kept in the forefront of all their efforts British ideals, British
institutions, British forms of government and the maintenance of British
Imperial ties.”36
Another patriotic anthem written especially for the occasion–Canada
Land of My Heart’s Adoration–was succeeded by Raoul Dandurand’s plea
for a truly bicultural Canada. Dandurand, a Liberal Senator and executive
member of the St. Jean Baptiste Society of Montreal, presented the official
francophone view of the Jubilee as a vehicle for finally reconciling and
harmonizing the competing nationalisms of French and English Canada.
He was followed, appropriately, by a choral version of the popular FrenchCanadian folk song, Vive la canadienne.37
The afternoon program ended shortly before five o’clock with some brief
concluding remarks by George Graham, the singing of Elgar’s Land of
Hope and Glory, and a final chorus of God Save the King.38
The evening segment of the broadcast was largely devoted to “patriotic
entertainments,” interspersed with “patriotic orations” by the same cast of
political dignitaries who figured in the afternoon program. The Ottawa
Jubilee celebration had been advertised as a major showcase of the finest
Canadian musical talent. During the interwar period, official commemoration drew various levels of government into involvement with the arts as
patrons and sponsors, most obviously by providing thousands of
commissions to artists, sculptors, stonemasons, metalsmiths and architects
for cenotaphs, statues, monuments, plaques and public buildings designed
to memorialize the dead of the Great War. Government sponsorship of civic
celebrations like the Diamond Jubilee provided yet another vehicle for
encouraging, promoting and less frequently directly subsidizing the work
of artists, writers, composers and performers. “On no occasion,” according
to Maria Tippett, “was it clearer how this sort of activity might stimulate the
arts than on the warm July day of 1927 when the Diamond Jubilee of
Confederation was celebrated on Parliament Hill.”39 The Jubilee also
revealed how the arts might be mobilized in the service of nation building in
the decades before the Massey Commission and the creation of the Canada
Council.
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The Carillon opened the proceedings with another selection of “typical
Canadian Airs”: O Canada,40 and the “well known patriotic song,” The
Maple Leaf Forever were followed by two popular chansons from Quebec,
Vive la Canadienne and Un Canadien errant. The musical prologue set the
pattern for the remainder of the scrupulously balanced program, in which
every announcement was made in both English and French, Anglophone
and Francophone speakers alternated with each other on the podium, and
medleys of French-Canadian folk songs were invariably followed by
traditional British ballads and hymns.41
The Peace Tower was illuminated for the occasion, transforming the
grounds of the Parliament Buildings into a brilliantly lit amphitheatre that
elicited more than one allusion to “a midsummer night’s dream.”42 A brief
welcoming address by Willingdon in both official languages that was
warmly praised in press reports for both its brevity and fluency, was
followed by a curious musical tribute to the newly appointed Governor
General: an instrumental suite of Edwardian popular songs that he had
composed as a student at Oxford, performed by the Chateau Laurier
Quartette.43 Margaret Anglin, repeating her florid rendition of Bliss
Carman’s Confederation Ode, was followed by Eva Gauthier, “the
world-famed Canadian prima donna,” singing a selection of five familiar
folk songs, representing the various elements that went into the making of
the dual nationality being celebrated on Parliament Hill: À la claire fontaine
from French Canada, Robert Burns’s Loch Lmond, the famous Welsh hymn
All Through the Night, the Irish ballad The Last Rose of Summer, and O Dear
What Can the Matter Be, from England.44 Gauthier’s medley neatly
demonstrated the official boundaries of cultural pluralism in 1927.
Mackenzie King, perhaps at the prompting of organizers anxious about
the unexpected length of the program and the lateness of the hour, rushed
through a repeat performance of his afternoon speech (and was chided by
the Toronto Star “for speaking just a trifle too fast for the comfort of his
audience.”45) King’s address was followed by the Hart House String
Quartette, a distinguished chamber music group from Toronto, performing
three original compositions, by the prominent Canadian composers Sir
Ernest Macmillan and Leo Smith.46
The cultural and linguistic balance of the entire program was finely
calibrated. Guthrie’s pointedly loyalist remarks, for example, were
immediately followed by a selection of traditional British ballads and music
hall songs sung by Allen McQuae, an Irish-Canadian tenor, while Raoul
Dandurand’s address in French was paired with yet another set of folk songs
from Quebec played by the Chateau Laurier Orchestra.
For the majority of spectators, the musical highlight of the evening was
provided by the popular Ottawa vocal group Charles Marchand and the
Bytown Troubadours, who invariably appeared dressed up as lusty
lumberjacks or jaunty voyageurs, in plaid shirts, corduroy trousers and
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buckskins, with colourful handkerchiefs knotted around their necks and
clay pipes in their teeth. Marchand, a key figure in the nostalgic revival and
popularization of traditional French-Canadian folk music, combined
ethnographic research with the vulgar showmanship of blackface
minstrelsy. The Troubadours regaled the crowd with rousing renditions of
the most “characteristic” songs of the habitant–En roulant ma boule, Youp
youp sur la rivière, and, inevitably, Allouette.47 The Diamond Jubilee
officially incorporated the surviving fragments of Quebec’s folk
culture–fitted out in quaint fancy dress for the benefit of Anglophone
consumers–into a common, pan-Canadian national identity. Many
French-Canadian folk songs had after all become “as well known in English
Canada as Quebec … heard in the college halls and practically every public
assembly … and were not unknown in the House of Commons of
Canada.”48 Marchand’s showstopping performance helped to fulfill
Rodolphe Lemieux’s desire for “un grand concert populaire où les vieilles
chansons canadiennes-francaises seraient à l’affiche. Il me semble
qu’alternant avec les chansons anglaises ces bons vieux refrains canadiens
plairaient au publique. Le grand festival aurait un cachet vraiment
national.”49
At one o’clock in the morning, as the chimes of the tower clock struck the
hour, the Chateau Laurier Orchestra began to serenade the thinning crowds
with yet another “selection of patriotic airs,” bringing the historic “national
Jubilee broadcast” to a rather anticlimactic end.50
Tuning In, Tuning Out: The Ambiguities of Reception
In purely technical terms the Committee had shattered all previous distance
records for a single transmission. The broadcast was received from one end
of Canada to the other, reaching into remote northern districts, countless
points in the United States, throughout Central America and Mexico, in
large parts of South America, New Zealand, as well as Great Britain and
much of the European continent. An estimated five million people around
the world reportedly heard “the sublime sounds of the great carillon from
the Peace Tower, the voices of thousands of Canadian children raised in
praise, and the several statesmen giving utterance to thoughts worthy of so
great an occasion.”51
At the end of the broadcast, the announcers invited listeners to write to
the National Diamond Jubilee Committee with their comments on the
quality of their reception. The response to the appeal was overwhelming,
with over thirty thousand letters and telegrams sent to the National
Committee in the weeks following the broadcast. A number of
correspondents expressed sentiments that seemed to vindicate King’s
feelings of triumph, and his faith in the efficacy of radio as a vehicle for
nation building. L. Penny of Summerside, Prince Edward Island wrote that
it was “splendid how much radio has done and will continue to do in making
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us nearer to one another.” W. Humphrey of Montreal, who was in his 79th
year, described how, “when the great bell began to boom at the noonday
hour, the sound gave me a thrill that passed right through my body and I had
many more thrills during the playing of the beautiful carillon. It was the
most wonderful performance I have ever heard and I did not give it up until
it ended at 1:34 in the morning …” J. Liddle of Windsor, Ontario had no
doubt that the broadcast had done much “to foster a better national spirit and
love of country” and only wished that “we could have more of such national
programs …” An anonymous correspondent from Saskatoon tried to
convey the “thrilling experience” of being linked up “so audibly though
unseen with such a vast multitude in the singing of both our national
anthems.” Another native of Saskatchewan could not find the words to
express “how much it meant to the people of the west … the first time many
of us have heard our premier’s voice … it seemed almost as if we were
present in Ottawa.” Many letters from francophone listeners expressed
their appreciation for the bilingual aspect of the broadcast. “Vos
programmes,” wrote a priest from Lauzon, Quebec, “ont plu tout
particulièrement par leur caractère bilingue …”52
“Never before,” confided King to his diary, “was the human voice heard
at one and same time over such an extent of the world’s surface and by so
many people … The Carillon and the radio broadcast have touched the
hearts and minds and homes of the people all over Canada. It is particularly
touching to read the notes coming in from outlying parts. We have at last a
country of our own which is a nation, one of the powers of the world …”53
Indeed, King was so profoundly impressed by the results of the Jubilee
broadcast that, according to E. Austin Weir, it played a key role, a year and a
half later, in his decision to appoint the Royal Commission on Public
Broadcasting that eventually led to the creation of the CBC.54
Many press commentators agreed with King that the broadcast had been
the most memorable and historically significant event of the entire Jubilee
year, binding together East and West, French and English Canada, and
making them “as one in a common national thanksgiving.” It is necessary,
however, to step back from this effusive nationalist rhetoric, inspired by the
euphoric afterglow of the Jubilee celebrations, in order to gain a more
balanced sense of the popular response to the broadcast.
In keeping with the liberal, bicultural convictions of the National Jubilee
Committee, the entire programme of patriotic ceremonial and
entertainment that was broadcast to the nation on July 1, 1927 was devoted
to the political and cultural traditions of the two “founding races.” There
was little attempt to appeal or even refer to any other significant group
within Canadian society, such as the immigrant communities of western
Canada or native people. Regional, provincial and other “limited identities”
were likewise downplayed. Leonard Tilley’s brief address was the sole
contribution from the Maritimes, and there was not a single voice on the
programme, either among the official speakers or the performing artists,
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from any province west of Ontario. The official interpretation of the
Diamond Jubilee projected by the July 1 broadcast was encapsulated in
Graham Spry’s nationalist creed, originally coined in 1927 for the
Canadian Club movement: “One nation, two cultures; one nationality, two
races; one loyalty, two tongues.”55 The Diamond Jubilee of Confederation
thus marked an important milestone in the construction of a pan-Canadian,
bicultural national imaginary, which would define Canada’s dominant
political identity for the next half century.
The persistence of unassimilated ethnic groups was deeply troubling for
official nationalism in 1927, because they were assumed to prevent the
emergence of a more modern, pan-Canadian notion of citizenship, while
perpetuating old sectional conflicts based on race and religion. The
National Committee was therefore understandably reluctant to
acknowledge the legitimacy of these competing languages and cultures by
broadcasting them throughout the Dominion. The emerging liberal
nationalism of the 1920s, with its commitment to linguistic and cultural
dualism, could not accommodate other ethnicities, which were expected to
be absorbed over time by one of the two “charter groups,” surviving, if at all,
in the private sphere bounded by family and neighbourhood.
The attitude of the National Jubilee Committee towards ethnic
minorities was informed by a Canadian version of the melting pot, which in
the 1920s gradually supplanted the harsh, overtly racist doctrine of
Anglo-conformity inspired by the first waves of mass European
immigration at the turn of the century. Since hopes for the resumption of
large-scale British emigration after the First World War were clearly
doomed to disappointment, the proponents of the melting pot made a virtue
out of necessity by accepting ethnic and cultural diversity, with the proviso
that over time the forces of assimilation, however slowly and imperfectly,
would eventually produce a new, homogeneous national type through “the
future operations of nature.”56
By 1927 the proliferation of ethnic associations and institutions led a
growing number of nationalists to temporarily shelve the ideal of the
melting pot in favour of the more realistic metaphor of the cultural mosaic.57
The concept was first popularized by Kate Foster, an executive member of
the YWCAwith long years of experience in citizenship work in Canada and
the United States, in her landmark survey of “the immigrant question,”
entitled Our Canadian Mosaic, published in 1926. Foster hoped to promote
“good will and friendliness … between the native born and the foreign
born” by familiarizing the former with the rich heritage and desirable
traits–the work ethic and social conservatism of eastern European peasant
farmers, for example–of the many nationalities seeking to make a new
home for themselves in Canada. Mutual respect and confidence would
result from the refutation of negative stereotypes. She still believed in the
existence of a natural racial hierarchy, with, unsurprisingly, Anglo-Saxons
at the apex. But she deplored the intolerance and bigotry of nativists and
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imperialists, offering an alternative, more liberal vision of “a culture based
on Anglo-Saxon traditions enriched by other national elements.”58 The idea
was subsequently taken up and promoted by the Association of Canadian
Clubs which, besides sponsoring lectures and articles on such topics as
“Mosaic or Melting Pot?” and “Unity in Diversity,” urged that “the new
races” be invited to participate in the Diamond Jubilee celebrations “in their
own terms.”59 However, the Canadian mosaic as conceived by the liberal
nationalists of the 1920s had only a tenuous connection to the prescriptive
policy of multiculturalism introduced by the Trudeau government in the
1970s, which actively sought to encourage and nurture cultural diversity.60
In 1927, not even its most enlightened advocates believed that the image of
a cultural mosaic provided a viable permanent basis for a new nationality.
The modern Canadian nation had to be greater than the mere sum of its
parts. There was a general belief, shared by nationalists of all stripes, that no
nation could attain greatness or even ensure its survival in the absence of a
“strong national spirit” capable of overcoming political, social and cultural
differences.61 The emerging mosaic was thus viewed not as a desirable end
in itself, but as a kind of halfway house on the road to the full assimilation
implied by the policy of the melting pot. The process was symbolized
during the Jubilee year by a float that federal organizers urged western
communities to include in their Dominion Day parades, which depicted a
group of recently arrived adult immigrants in traditional national dress,
with “their children before them clothed as modern young Canadians.”62
On the eve of Dominion Day, John Dafoe, the influential editor of the
Manitoba Free Press, described how foreign immigrants, together with the
English and French majority, were “becoming one people and making a
new nation on the face of the earth,” whose inhabitants would “simply be
known as Canadians … a new people, brought into being by the mingling of
many peoples.”63 This was about as far as the pan-Canadian nationalism of
the Jubilee year was willing to go in accommodating ethnic diversity. In the
meantime, the state would try to expedite the workings of the melting pot by
inducing New Canadians, through their participation in patriotic festivals
like the Diamond Jubilee, to “direct their thoughts to Canada and to their
duties, responsibilities and privileges as citizens of the Dominion.” On July
1, 1927, they were expected to gather together “under a Canadian sky, with
Canada on their lips and Canada in their hearts.”64
The Jubilee broadcast offered, in the opinion of one leader writer, “an
unanswerable reply to all those doubting souls who have declared that with
its complexity of racial, religious, geographical and economic problems
Canada could never become a united people.”65 “Doubting souls,”
however, could point out that the new medium was unlikely to woo
unassimilated New Canadians into the melting pot as long as its messages
were delivered in languages they might not be able to understand. On the
other hand, any attempts to appeal to them in their native tongues would
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have the effect of affirming and legitimating the traditional cultures that the
National Jubilee Committee was trying to undermine.
The language issue would have mattered little to the residents of many
ethnic neighbourhoods, since so few of them owned radios in 1927. The
broadcasting industry had made remarkable advances in a few short
years–the first two federally-licensed commercial stations had gone on the
air in Winnipeg in 1922–but its impact was unevenly diffused throughout
the country. By 1927, Canada boasted 73 stations and approximately
210,000 licensed radio receivers.66 However, less than a quarter of a million
households, out of a population of nearly ten million people, represented a
minority of relatively affluent Canadians. The price of a standard three tube
Marconi radio set was between two and four hundred dollars, well beyond
the reach of most working class families in this period, when the average
industrial wage was around $1300 a year in Montreal and Toronto.67 The
radio had not yet evolved from a middle-class novelty into a household
necessity.68
In over two hundred communities, those without access to private
receivers were able to listen to the broadcast in the open air from
loudspeakers provided free of charge to municipalities by the National
Committee. Newspaper reports refer to the electrifying effect of the Peace
Tower bells playing the opening bars of O Canada on the hushed, expectant
crowds gathered in public parks and squares from Halifax to Victoria.
However, it is doubtful whether the rest of the programme beamed from
Parliament Hill received the same rapt attention as its spine tingling
opening moments. Those who experienced the Ottawa program
communally in outdoor public spaces, surrounded by friends, relations and
neighbours, would have had their attention diverted by crowd noises, bored
and unruly children, traffic sounds, poor acoustics, competing attractions,
and so on. Their thoughts and emotions were less likely to be focussed on
the succession of patriotic speeches emanating from the capital than on
their immediate surroundings.
The difficulty of assessing popular responses to the broadcast is neatly
demonstrated by the behaviour of the twenty thousand Montrealers
assembled at the foot of Mont Royal, within range of the amplifiers installed
in Jeanne Mance Park near the Cartier Monument. The reading of the
King’s Jubilee message by the Governor General evoked, to the satisfaction
of one loyal CNR engineer, “great and prolonged applause.”69 He neglected
to mention that half an hour later, the same crowd enthusiastically cheered
Henri Bourassa’s scathingly anti-imperialist speech delivered on the same
spot.70 It must also be remembered that in 1927 radio was a relative novelty,
still capable of inspiring awe and wonder. As a result, it was not always clear
whether listeners were responding to the actual substance of the
programme, or to the almost occult quality of the technical feat represented
by the broadcast. Some contemporary official reports pointed to the latter
possibility: “The spectator was divided in interest between the thoughtful
116
matter of the addresses and the marvels of modern science, which enabled
the great crowd of individuals to listen in comfort to a program being
offered at the capital.”71
Students of nationalism in the developing world have argued that the
emergence of national identity is a gradual negotiated process. It involves a
“dialectic” of local and national values and interests; a process of
selectively adopting and appropriating the new national culture imposed by
modernizing elites from the centre, without wholly abandoning local and
traditional loyalties and identifications.72 Something similar seems to have
occurred throughout much of Canada in the Jubilee summer of 1927.
Radio was not the exclusive monopoly of modernizing nationalist elites
in 1927. New Canadians used every medium available to them, including
radio broadcasting, to represent and celebrate their ethnic origins and
traditions in the wider public sphere that was opened up to them by the
Diamond Jubilee. In Manitoba, for example, ethnic associations produced
regular radio reports on the progress of local organizing efforts, which were
broadcast throughout the province every day at noon.73 In Winnipeg, two
weeks before Dominion Day, the representatives of twenty-one ethnic
communities produced “an unusual and interesting demonstration over the
radio,” grandiosely entitled “An Oratorical Symposium of All Races.” It
consisted of brief addresses by representatives of “the various nationalities
which have entered into our Western Canadian citizenship,” delivered in
seventeen different languages, and interspersed with “characteristic
musical numbers” by ethnic choirs. Ostensibly intended to focus the
interest of recent immigrants on the organization and purpose of the
upcoming celebration, it also succeeded in proclaiming the virtues of their
traditional cultures to radio listeners throughout Manitoba.74
The National Jubilee Committee did not have the power to compel
Canadians to tune in to the entire broadcast. On Dominion Day, New
Canadians throughout the west reportedly turned out in large numbers to
watch Jubilee parades and pageants, listen to patriotic orations, and look
proudly on as their children received their commemorative medals from
local dignitaries. Afterwards, however, many of them put on their lovingly
preserved traditional peasant costumes, tuned their mandolins and
balalaikas, and went out into the street to display their transplanted folk
cultures in front of admiring or bemused friends and neighbours. In
Winnipeg, for example, over 30,000 residents of the city’s ethnic
neighbourhoods in the North End gathered at Assiniboine Park on the
evening of July 1 to participate in an ambitious “Pageant of All Nations.”
Organized by representatives of twenty-five patriotic societies, it included
performances of traditional folk dances, choral concerts, community
singing, communal suppers and a variety of athletic events, advertised as “a
miniature Olympic Games.”75
117
Meanwhile, in the Orange and imperialist stronghold of Toronto–still
proudly advertising itself as the “Queen City”–over 140,000 loyal British
subjects were at the same time converging on two city parks to experience a
program of “monster military and patriotic tattoos … wonderful spectacles
of colour and light and pyrotechnical display … and marvellous ensembles
of martial and popular music.”76 Massed army bands–led by the pipes and
drums of the kilted 48th Highlanders and the Governor General’s Body
Guard in brilliant scarlet–played Rule Britannia, We’ll Never Let the Old
Flag Fall, Tipperary and other jingoistic favourites. Community singing of
traditional British folk songs, such as Men of Harlech, Bonnie Banks of
Loch Lomon, Comin’ Thro’ the Rye, and John Peel, alternated with Welsh
country dances, Irish jigs, sailors’ hornpipes and Highland flings. There
were precision drills, demonstrations by naval gun crews, mock infantry
charges, massed bands playing regimental marches, and a tableau vivant of
Britannia attended by a maidenly Canada and her sister Dominions.77 Long
past midnight, Toronto’s Jubilee tattoos came to a close with a spectacular
fireworks display, while the crowd joined the combined bands in a final
rousing chorus of God Save the King.78 Rather than remain at home
listening to the bicultural messages of racial harmony and national unity
being broadcast from Parliament Hill, the cheerful, braying multitudes in
Riverview Park preferred to revel in their collective sense of British identity
through atavistic ritual performances that pointedly excluded their
non-English-speaking fellow citizens.
It appears, therefore, that in1927 the reach of the National Broadcasting
Committee exceeded its grasp. Radio was unable to exert a genuinely
national influence during the Jubilee year, despite the brilliant technical
improvisations of Ahearne and his colleagues. The Jubilee broadcast, with
its almost pedantic regard for the cultural and linguistic sensibilities of the
two charter groups, had the unintended effect of reinforcing existing
subordinations and exclusions. Only Canadians who owned or had easy
access to radio sets, lived in places capable of receiving signals from
transmitting stations, and were able to understand one of the two official
languages could qualify for full membership in the community of listeners
created by the broadcast. Those who, as a result of poverty, linguistic
barriers or other causes lacked such access and understanding, were
effectively excluded. The Diamond Jubilee of Confederation thus both
hastened the emergence of a national political community centred on
Ottawa, and contributed to an “intensification of particularities,” as ethnic
communities sought to overcome their marginalization by engaging in “a
cultural politics of assertion.”79 The reluctance of many minorities to
follow the official Jubilee script coexisted with the desire to be politically
and economically integrated into the modern nation; however, only on
terms that did not require them to wholly set aside their distinctive group
identities.
118
The Jubilee broadcast, beamed from the Peace Tower into thousands of
homes in every corner of the Dominion, helped Canadians to internalize the
idea of the nation, and inaugurated a new, more intimate relationship
between the political centre and the periphery. The unprecedented size and
patriotic enthusiasm of the radio audience on July 1 convinced Mackenzie
King that the people of Canada had been moulded into “a single
assemblage, swayed by a common emotion, within the sound of a single
voice.”80 Many Canadians undoubtedly did feel an almost mystical sense of
communion with formerly remote political leaders speaking to them
through the ether from the capital, and with thousands of their unknown
fellow citizens, as they all marvelled together at the spellbinding music of
the bells floating out of their speakers during the opening moments of the
Jubilee broadcast. But neither the medium nor the message was powerful
enough to impose a shared, collective understanding of what it meant to be
Canadian in 1927.81 Intended by its promoters to unite all classes of citizens
under the banner of pan-Canadian nationalism, the Jubilee celebrations
were subverted by a complex process of negotiation and reinterpretation, in
which the part was empowered, with few questions asked, to stand for the
whole. By providing ethnic communities with the opportunity to act out
their cultural differences in the public sphere, the Diamond Jubilee tacitly
acknowledged and legitimized the intractable pluralism of Canadian
society. In retrospect, the most significant achievement of the national
Jubilee broadcast may have been its uncanny ability to evoke a widely
diffused sense of unity in the absence of genuine consensus on the meaning
of Canadian nationhood and citizenship.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Montreal Star, 4 July 1927, 1.
Report of the National Executive Committee on the Celebration of the Diamond
Jubilee of Confederation (Ottawa: F. A. Acland, 1928), 54.
NA, Diamond Jubilee of Confederation Collection, Cowan to Short, 2 April
1927, RG6 D3, vol. 446, file 7; From Sea to Sea … Canada’s Jubilee Radio
Broadcast July 1st, 1927 (Ottawa: s.n., 1927), 11.
NA, Diamond Jubilee of Confederation Collection, Cowan to Short, 2 April
1927, RG6 D3, vol. 446, file 7.
Maurice Charland, “Technological Nationalism,” Canadian Journal of Political
and Social Theory, X, 1-2 (1986).
Manitoba Free Press, 2 July 1927, 13.
Toronto Star, 2 July 1927, 1.
Saturday Night, 12 July 1927, 4.
Even King’s ponderous reflections on “The Message of the Carillon” that
immediately preceded the inaugural performance of the bells did not, apparently,
break the magic spell woven by radio. King explicitly linked the destructive fire
of 1916 that had consumed the original tower to the devastation of the Great War.
Just as a purified and peaceful world had emerged from the dreadful sacrifices of
the war, so did a new, more beautiful tower rise from the ashes of the “old sentinel
at midnight.” The striking of the clock at noon, succeeded by the inaugural
119
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
120
playing of the Carillon, would symbolize more than the restoration of the original
Parliament Buildings and, by extension, of the old political order associated with
them. They would signal the glorious “resurrection and birth” of a new Canada.
The Peace Tower stood as a symbol of “the spirit of this nation, bearing in its
breast the sacrifice made by our country for the world’s peace.” The cause of
international peace was identified with the values and aspirations of the young
Canadian nation that had come of age in 1927. His Dominion Day addresses,
together with other speeches delivered during the Jubilee year, were subsequently
published in Mackenzie King, The Message of the Carillon and Other Addresses
(Toronto: Macmillan, 1928). His remarks on the symbolic meaning of the
Carillon are found on pages 3-14.
Mackenzie King, The Message of the Carillon, 78-9.
Mackenzie King, The Message of the Carillon, 79.
Mackenzie King, The Message of the Carillon, 77-8.
From Sea to Sea, 15-17.
NA, Diamond Jubilee of Confederation Collection, Macpherson to Cowan, 27
May 1927, RG6 D3, vol. 446, file 7.
NA, Diamond Jubilee of Confederation Collection, Minutes of National
Executive Committee, Appendix D, Report of Chairman of Broadcasting
Committee, RG6 D3, vol. 445, file 5.
From Sea to Sea, 15.
The Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs … 1927-28 (Toronto: The
Canadian Review Company, 1928), 252.
Executive Committee, Appendix D, Report of Chairman of Broadcasting
Committee, RG6 D3, vol. 445, file 5; The Canadian Annual Review of Public
Affairs … 1927-28, 252.
Programme of National Celebration, 2. A comically anti-climactic ending to the
morning program was provided by the untimely and unannounced arrival, just as
the official party was beginning to disperse, of four breathless young runners
from Toronto, bearing official messages of greeting from the Premier, George
Howard Ferguson, to the intense annoyance of a badly flustered Mackenzie King.
King Diaries, 2 July 1927.
The role of the announcers was to enable radio listeners to visualize what was
happening in Ottawa and to convey some sense of its significance. Both the text
and the delivery were distinguished by a ponderous, high-minded earnestness.
Here, for example, is how they described Mackenzie King’s speech at the
dedication of the Carillon: “You will now listen to an address by the Right
Honourable W. L. Mackenzie King, Prime Minister of Canada. The Prime
Minister will explain the reasons that prompted the Government to install the
Carillon in the Peace Tower of the Parliament Buildings and tell you of the
spiritual significance of the message that will go forth to the world from these
bells …” And later: “At the present time Her Excellency the Viscountess
Willingdon, accompanied by His Excellency the Governor General, the Prime
Minister of Canada, Members of the Cabinet and other notable personages is
planting a Canadian maple tree on Parliament Hill, which will commemorate the
60th anniversary of Confederation. This tree is being planted on behalf of the
women of Canada and it will stand as a tribute to the part that women have played
in the growth and development of the Dominion …” And so on. NA, Announce-
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
ments–National Broadcast–July 1, 1927, Austin Weir Papers, MG30 D67, reel
M-715.
Montreal Star, 2 July 1927, 1.
Report of Executive Committee, 82-3. Willingdon’s speech was especially
praised in press reports for its brevity, in contrast to the Jubilee addresses of most
Canadian politicians who, according to the Montreal Star, “were not as brief as
they had promised to be.”
The Commonwealth was a distinctly newfangled concept in 1927, which was
bitterly resisted by many imperially-minded British Canadians. See, for example,
the remarks of G. Howard Ferguson in Echoes, March 1928, 15.
Report of National Executive Committee, 83-4. Note once again the vagueness of
the rhetoric. A shared vision of the nation’s aspirations and ideals did not yet
exist. But nationalists optimistically hoped that it would somehow emerge out of
the Jubilee celebrations. Canadian nationalism was an empty gourd that the sense
of communion–or communitas–inspired by commemorative ritual was expected
to fill.
NA, Confederation Diamond Jubilee Broadcast Programme, E. Austin Weir
papers, MG30 D67, reel M-715.
It was one of his last works. Carman, a popular lyric poet of the Canadian
landscape, whose unfortunate streak of vaguely mystical “Emersonian
transcendentalism” recommended him to Mackenzie King, died in 1929. Claude
Bissell et al., Literary History of Canada, Vol. I, (Toronto: UTP, 1965), 426-32.
Report of National Executive Committee, 84.
The last surviving offspring of Leonard Tilley and Jean Charles Chapais.
Report of National Executive Committee, 85-6.
Saturday Night, 5 July 1927, 5.
King, The Message of the Carillon, 21-24.
Report of National Executive Committee, 87-91.
Report of National Executive Committee, 96; NA, Confederation Diamond
Jubilee Broadcast Programme, E. Austin Weir Papers, MG30 D67, reel M-715.
Papers, MG30 D67, reel M-715.
Maria Tippett, Making Culture: English-Canadian Institutions and the Arts
Before the Massey Commission (Toronto: UTP, 1990), 76-77.
Carefully described as the “popular Canadian anthem,” to distinguish it from
God Save the King, which, as the IODE (Imperial Order of the Daughters of the
Empire) was always ready to point out, remained Canada’s official national
anthem.
C. J. Hanratty, “World Record Broadcast Made,” Canadian National Railways
Magazine, August 1927, 13, 39.
The suite consisted of five sentimental popular tunes: Sleep Baby Sleep, Lines to
an Indian Air, By the River, Severed and Tell Me Not Now.
Toronto Star, 2 July 1927, 4.
The “slow movement” from Macmillan’s Quartet in C Minor and his Sketch on a
French-Canadian Folk Song; and Leo Smith’s transcription of the French-
121
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
122
Canadian folk song, Dans Paris y-a-t-une brune. NA, Confederation Diamond
Jubilee Broadcast Programme, E. Austin Weir Papers, MG30 D67, reel M-715.
Described somewhat bafflingly in the program as “among the most original and
typical songs of pioneer life in the world.”
NA, Lemieux to Désy, 9 Feb. 1927, Diamond Jubilee of Confederation
Collection, RG6 D3, vol. 455, file 25.
Hanratty, “World Record Broadcast Made,” 15.
From Sea to Sea, 38-44.
William Lyon Mackenzie King Diaries, 7 July 1927.
Earnest Austin Weir, The Struggle for National Broadcasting in Canada
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1965), 117.
Graham Spry, Passion and Conviction: The Letters of Graham Spry, Rose
Potvin, ed. (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1992), 47.
W. G. Smith, Building the Nation (Toronto: Canadian Council of the Missionary
Education Movement, 1922), 170.
Howard Palmer, Patterns of Prejudice: A History of Nativism in Alberta
(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982), 79.
Kate Foster, Our Canadian Mosaic (Toronto: Dominion Council of the YWCA,
1926).
NA, Brooke Claxton Papers, MG32 B5, vol. 3, file “Canadian Club of Montreal,
1914-40.”
The modern idea of the cultural mosaic as a desirable end in itself, distinguishing
Canadian approaches to foreign immigration from the coercive operation of the
American melting pot, emerged in 1938 with the publication of John Murray
Gibbon’s Canadian Mosaic, the Making of a Northern Nation (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1938).
“A divided nation cannot fulfill its responsibilities with the same energy, the
same success as a united nation.” NA, “Special Tasks Assigned to the
Association,” Brooke Claxton Papers, MG32 B5, file “Association of Canadian
Clubs 1926-1941.”
NA, Cowan to Kerr, 23 May 1927, Diamond Jubilee of Confederation Collection,
RG6 D3, vol. 448, file 20.
Manitoba Free Press, 30 June 1927, 19.
Manitoba Free Press, 30 June 1927, 19.
Executive Committee, Appendix E, Newspaper Editorials re Jubilee Broadcast,
RG6 D3, vol. 445, file 5. The Broadcast Committee also exploited radio for less
spectacular purposes. Bulletins describing the preparations of the National
Committee were regularly issued over all Canadian broadcasting stations, which
were also urged to provide nightly bulletins on the progress of local Jubilee
preparations. Special attention was devoted to children’s programming. From the
beginning of May, every station in Canada was supplied with two historical
stories a week in English and French versions, written by Norman Cole–a popular
early radio performer known as “Uncle Dick”–suitable for airing during
“children’s hour.” NA, Diamond Jubilee of Confederation Collection, Minutes of
National Executive Committee, 21 April 1927 and 16 June 1927, RG6 D3, vol.
445, file 2.
66. The Canadian Annual Review of Public Affairs … 1927-28, 251.
67. Mary Vipond, Listening In: The First Decade of Canadian Broadcasting
1922-1932 (Montreal: McGill-Queens Press, 1992), 41.
68. The transformation of radio into a genuine mass medium of communication
occurred during the early years of the following decade, coinciding with the worst
years of the Depression.
69. Hanratty, “World Record Broadcast Made,” 11.
70. Montreal Gazette, 2 July 1927, 1; Le Devoir, 2 July 1927, 1.
71. Hanratty, “World Record Broadcast Made,” 11.
72. See, for example, Prasenjit Duara, “Historicizing National Identity, or Who
Imagines What and When,” in Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds.,
Becoming National: A Reader (Oxford: OUP, 1996), 151-178.
73. PAM, Minutes of Meeting of General Executive, 20 May 1927, Confederation
Diamond Jubilee, MG 14 A 10, file “Correspondence.”
74. PAM, letter to Manitoba Free Press from Publicity Committee, 25 May 1927,
Confederation Diamond Jubilee, MG 14 A 10, file “Correspondence.”
75. Manitoba Free Press, 14 June 1927, 4.
76. Toronto Star, 4 July 1927, 1; AO, Confederation Diamond Jubilee, Synopsis of
Tattoo Programme at Riverdale and Willowvale Parks, Friday Evening 8 p.m.,
MU 750, file 9.
77. Toronto Star, 4 July 1927, 1.
78. Toronto Star, 4 July 1927, 1.
79. Edwin E. Wilmsen, “Premises of Power in Ethnic Politics,” in Edwin N. Wilmsen
and Patrick McAllister, eds., The Politics of Difference: Ethnic Premises in a
World of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 17-18.
80. Mackenzie King, The Message of the Carillon, 79.
81. My argument draws on Benedict Anderson’s familiar notion of the nation as an
imagined community. According to Anderson, “the members of even the smallest
nation will never know most of their fellow members … yet in the minds of each
lives the image of their communion.” But not, I would add, necessarily the same
image. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1990), 15.
123
Forum
Discussion en forum
Richard J.F. Day
Can There Be a Postcolonial Multiculturalism?
A Response to Ian Angus
Introduction
In a recent article in International Journal of Canadian Studies, Ian Angus
defends his conception of a multicultural, post-colonial Canada against the
critique of multiculturalism as a dividing managerial practice. As part of
this defense, he charges those whom he sees as working within a
“Foucaultian frame” with refusing to enter “the ethico-political territory of
valuations that is inhabited by political actors.” As a result, according to
Angus, political action is rendered within this frame as “entirely external to
critical intellectual activity.”1 For those of us who are committed to
theorizing as an activist political practice, Angus’s contention must be
taken seriously. In this response I will argue that: (1) the concept of critique
that guides Foucaultian genealogy, while indeed anti-normative, remains
ethical and political; (2) while Angus’s argument represents an important
advance beyond liberal multiculturalism as state policy and political
theory, traces of a hierarchical conceptualization remain in his discourse;
and (3) if these traces are to be successfully erased, the matter of the relation
of the multicultural context to the system of liberal-capitalist nation-states
must be directly addressed rather than left as an undecidable question.
The Normative vs the Ethico-Political
Poststructuralist critique, unlike liberal theory and philosophy, makes a
distinction between the normative (moral) and the ethico-political. While I
cannot enter into an extended discussion of this distinction, I do hope to
argue convincingly that a refusal to enter into a normative discourse does
not necessarily imply a refusal of ethical and political engagement. First, it
should be noted that for writers such as Foucault, the political appears as an
unavoidable feature of human interaction, as the inevitable working out of
relations of competition, co-operation, ignorance, ambivalence–of
relations of power in all of their myriad variations. On this view, it is
impossible to avoid the political; all acts, statements, institutions–and
philosophical concepts–appear within complex webs of force. To take
Angus’s example, if Michel Foucault argues that the concept of ‘justice’
should not be deployed in a popular struggle, this is not because he wants to
avoid politics, but because he is of the opinion that deploying this concept in
this situation at this time is not the best political strategy. He is pointing out
that the decision to deploy a concept (or not) is always itself a political
decision.
The category of the ethical also operates differently within a Foucaultian
frame. Reading Angus’s text carefully, it would seem that he is either not
aware of, does not accept, or deliberately conflates the poststructuralist
distinction between the ethical and the normative: “One has to enter the
ethico-political territory of valuations … both Day and Mackey refuse to
enter such a normative discourse.”2 For Foucault, the ethical appears not as
submission to a universal duty or command, but as a moment of decision
which arises in a context of undecidability and contingency.3 This
undecidability haunts the universalizing aspirations of morality by
bringing to light the impossibility of an adequate generalization, a
sufficient abstraction, a perfect prediction. Just as we are ‘forced’ to be
political, then, we are forced to be ethical. On this analysis, recourse to
morality (normativity) appears as an attempt to avoid ethics and politics,
which is not only impossible, but indicative of an unwillingness to accept
the burden of infinite responsibility.
What then of engaged critique? How is the poststructuralist intellectual
implicated in concrete political struggles? Is this relation purely one of
externality, as Angus suggests, or is the internal/external distinction itself
questionable? In a 1976 discussion, Foucault and Deleuze argue that theory
and practice are mutually interpenetrating; each requires the other, each in a
sense ‘is’the other. For them, “practice is a set of relays from one theoretical
point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another.”4 The
ceaseless play of relays confounds the internal/external distinction, and
means that the intellectual, like everyone else, is already operating on the
field of the political.
A further point needs to be mentioned here, a point that is crucial to
understanding the position from which one might launch a poststructuralist
critique of a discourse like Canadian multiculturalism. For Foucault and
Deleuze, as should be obvious, theoretical practices are not, and cannot be,
neutral. But they go further than this, claiming that theory–what they are
willing to call theory, that is–is precisely a struggle against power as
domination. Whereas in practicing liberal theory one takes upon oneself an
implicit orientation to finding ways in which existing structures can be
reformed without altering the relations of power upon which they are based,
in practicing poststructuralist theory one takes upon oneself an explicit
orientation to radical social change that involves resistance and reconstruction at all levels. This is what I take to be the goal of a “critical ontology of
ourselves”5–nothing other than, but nothing less than, what Marx called a
ruthless critique of everything existing.
128
In the spirit of entering into an ethico-political critique of normalizing
discourses, I would like to pursue the implications of the mode of cultural
pluralism Angus advocates in his article. First I should note that there are
many points at which our positions converge. In accepting that actually
existing English-Canadian multiculturalism as state policy and liberal
theory implicitly legitimates the colonial history of the Canadian
nations-state, Angus takes a significant step away from the mainstream
discourse. We are also in complete agreement on the point that the
distinction between founding group and ethnocultural minority cannot be
maintained without “assuming the legitimacy of the Canadian nations-state
and the processes through which it was founded.”6 However, a genealogical
critique must be suspicious of any move to bracket the question of the
historical emergence and contemporary pertinence of English-Canadian
nationalism, since this would very likely result in its surreptitious return via
an unconscious repetition of the tropes of Empire.
Of course, Angus is not unaware of this peril. In defining the
characteristics of what he calls a multicultural postcolonial speech act, he
accurately identifies the limits of theoretical practices that ignore a
multiplicity of traditions of legitimation in order to install a single
overarching discourse of integration. The question then becomes: to what
extent does Angus’s own language game meet the criteria he has set out? As
I have already mentioned, just by acknowledging the existence of
postcolonial and poststructuralist critiques, Angus places himself outside
mainstream, liberal multiculturalist theory and policy.7 However, his vision
may appear to some political actors as being inadequately critical of the
status quo. This preserving effect can be seen in the repeated appearance of
hedging terms in the section entitled “A Normative Multicultural Theory.”
Angus suggests that a claim that emerges from a particular tradition “may”
become a context for judging that tradition.8 Atradition in which communal
rights is strong “may” lead to the strengthening of non-statist communities
in other traditions. One can agree, at the level of theory, that all of these
things may happen. But this is to beg the political question of the conditions
under which they have happened, or are likely to happen. Angus writes:
In principle, postcoloniality … refers not only to the presence of a
plurality of traditions in a given context but primarily to the
inability of any one of these traditions to monopolize the rules. If
no single tradition owns the context, then every speech act
functions in a double fashion … . (82, emphasis added).
If a multicultural Canada is to be seen as a postcolonial language game, then
it must be the case that no one owns its context–that no one can, and more
importantly that no one does, categorize, divide, and hierarchize the
participants in the game.
129
As Angus acknowledges, one of the primary tasks of the EnglishCanadian nations-state is, and has long been, to implement a claim of
ownership of the symbolic and geographic context known as Canada. Thus
it is unfortunate that he chooses not to directly engage with the
ramifications of this fact for contemporary philosophical-political practice.
Instead he suggests that “whether the issue [of the origin of Canadian
multiculturalism] pertains internally to inclusion in the Canadian
nations-state or externally to a group claiming equal sovereignty must
remain an open question.”9 To be sure, with this move Angus succeeds in
stepping out of the horizon of the English-Canadian nations-state. But he
immediately–and necessarily–steps into the horizon of the system of states
upon which English Canada relies for its meaning and being. This is to say
that both of the options he presents, inclusion or exclusion, assume a
context of nations, states, colonizing and colonized groups, ethnicities, and
so on; in other words, they assume the discourse of national sovereignty on
the Western model. The implicit recourse to Western concepts and the
system of states is also apparent in references to a “civic context” and
“universal rights,” neither of which make any sense outside of this
horizon.10 But the most worrisome appearance of elements of a hierarchical
ordering occurs when a distinction is made between “the nation” and
“sub-national group[s] such as linguistic, ethnic, and gender or regional
identities.”11 With the prefix “sub” it would seem that “the nation,” however
it is defined or not defined, is granted a privileged position over these other
entities. A hierarchy–and the usual liberal-multiculturalist hierarchy at
that–is thus re-installed at the moment the (English-Canadian?) nation
(dis?)appears.
I would not want to claim that this impasse is the result of an inadequate
theoretical understanding or a lingering colonial political will; rather, it is
the necessary result of a desire for the preservation, in some form, of an
“English Canada.” No nationalist enterprise can be multicultural and
postcolonial in Angus’s sense, since the nation(s)-state and the system of
states out of which it emerges are based precisely upon the ownership of
contexts, i.e. the universalizing and hierarchical apportioning of identities
to geographical and symbolic containers known as states, nations, cultures,
and ethnicities.
Alternatives Beyond the Nation(s)-State
I have suggested that what critics of poststructuralist theory see as a lack of
ethico-political engagement is more accurately viewed as an unwillingness
to participate in universalizing normative discourses. Yet the question
remains: what kinds of alternatives are open to us if we reject identification
with nations? And how can meaningful change be achieved except through
bureaucratic conditioning of symbolic and geographical territories? A
tentative answer to these questions is provided in a footnote to Angus’s text,
in which he wonders whether multiculturalism is “necessarily tied to the
130
state form.”12 Obviously, multiculturalism has been tied to the state form,
has emerged within liberal-capitalist White settler nation-states such as
Canada and Australia, and is being advocated as a model for supranational
entities such as the European Union. Theoretically, however, there is no
reason why what we might call the ‘multicultural imaginary’ could not be
broken away from the desire to preserve current relations of power as
expressed by distinctions between nations and ethnicities within the system
of states. There is also no reason why the links between multiculturalism
and capitalism, multiculturalism and racism, multiculturalism and rationalbureaucratic domination, multiculturalism and patriarchy, could not all be
broken as well.
All of these things, again, are theoretically possible–but they do not seem
politically likely. No identity that has achieved hegemony within (or
beyond) a nation-state container is presently moving towards what Angus
would call a postcolonial situation. Rather, each and every one is attempting
to maintain its control over the context of cultural interaction, and over
relations involving race, gender, sexuality, political economy, and the
natural environment. One of the favourite ploys of liberal theory is to
pretend that these ‘spheres’ can be treated separately, that we can ‘solve’
problems of cultural interaction without addressing, for example, the
racialization of poverty and the political-economic destruction of
indigenous societies under colonial relations of power. The term ‘multiculturalism’ is deeply entwined with this liberal ethico-political field. Thus, if
the goal is to move towards a non-hierarchical mode of engagement in
which no particular identity hegemonizes the space of interaction or the
rules of its construction, then it is necessary to abandon multiculturalism in
favour of explicitly non-statist, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, pro-feminist,
non-heterosexist ways of relating, in theory and practice, to ourselves, and
our human and non-human others. Whatever is ‘good’ about (English)
Canada, whatever is worth preserving, can surely be maintained or
re-invented without perpetuating the reliance on a sovereign nation within
the system of states. As many postcolonial theorists have argued, only
through painful identification with the symptoms of ongoing colonial
relations of power can we be begin to realize, rather than merely
hypothesize, a postcolonial context.
This, then, is the non-normalizing ethico-political position I am
interested in advancing, and it is much to Ian Angus’s credit that he has
opened up the possibility of a productive exchange across the abyss that
separates liberal multiculturalism from Foucaultian critique. I look forward
to continuing this discussion, and hope that others will see fit to join it as
well.
131
Notes
1.
Ian Angus, “Cultural Plurality and Democracy” in International Journal of
Canadian Studies / Revue internationale d’études canadiennes, no. 25, Spring/
Printemps 2002, p. 77.
2. Angus, p. 77.
3. For further discussion of this point, see Richard J.F. Day “Ethics, Affinity, and
the Coming Communities” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 27:1, 2001.
4. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and Power” in Foucault Live,
New York: Semiotext(e), 1996, p .74.
5. Foucault’s response to those who said he had abandoned modern critique was to
position his project precisely within modernity. This explicit positioning,
unfortunately, is often ignored by those who charge Foucault with relativism. See
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in P. Rabinow (ed.) The Foucault
Reader, New York: Pantheon, 1984, p. 50.
6. Angus, p. 71.
7. James Tully also stands out in this regard. See his Strange Multiplicity:
Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
8. Angus, p. 80.
9. Angus, p. 71.
10. Angus, p. 79.
11. Angus, p. 82.
12. Angus, p. 84, note 21.
132
Ian Angus
Abyss, or a Located Ethics?
Reply to Day
While Day claims to respond to my argument on three points, it seems to me
that the first–the polemic regarding post-structuralism–is largely beside the
point, except insofar as it seems to have struck a prevailing nerve in which
the practice of social critique is supposed to begin and end with Foucault. I
admit to using the term “normatively” (but not ‘normalizing’)
unselfconsciously to refer to any kind of a direct ethico-political discourse,
but surely it is to build too much of a castle in the air to suggest that my
woeful ignorance of Foucault’s technical terminology amounts to an
ignorance of the distinction to which that terminology points. For example,
it is standard phenomenological fare to distinguish between an ‘ethic of
rules’ and an ‘ethic of responsibility’ that “is not a matter of formulae. It is a
matter of maieutics.”1 If this does not constitute an “undecidability
haunt[ing] the universalizing aspirations of morality”2 (which in any case
sounds more like Derrida than Foucault) it will take more than a polemic
against the easy target of a childlike obedience to “an adequate
generalization, a sufficient abstraction, a perfect prediction” to prove it.3 I
did not suggest that Foucault’s position was not a politics, but that it was not
an adequate politics, because the relation between theoretical critique and
the position of political actors was misconceived. There was no general
attack on post-structuralism, nor even on Foucault, but on the inadequacy of
this relation between critique and politics in the context of Canadian
multiculturalism, such that it served to render the ethico-political
dimension of social critique invisible or unnecessary. One will search in
vain through the books of Day and Mackey to which I refer for any such
discussion.4 Consequently, I do not see that we actually disagree about this,
though we obviously disagree as to whether it should be regarded as a good
thing. So, let’s get to the substance.
Beginning by apparently crediting me with “taking a significant step
away from the mainstream discourse,” Day proceeds to claim that my
argument must “assume the discourse of national sovereignty on the
Western model,” such that, in the end, while I apparently have “opened up
the possibility of a productive exchange across the abyss that separates
liberal multiculturalism from Foucaultian critique,” my own position is an
impossibility.5 Since there are claimed to be only two positions on either
side of the abyss, and since I am obviously not in the Foucaultian camp, I
am, I gather, in the end consigned to being a liberal multiculturalist who
cannot escape his box. A short step indeed. My own preference is rather to
be thrown into the abyss. While I admit that contemporary theoretical
discourse wants to regard my position as an excluded middle between
old-fashioned English-Canadian Left-nationalism and poststructuralism or
‘postmodernism,’ I doubt whether it is really excluded on theoretical
grounds.6 It may well be excluded on political grounds (though this is
impossible to predict), but, even so, this would indicate an unfortunately
missed opportunity.
Day argues that “traces of a hierarchical conception remain in his [i.e.,
my] discourse”7 and that erasing these traces would require deciding the
question that I argued should remain undecidable—“whether the field of
application of multiculturalism is within Canada, within English Canada,
or pertains to the founding and/or legitimacy of the nations-state itself.”8
The decision is clear for Day: “Both of the options he presents, inclusion or
exclusion, assume the context of nations, states, colonizing and colonized
groups, ethnicities, and so on; that is, they assume the discourse of national
sovereignty on the Western model.”9 However, he provides no evidence for
this claim. He asserts without discussion, let alone proof, that the mere
mention of terms such as “civic context” and “universal rights” requires
that one assume a model of national sovereignty without noting that the
sentence in which they occur attempts to clarify the ‘multi-ness’ of the
multicultural context in distinction from ethnic nationalism.10 He quotes
my use of the term “sub-national … identities” to claim that I grant the
nation a “privileged position over these other entities”11 without noting that
in the previous paragraph I explicitly discuss exactly this issue, arguing that
the necessary postcolonial supplement to multiculturalism shows that
“speech that is barred from touching the rules of interaction becomes a
‘minority’speech precisely through this bar.”12 In other words, my analysis
shows the constitution of the distinction and does not assume the distinction
as independently valid. The quotes are wrenched out of context and asserted
without proof to have undesirable implications.
Emphasis is laid on the fact that I use conditional or, if one prefers,
“hedging”13 terms to describe the possibly emergent postcolonial
multiculturalism which I was trying to articulate as a political theory. Day
suggests that in the world of theory any and all variants are possible—an
assumption that I will not take the space to deny here. Thus, a theoretical
possibility proves nothing in his view; what is important is that “they do not
seem politically likely.”14 But how does he know this? It is a political
judgment and, as such, accessible to the rationality of political judgment,
which is the terrain on which my argument operates. All that is provided is
the assertion of the next sentence: “No identity that has achieved hegemony
within (or beyond) a nation-state container is presently moving towards
what Angus would call a postcolonial situation.”15 I could agree with this
statement without it affecting my argument in the least. I am making no
assertion about the direction of current history. I am articulating and
134
Abyss, or a Located Ethics?
Reply to Day
attempting to justify a political goal. Its likelihood is relevant, but not a
deciding factor. The conditional phrasing is necessary because I cannot be
sure of the political outcome.
But notice, further, that this sentence begs exactly what is at issue. Of
course, it is not likely that a “hegemonic,” if one means a “ruling,” group
would voluntarily relinquish its power—though it would also be unwise to
overlook those cases when this has happened. The real issue is whether it is
likely that a group that has been assigned a subordinate identity under the
current hegemony might, or might try to, use the resources conferred by this
location to transform themselves into a postcolonial situation of cultural
plurality (i.e. multiculturalism that has foresaken the state-organized
monopolization of the rules of interaction). Is this unlikely? I don’t see why.
Being subaltern, such groups have motives for social critique; having some
social recognition, they have some resources for struggle. I think it likely
that this is a politics that current First Nations activists and some Québec
sovereignists might find attractive and are probably already engaged in.
(Why the conditional? Because I can’t speak for them.) This, again, is the
location of my political argument. Does it have a future? Well, that depends
on politics and that is why it is undecidable. The future is unforseeable,
though a politics that builds on the limited successes of the past seems to me
a better bet than one that rhetorically seeks to step out of the continuity of
history. Day says that “whatever is ‘good’ about (English) Canada,
whatever is worth preserving, can surely be maintained or re-invented
without perpetuating the reliance on a sovereign nation within the system of
states.”16 But he says nothing about how this can “surely” be done, or with
what ideas and historical interpretations this historical task can be
accomplished. This was what my argument was about.
The apparent compliment that I have “opened up the possibility of a
productive exchange across the abyss that separates liberal
multiculturalism from Foucaultian critique”17 is to me no compliment at all
because it plays no part whatsoever in my theoretical work. I am interested
in a critique of empire, colonialism and capitalism. To me liberalism’s
moralism and Foucault’s aseptic narratives appear as two sides of the same
coin. I’ll choose the abyss between liberalism and Foucault if that is the only
spatial metaphor going, but an adequate politics requires an ethico-political
discourse in both the long and the medium term. It is the latter task to which
my essay was directed. The critique of Foucaultian approaches was only a
step toward making a political argument for a postcolonial democratic
politics embracing cultural diversity.
Notes
1.
José Huertas-Jourda, “‘You Should Have Known Better!’ A Phenomenological
Inquiry into the Mechanics of Ethical Education” in F. J. Smith (ed.)
Phenomenology in Perspective (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970) p. 170.
135
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
136
This phrase, used in a positive fashion, seems to suggest that Day believes I have
my undecidability in the wrong place. I have it at the point of political action and
political thought attuned to such action, whereas he suggests that it should be
directed to the universal pretentions of morality. He should note that I have my
undecidability where Derrida has his, “a decision, a choice, a responsibility has
meaning and a meaning that will have to pass through the ordeal of the
undecidable.” Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London:
Routledge, 1994) p. 87. But this undecidability depends on a messianic universal
which is deconstruction and justice. Foucault has no undecidability. He rejects it
as a serious contemporary problem. See Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot:
The Thought from Outside” in Foucault/Blanchot, (New York: Zone Books,
1987) section “I Lie, I Speak.” Day is either on his own at this point, or relying on
someone he has not mentioned. This makes it somewhat suspect that he can speak
for “the poststructuralist intellectual” (p. 130) in such an unrestricted fashion as
he suggests.
Richard Day, “Can There Be a Postcolonial Multiculturalism? A Response to
Angus” in International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale
d’études canadiennes, No. 26, Fall/Automne 2002, pp. 130.
Richard Day, Multiculturalism and the History of Canadian Diversity (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2000); Eva Mackey, The House of Difference:
Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (London and New York:
Routledge, 1999).
Angus” in International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale
d’études canadiennes, No. 26, Fall/Automne 2002, pp. 133.
The pervasiveness and insufficiency of this polarization between
Left-nationalism and postmodernism in Canadian Studies was addressed in
Appendix One of Ian Angus, A Border Within (Montréal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s Press, 1997). My ‘solution’ of “a plurality of dependencies” was
presented in the same work, pp. 40-7. Additional evidence of this polarization is
that I have also been criticized from the Left-nationalist side. See, Robin
Mathews’ review in The Friend: The Red Tory Review, Vol. 3, No. 2 and my
reply in the next issue.
Angus,” p. 129.
Ian Angus, “Cultural Plurality and Democracy” in International Journal of
Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d’études canadiennes, No. 25, Spring/
Printemps 2002, p. 72.
Angus,” p. 132.
Ibid, p. 132.
Ibid, p. 132.
Ian Angus, “Cultural Plurality and Democracy, p 82.
Angus,” p. 131.
Ibid, p. 133.
Ibid, p. 133.
Ibid, p. 133.
Ibid, p. 133.
Review Essays
Essais critiques
Daniel Salée
Enjeux et défis de l’affirmation identitaire et
politique des peuples autochtones au Canada :
autour de quelques ouvrages récents
Alan C. Cairns, Citizens Plus. Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State,
Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2000. viii, 280 pages.
Bernard Cleary, Capteur de rêves, s.l., Éditions de la piste et Margot Rankin,
2002. 397 pages.
Renée Dupuis, Quel Canada pour les Autochtones? La fin de l’exclusion,
Montréal, Boréal, 2001. 174 pages.
Tom Flanagan, Premières nations? Seconds regards, Québec, Septentrion,
2002. 304 pages.
Patrick Macklem, Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada,
Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2001. x, 334 pages.
Denys Delâge, le sociologue et historien québécois à qui l’on doit bon
nombre de travaux influents sur l’histoire et la dynamique des rapports
entre Autochtones et non-Autochtones, se demandait récemment dans un
court essai sur l’historiographie des Premières nations « de quel “nous”
faisons-nous l’histoire et quelle est la place des Autochtones dans ce
“nous”? » (Delâge 2000 : 526). Dans le contexte précis de cet essai Delâge
s’interrogeait surtout sur la nature de son objet privilégié d’analyse et sur la
manière appropriée de bien le cerner à travers le refus de l’héritage colonial
et la reconnaissance des Autochtones comme partie prenante de l’histoire
du Canada. Mais son interrogation transcende les frontières disciplinaires
et pourrait tout aussi bien s’appliquer aux autres disciplines des sciences
humaines et sociales qui, de plus en plus, se confrontent à la « question
autochtone ». La Commission royale sur les peuples autochtones, les
affrontements violents entre diverses nations autochtones et les autorités
étatiques qui depuis plus d’une décennie ponctuent la vie politique
canadienne – qu’on se rappelle Oka, Ipperwash, Gustafsen Lake, Burnt
Church – et, de façon générale, l’intensification des revendications et
mobilisations politiques autochtones interpellent sans équivoque les
Canadiens et les forcent à un examen de conscience sur le sens historique de
leur rapport avec les Premiers Peuples.
Cet examen de conscience, pour peu que l’on s’y livre avec intégrité, n’a
rien d’aisé et peut s’avérer assez troublant. Car l’Autochtone dérange. À
une époque où les discours autour des droits de la personne et de la
préservation des identités ethnoculturelles modulent largement
l’imaginaire socio-politique, sa présence rappelle les moments les moins
glorieux de notre passé et notre absence d’égard à l’endroit d’un groupe
ethnoculturel minoritaire délibérément marginalisé; mais elle contraint
par-dessus tout à pousser encore plus loin les limites intellectuelles et
idéologiques de la démocratie et de la communauté politique canadiennes.
Quelles dimensions de notre culture de dominants, de nos valeurs, de nos
préjugés, sommes-nous prêts à modifier, voire à abandonner pour favoriser
l’expression et le développement inconditionnels de cultures minoritaires?
Quel espace institutionnel sommes-nous vraiment prêts à consentir pour
que les Autochtones, ou tout autre groupe minoritaire, puissent vivre
librement leur différence selon les termes qu’ils auront eux-mêmes définis
et dans la jouissance d’une souveraineté dont ils auront eux-mêmes fixé les
balises? Jusqu’à quel point, en d’autres mots, sommes-nous prêts à aller
pour composer avec l’altérité qui s’incarne de par les revendications
autochtones?
Au Canada, la question autochtone s’impose désormais, incontournable,
au cœur des débats publics sur la nature de la communauté politique
nationale. Non pas comme un problème épineux qui se poserait aux
formulateurs de politiques publiques – quoique nombreux sont ceux qui la
conçoivent ainsi – mais plutôt parce qu’elle met en cause à la fois le type de
citoyenneté et la dynamique de cohésion sociale que l’État canadien
prétend vouloir instituer. L’avenir politique et la viabilité démocratique de
la société canadienne reposent en fait sur la manière par laquelle l’État et, à
travers lui l’ensemble des Canadiens, abordent la question autochtone.
Autrement dit, tout dépend en bout de piste de leur volonté de s’engager (ou
non) à recomposer les paramètres de la coexistence entre Autochtones et
non-Autochtones.
Étant donné l’importance des défis et des enjeux que suscite aujourd’hui
l’affirmation identitaire des peuples autochtones du Canada, on ne
s’étonnera pas de ce que la question ait donné lieu à un nombre croissant
d’ouvrages percutants dont certains se sont valu l’éloge de la critique et ont
été reconnus parmi les plus significatifs à être produits en sciences sociales
au cours des deux dernières années. Le présent essai en retient cinq qui,
chacun à sa manière, proposent des voies à suivre ou à ne pas suivre quant à
la manière d’aborder la question de la reconnaissance identitaire et
politique des peuples autochtones. Ils divergent quant à la teneur et à la
méthode. Leur lecture permet cependant d’apprécier l’éventail des
possibles et de juger de la distance qui nous sépare encore de l’objectif de
recomposition de la coexistence que d’aucuns souhaitent si ardemment.
140
Enjeux et défis de l’affirmation identitaire et politique des peuples
autochtones au Canada : autour de quelques ouvrages récents
Qui a peur du discours autochtoniste?
L’essai controversé de Tom Flanagan, Premières nations? Seconds
regards, pourra laisser perplexe quant à la probabilité d’un renouvellement
du rapport entre Autochtones et non-Autochtones. Ce professeur de science
politique de l’université de Calgary qui a aussi conseillé les ténors
politiques de la droite canadienne dont Preston Manning, l’ancien chef du
Reform Party, et Stephen Harper, l’actuel chef de l’Alliance canadienne (le
Reform Party réincarné), poursuit avec zèle dans cet essai paru d’abord en
anglais il y a deux ans ce qui pour lui doit prendre la forme d’une entreprise à
longue haleine de démythification de la cause autochtone : ses travaux
antérieurs sur Louis Riel et la Rébellion du Nord-Ouest en 1885 (Flanagan
1983, 1996) et sur les revendications territoriales des Métis du Manitoba
(Flanagan 1991) ne pèchent pas par excès de sympathie pour la perspective
autochtone, point s’en faut; ils s’attachent plutôt à en démontrer
l’illégitimité, la faiblesse ou l’illogisme supposés.
Premières nations? Seconds regards reste fidèle à la pensée que
Flanagan développe sur la question autochtone depuis une vingtaine
d’années et constitue une sortie en règle contre ce qu’il appelle l’orthodoxie
autochtone. Il existerait à ses dires « un accord consensuel en voie
d’émergence » qui allie divers « courants de pensée dominants chez ceux
qui élaborent la politique autochtone et qui y exercent quelque influence ».
Ce consensus que Flanagan apparente à une « doctrine » serait partagé et
« largement admis chez les leaders autochtones, les responsables
gouvernementaux et les spécialistes universitaires » (14).
L’orthodoxie contre laquelle Flanagan s’insurge s’appuie, selon lui, sur
huit propositions qu’il s’emploie à récuser en autant de chapitres : « 1. Les
Autochtones diffèrent des autres Canadiens parce qu’ils ont été les premiers
à occuper le territoire. En tant que « Premières nations », ils ont des droits
particuliers, y compris le droit « inhérent » à l’autonomie gouvernementale;
2. Les cultures autocthones étaient de même niveau que celle des
colonisateurs européens. La distinction entre civilisé et non-civilisé est un
instrument d’oppression raciste; 3. Les peuples autochtones étaient
souverains. Ils le sont encore, même s’ils choisissent de parler de « droit
inhérent à l’autonomie gouvernementale »; 4. Les peuples autochtones
étaient et sont des nations au sens à la fois culturel et politique du terme.
Leur statut de nation coïncide avec leur souveraineté; 5. Les peuples
autochtones peuvent exercer avec bonheur leur droit inhérent à l’autonomie
gouvernementale dans les réserves amérindiennes; 6. Les droits de
propriété autochtones devraient être reconnus comme des droits pleins et
entiers aux termes du droit canadien et être constitutionnalisé, et non
éteints, par des ententes sur les revendications territoriales; 7. Les traités de
cession territoriale conclus en Ontario et dans les provinces des Prairies ont
un autre sens que celui de leur libellé. Leur formulation doit être
« modernisée » – réinterprétée ou renégociée – de manière à reconnaître
l’existence d’une relation suivie entre nations; 8. Les peuples autochtones,
141
vivant et travaillant sur leur propre territoire, atteindront à la prospérité et
l’autosuffisance en combinant paiements de transfert, revenus provenant
de ressources naturelles et emploi local » (16-17).
Sur chacun de ces points, assure Flanagan, l’orthodoxie autochtone a
tout faux et ses conclusions ne correspondent pas aux faits. Il reprend à son
compte les poncifs convenus qu’utilisent depuis toujours les détracteurs
des revendications autochtones pour en délégitimer les fondements : les
Européens n’ont fait que développer des territoires inoccupés par les
peuples autochtones démographiquement faibles et toujours en
mouvement; l’habitat actuel de nombreux groupes autochtones est
postérieur à l’arrivée de colons européens; la civilisation européenne s’est
imposée par sa supériorité naturelle sur les cultures autochtones; les
peuples autochtones ne constituent pas des nations au sens propre du terme
et n’ont donc aucune base pour appuyer leur prétention à la souveraineté;
l’incompétence administrative endémique des gestionnaires autochtones,
leur penchant pour le népotisme et leur tendance à abuser des fonds publics
montrent bien que les Autochtones ne sont pas encore prêts à assumer les
responsabilités de l’autonomie gouvernementale. Et ainsi de suite. Bref,
pour Flanagan, la cause est entendue : les peuples autochtones doivent se
rendre à l’évidence : l’amélioration de leur sort dépend essentiellement de
leur volonté d’abandonner leurs pratiques culturelles traditionnelles et
toutes les revendications vouées à la promotion ou à la défense de celles-ci
pour s’intégrer de plain-pied au coeur de la société canadienne et de ses
valeurs sous-jacentes.
L’idée qu’il existe une orthodoxie autochtone participe d’une stratégie
d’argumentation savamment employée par Flanagan pour créer
l’impression qu’il nage seul et avec courage à contre-courant d’une pensée
unique manifestement mal avisée et injustement dominante. En présentant
comme une orthodoxie ce qui n’est en définitive rien de plus que la somme
des tentatives répétées des peuples autochtones du Canada d’établir les
conditions de rapports égalitaires, équitables et équilibrés avec les
non-Autochtones, Flanagan cherche délibérément à discréditer les
revendications autochtones. Celles-ci apparaissent déraisonnables et, par
l’insidieux travail de déconstruction de l’histoire qu’il opère, elles
semblent s’acharner contre la population non autochotone qui, sous sa
plume, fait désormais figure de victime d’une supercherie organisée de
toute pièce.
Ce que Flanagan range sous le vocable d’orthodoxie autochtone ce sont
essentiellement des mesures et des politiques littéralement obtenues à
l’arraché – et jamais totalement acquises, il faut bien l’admettre – à force de
remises en question persistantes et de luttes inlassables contre des pratiques
sociales, politiques et institutionnelles historiques déshonorables de la part
de l’État canadien et de la population non autochtone. En qualifiant
d’orthodoxie les quelques gains qu’ont pu faire les Autochtones, Flanagan
signifie sans équivoque qu’il n’apprécie pas le renversement possible de la
142
dynamique de pouvoir que cela pourrait représenter et n’accepte pas l’ajout
éventuel d’autres gains à ceux déjà acquis. En bon dominant, il préfère sans
doute ses subalternes humbles, sans ressource, silencieux et obéissants.
Qu’il y ait sur l’échiquier politique canadien un discours autochtoniste, on
en disconviendra pas – et il ne faudrait pas non plus en prendre ombrage, pas
plus qu’il faudrait déplorer qu’il y ait un discours féministe, un discours
ouvriériste ou un discours libéral – mais qu’il se soit érigé en orthodoxie
influente, il faut voir dans cette manière de poser les choses une exagération
sans laquelle le pamphlet de Flanagan tourne à vide : il lui faut, pour bien
marquer le coup, donner au discours autochtoniste beaucoup plus
d’ampleur politique qu’il n’a en réalité. Mais songeons-y bien : si le
discours autochtoniste avait toute la force d’impact que lui suppose
Flanagan, les Autochtones du Canada seraient-ils encore confinés au
dernier rang de tous les indicateurs socio-économiques, très loin derrière la
majorité de la population?
Au fond, la démarche de Flanagan participe de l’inquiétude, maintes fois
exprimée dans l’histoire de l’humanité, de groupes ou de populations dont
la domination socio-politique et institutionnelle séculaire est remise en
question par d’autres groupes ou populations qui ont fait les frais de cette
domination et qui tentent maintenant d’en contrer les effets délétères.
Comme la plupart des critiques d’une certaine politique de la
reconnaissance, Flanagan déplore que l’esprit de la politique autochtone
actuelle, qu’il prétend inspirée par le Rapport de la Commission royale sur
les peuples autochtones, cède à tort à un penchant de plus en plus prononcé à
admettre comme politiquement recevable les revendications identitaires
des minorités ethnoculturelles. Cette tendance, évidemment fâcheuse à ses
yeux, risque de dénaturer la nature profonde du Canada. Le pays, croit-il,
menace d’être « redéfini comme un État multinational comprenant un
archipel de nations autochtones qui seraient propriétaires d’un tiers du
territoire canadien, exemptes d’impôts fédéraux et provinciaux,
économiquement soutenues par des paiements de transfert provenant des
contribuables, autorisées à ne plus se soumettre aux lois fédérales et
provinciales et libres d’entretenir des relations diplomatiques « de nation à
nation » avec ce qui restera du Canada » (15). Flanagan doute que ce soit là
une vision du Canada que la plupart des Canadiens soient prêts à entériner.
Il estime de surcroît que la mise œuvre d’une pareille vision ne saurait
profiter à l’ensemble des Autochtones : « les leaders autochtones pourraient
certes mener de satisfaisantes carrières politiques, mais la plupart de leurs
commettants resteraient pauvres, dépendants et marginalisés dans des
réserves ou autres enclaves territoriales » (15).
Flanagan se réclame du libéralisme classique. Croyant avec ferveur aux
vertus de l’individualisme, de l’État minimum et de l’égalité formelle
devant la loi, il se pare de ces principes qu’il présume moralement
supérieurs pour dénoncer les « abus » et les écarts politiques auxquels
conduit la satisfaction des prétentions autochtones. Dans sa préface de
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courtoisie à l’édition française, Guy Laforest salue le courage de Flanagan,
sa rigueur, sa volonté de « désenchanter le réel », de dire des choses que
certains n’aiment pas nécessairement entendre. En réalité, comme la
critique l’a déjà évoqué, l’auteur de Premières nations? Seconds regards
livre une charge idéologique à fond de train suggérant en remplacement sa
propre orthodoxie (Rotman 2001), celle que le néo-libéralisme ambiant
impose désormais sans conteste. Loin de désenchanter le réel, il cherche
beaucoup plus à constituer un argument en faveur du maintien du rapport de
force qui, de tout temps, a été à l’avantage marqué des populations non
autochtones qu’à repenser la donne.
On pourrait être tenté de croire que les positions de Flanagan sont celles
d’un marginal dont on a pas à tenir compte. Rares, après tout, sont ceux qui
aujourd’hui osent, comme lui, proclamer ouvertement la supériorité
civilisationnelle des Européens et affirmer que le colonialisme de ces
derniers ait été une bonne chose. Or, malgré quelques critiques acerbes, la
version originale anglaise de Premières nations? Seconds regards (First
Nations? Second Thoughts) a connu un succès d’estime remarquable.
Publié par l’une des plus importantes presses universitaires du Canada
(McGill-Queen’s University Press), l’ouvrage s’est mérité en 2000 le prix
Donald Smiley de l’Association canadienne de science politique et le
prestigieux prix de la Fondation Donner pour le meilleur livre de l’année sur
un sujet lié aux politiques publiques canadiennes. De telles accolades
laissent songeur : beaucoup plus de gens que ne l’admet Flanagan
sympathiseraient avec sa vision de la question autochtone.
Le fait est qu’on le prend au sérieux. Aussi radicalement anti-autochtone
qu’elle puisse être, sa pensée, dit-on, offre matière à réflexion. En tout cas,
Septentrion, l’éditeur francophone de l’ouvrage, le croit certainement
puisqu’il ajouté au livre quatre textes d’universitaires connus et respectés
qu’il a invités à donner la réplique à Flanagan. L’un d’eux, Jean-Luc Migué,
économiste et membre du Fraser Institute, fait écho en tous points aux
positions de Flanagan et l’appuie entièrement. Quant aux trois autres, ils y
vont d’interventions plus nuancées. Le constitutionnaliste Ghislain Otis, de
l’université Laval, note bien les écarts interprétatifs de Flanagan sur divers
points de droit dont, notamment, la question de l’inhérence des droits
ancestraux, mais il considère que celui-ci contribue malgré tout au débat sur
le bien-fondé de la légitimité de ces mêmes droits. Jean-Jacques Simard,
sociologue, de l’université Laval également, prend en défaut Flanagan,
particulièrement lorsque celui-ci soutient que les Autochtones n’avaient
pas d’institutions socio-politiques développées, mais il partage avec lui sa
hantise des droits ancestraux. Finalement, le philosophe Charles Taylor,
dont les travaux internationalement reconnus le situent politiquement aux
antipodes de Flanagan, salue « la solide dose d’iconoclasme » que ce
dernier injecte au débat et souscrit, non sans certaines réserves, à la thèse de
l’existence d’une orthodoxie autochtone.
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Politesse oblige sans doute, aucun de ces auteurs n’ose désapprouver
Flanagan clairement et sans équivoque. On ne peut plus révélateur : n’est-ce
pas qu’au fond, malgré l’intransigeance idéologique du politologue et le
caractère tranché de son point de vue, on estime qu’il n’a pas tout à fait tort?
On peut bien vouloir être solidaire de la cause autochtone, mais faut-il que
les réparations consenties en compensation d’un passé inique dont on est,
dans l’immédiat, guère responsable, s’accomplissent au prix de la
dénégation de l’espace civique et institutionnel auquel se rattache notre
identité socio-politique profonde? « L’équanimité du public canadien face
aux aspirations autochtones », note Jean-Jacques Simard, « trahit surtout
(...) une indulgente indifférence. Du moins, tant que ces refoulés ne sortent
pas trop indûment de leurs lointaines réserves (...) pour venir troubler la
quiétude des honnêtes gens. Car dès que surviennent quelque part des
esclandres tapageurs, des barricades dressées en travers des chemins, les
sondages subséquents révèlent un durcissement relatif des positions dans le
voisinage “majoritaire” » (230). Nous hésiterions donc à condamner
carrément les positions d’un Flanagan parce qu’elles ne sont pas sans
trouver écho dans notre propre vision des choses, particulièrement lorsque
les revendications autochtones nous poussent dans nos derniers
retranchements et nous demandent des efforts d’imagination politique et de
reconfiguration institutionnelle auxquels nous ne sommes pas préparés.
Repousser les frontières de la citoyenneté : vers une nouvelle
donne?
En 2000, en même temps que Tom Flanagan, un autre politologue canadien
bien connu, Alan Cairns de l’université de la Colombie-Britannique,
proposait aussi sa propre lecture de la question autochtone. Son livre,
Citizens Plus, ne s’est pas mérité les honneurs auxquels a eu droit Flanagan
(il a quand même été également primé par la Fondation Donner, au second
rang derrière Flanagan), mais il a été généralement reçu avec plus de
sollicitude. Le ton et l’approche de Cairns, exempts du mordant qui
caractérise l’ouvrage de Flanagan, y furent pour beaucoup. Apôtre du
middle ground, de la solution mitoyenne, Cairns s’est gagné des sympathies
beaucoup plus senties tant parmi les Autochtones que les non-Autocthones.
Et pour cause. Plutôt que de remettre en question la légitimité des
revendications autochtones, Cairns l’admet d’emblée et cherche à combler
notre déficit d’imagination politique en appelant à la mise en place
d’arrangements institutionnels et constitutionnels qui reconnaîtraient la
différence identitaire autochtone et consolideraient la citoyenneté
canadienne que partagent Autochtones et non-Autochtones.
Pour l’essentiel, Cairns revient aux conclusions et recommandations
d’une enquête exhaustive à laquelle il participa sur « Les Indiens
contemporains du Canada », commandée en 1964 par le ministère fédéral
de la Citoyenneté et de l’Immigration. Cette enquête, mieux connue sous le
titre de Rapport Hawthorn (du nom de son directeur, le professeur Harry
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Hawthorn, anthropologue à l’université de la Colombie-Britannique)
s’étendit sur près de trois ans et impliqua plus d’une quarantaine de
chercheurs qui avaient pour mandat d’étudier « les conditions qui
empêchent la concrétisation des aspirations normales et justes des Indiens
du Canada vers le bien-être matériel et la santé, et qui leur enlèvent la
conviction qu’ils sont traité équitablement et avec dignité dans la grande
société canadienne » (Hawthorn 1968 : 1). Cairns joua un rôle clé dans la
réalisation de l’étude en tant que chercheur principal et co-auteur de plus de
la moitié du rapport. Le Rapport Hawthorn soutenait qu’il ne fallait pas
chercher à assimiler ou à intégrer les Autochtones dans la société
canadienne contre leur gré ou au détriment de leur identité culturelle
particulière. Au contraire, les auteurs du rapport souhaitaient plutôt que les
Autochtones se voient accorder toute la latitude nécessaire pour prendre des
décisions qui regardent la préservation de leur identité. Pour cette raison, ils
devraient être considérés par l’État comme des « citoyens avantagés »
(citizens plus) qui, en plus des droits et des devoirs qui découlent
normalement de la citoyenneté se verraient également reconnaître des
« droits supplémentaires en leur qualité de membres privilégiés de la
collectivité canadienne » (Hawthorn 1968 : 11). À cette fin, l’État doit
veiller à ce que Autochtones et non-Autochtones soient sur un pied
d’égalité dans les domaines social et économique, il doit appuyer sans
relâche la cause autochtone, lutter contre les tensions raciales qui opposent
Autochtones et non-Autochtones et s’assurer que les droits et privilèges des
Autochtones soient respectés et que la population et les gouvernements en
admettent l’existence.
Le Rapport Hawthorn devait rester lettre morte. Quelque temps après sa
parution, le gouvernement de Pierre Elliott Trudeau proposait en 1969 son
Livre blanc sur sa « politique indienne » qui, tout à fait à l’opposé
d’Hawthorn, récusait l’idée d’un statut citoyen différencié pour les
Autochtones et estimait que c’était précisément cette approche, à travers le
système de réserves et une loi d’application spéciale (la loi sur les Indiens),
qui avait empêché les Autochtones de participer pleinement, librement et
en toute égalité à la vie sociale et politique de la société canadienne.
L’intégration totale des Autochtones, sans statut particulier et avec tous les
avantages de la citoyenneté canadienne, constituait pour le Livre blanc la
seule solution acceptable, susceptible de favoriser l’émancipation des
Autochtones. Derrière cette vision se profilait l’idée qu’il fallait faire table
rase du passé, oublier les réserves, oublier les traités et poser les bases d’une
dynamique nouvelle en vertu de laquelle les distinctions entre Autochtones
et non-Autochtones disparaîtraient. Aux yeux du gouvernement le Livre
blanc participait d’intentions honorables : ne proposait-il pas d’éliminer les
différences qui faisaient des Autochtones des citoyens de deuxième classe?
Toutefois, dans la mesure où il en appelait à la dilution de l’identité
autochtone dans le grand tout canadien, on le taxa d’assimilationniste. Il fut
l’objet d’un tollé de protestations qui eurent pour effets de mobiliser les
forces vives de la cause autochtone et d’en accélérer la politisation. On
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connaît la suite : le gouvernement céda aux pressions, retira son Livre blanc,
le statu quo fut maintenu et les tensions entre l’État canadien et les
Autochtones s’en trouvèrent ravivées. On ne revint toutefois pas à
Hawthorn.
L’économie générale de la réflexion que propose Citizens Plus repose en
grande partie sur le contraste entre les propositions du Livre blanc et celles
du Rapport Hawthorn. Cairns appréhende à travers la distance
programmatique qui sépare les deux documents la difficulté de repenser la
dynamique des rapports sociaux et politiques, de concevoir un modus
vivendi entre Autochtones et non-Autochtones en des termes qui
satisfassent les uns et les autres sans, surtout, mettre en péril la pérennité de
la communauté politique canadienne. Car pour lui c’est là le fin mot de
l’affaire. Démocrate et respectueux de l’altérité, il se garde bien de
souscrire aux perspectives assimilationnistes du Livre blanc; mais étant
aussi profondément attaché à la préservation de la communauté politique
canadienne, il ne saurait lui être question non plus de sanctionner des
arrangements institutionnels et constitutionnels qui en modifieraient
substantiellement l’essence. Aussi, Cairns pose bien le défi politique de la
question autochtone : avons-nous la capacité de développer des institutions
et un vocabulaire politiques qui affirment la multiplicité identitaire tout en
cultivant une solidarité communautaire qui transcende les différences?
La question n’est pas tout à fait neuve mais n’en est pas moins centrale ;
elle obsède la pensée politique libérale occidentale depuis plus d’une
décennie. La réponse que Cairns y apporte montre combien, tout comme la
plupart de auteurs qui s’y sont frottés, il glisse lui aussi dans une sorte de
clair-obscur de la reconnaissance identitaire : va pour l’expression, voire
l’appui institutionnel, d’identités culturelles autres et différentes de celle de
la majorité, tant et aussi longtemps qu’elles trouvent à s’accomplir selon les
paramètres structuraux et les dynamiques de rapports intercommunautaires
pré-établis par la norme dominante de l’État et de la communauté politique
qui les accueillent. Son réquisitoire contre l’esprit et les conclusions du
Rapport de la Commission royale sur les peuples autochtones fixe sans
équivoque les limites qu’il croit devoir imposer à la reconnaissance
identitaire des peuples autochtones du Canada. Cairns, en effet, en a contre
les appels de la Commission à l’établissement de partenariats négociés de
« nation à nation » entre les gouvernements canadiens et les peuples
autochtones, contre la citoyenneté et le cadre fédéral multinationaux qui en
émergeraient, contre les allégeances civiques disparates qui se
constitueraient suivant l’appartenance des individus à des nations séparées.
À son avis, la reconnaissance recommandée par la Commission des
soixante à quatre-vingts nations autochtones dotées de pouvoirs politiques
autonomes et de ressources territoriales et économiques appropriées ne
ferait que compliquer inutilement la gestion des rapports intergouvernementaux au sein de la fédération canadienne, créerait des
communautés politiques beaucoup trop petites pour être fiscalement et
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administrativement viables, isolerait davantage les Autochtones vivant en
milieu urbain (près de deux tiers de tous les Autochtones du Canada), sans
parler de la menace que cela représenterait pour l’unité politique du pays.
Cairns note que les conditions originales qui ont pu sous-tendre à un
certain moment des relations de nation à nation n’existent plus aujourd’hui,
tout aussi navrantes que soient les raisons historiques qui ont conduit à cet
état de fait. Il préfère plutôt insister sur l’hybridité ethnoculturelle d’un
grand nombre d’Autochtones (suite aux mariages mixtes notamment), sur
la participation de la plupart d’entre eux aux grands réseaux sociaux et
économiques de la société canadienne, sur leur proximité normative et
culturelle aux autres Canadiens, bref sur tout ce qui, selon lui, rapproche
Autochtones et non-Autchtones dans la même communauté citoyenne
qu’est le Canada. Pour Cairns, la clé de la question autochtone tient en
définitive dans la recherche de solutions qui, tout en étant adaptées au cadre
institutionnel actuel, tiendraient respectueusement compte de ce qui
séparent Autochtones et non-Autochtones et préserveraient l’unité de la
communauté politique et l’intégrité de l’État canadien.
De la difficile reconnaissance de la différence autochtone
Dans les mois qui ont suivi la parution simultanée des ouvrages de Flanagan
et de Cairns, les deux hommes ont été conviés à plusieurs reprises à
présenter et à débattre de leur position respective sur diverses tribunes. De
leurs échanges,1 on pouvait aisément retenir l’impression que la
perspective de l’un se présentait comme l’antithèse de l’autre. D’un côté,
l’intransigeance assimilationniste, néo-libérale et hargneuse de Flanagan;
de l’autre, le respect démocrate et l’ouverture humaniste de Cairns. À y
regarder de plus près cependant, la distance qui sépare les deux auteurs est
beaucoup moins importante qu’il n’y paraît. Bien que Cairns récuse la
vision réductrice de Flanagan, il n’en condamne pas moins le parallélisme
socio-politique que supposent les exhortations à la reconnaissance des
peuples autochtones comme nations et qui, pour plusieurs, constitue une
condition sine qua non de l’émancipation autochtone. Au fond, les deux
politologues restent fondamentalement préoccupés par l’unité du sujet
politique canadien, par la préservation du cadre institutionnel étatique et
par la menace que pourrait constituer des revendications autochtones
débridées pour la stabilité constitutionnelle et politique de l’État canadien.
Leur inquiétude est la même. Leur opposition apparente est surtout
question de degré : Flanagan n’a tout simplement pas la patience de Cairns
devant les revendications autochtones, mais Cairns n’entend pas non plus
en agréer la pleine légitimité jusqu’à la limite de ce qu’elles peuvent
impliquer en termes de restructuration du système politique canadien et de
sa dynamique constitutive de rapports de pouvoir. Un critique exaspéré dira
d’ailleurs de Cairns qu’il ne déclame ni plus ni moins qu’une version à peine
modifiée de la vieille rengaine assimilationniste (Alfred 2000).
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Qu’on ait pu présenter le débat entre Flanagan et Cairns comme un
affrontement entre deux perspectives contradictoires dans lequel Cairns
fait figure d’apôtre de la tolérance et de la réconciliation témoigne en réalité
de la résistance inhérente du discours politique dominant à penser la
différence identitaire et à imaginer des dynamiques novatrices
d’interaction entre majoritaires et minoritaires au-delà du cadre convenu de
la communauté politique instituée. La position de Cairns, on en conviendra,
n’est pas sans mérite : à tout prendre, elle paraît infiniment plus
bienveillante et sympathique que celle de Flanagan. Mais elle repose
surtout sur l’espoir nébuleux selon lequel à force de bonne volonté et de
respect de part et d’autre s’instaurera bien un équilibre institutionnel
mutuellement satisfaisant. Elle fait abstraction – tout comme celle de
Flanagan d’ailleurs – des rapports de pouvoir et d’exclusion, des blessures
sociales et économiques bien réelles qui n’ont jamais été à l’avantage des
Autochtones et qui perdurent malgré la rhétorique officielle au contraire. Il
y a trente ans, l’idée de reconnaître les Autochtones comme des citizens plus
pouvait paraître avant-gardiste; aujourd’hui, après trois décennies d’un
bras-de-fer incessant entre l’État et les Autochtones, de quelques avancées,
certes, mais aussi de constantes remises en question des gains consentis,
voire de reculs qui ont radicalisé ces derniers, elle vient trop tard et offre trop
peu à des gens qui n’ont pratiquement plus rien à perdre et tout à gagner.
Pour plusieurs, l’heure n’est plus désormais aux ré-arrangements
institutionnels et constitutionnels, aux formules équivoques, mais bien à
l’abandon inconditionnel, sans ambiguïté, de rapports de pouvoir par trop
inégaux et à la mise en place d’une donne fondamentalement nouvelle.
La question reste entière, donc. Peut-on penser le rapport à l’Autochtone
au-delà de l’horizon somme toute limité que proposent Cairns et la plupart
des penseurs politiques libéraux? Les trois autres ouvrages recensés dans le
présent essai critique offrent quelques réponses à cette question et ouvrent
des avenues d’analyse un peu plus audacieuses que celle proposée par
Cairns.
Dans Capteur de rêves, Bernard Cleary pose les conditions essentielles
d’un « nouveau contrat social » (165), d’une redéfinition acceptable pour
les Autochtones de la relation que ceux-ci entendent établir avec les
Canadiens. L’auteur est bien connu au Québec particulièrement pour sa
promotion inlassable de la cause autochtone. D’origine innue, journaliste et
communicateur de métier, artisan des premiers mouvements de
mobilisation politique autochtone au cours des années soixante, il a agi à
maintes reprises depuis à titre de conseiller et négociateur pour le compte de
plusieurs nations autochtones dans divers dossiers de revendications
territoriales, de gestion des ressources naturelles et de partenariat
économique. Il a publié en 1989 un livre assez percutant, intitulé L’enfant
de 7000 ans, qui connut un certain succès d’estime et dans lequel il trace un
portrait troublant des rapports entre Autochtones et non-Autochtones et
propose les voies de la reconquête du destin collectif des peuples
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autochtones. Capteur de rêves reprend les thèmes abordés dans ce premier
ouvrage, mais n’en a ni la profondeur, ni la qualité.
Pour le moins imparfait, le nouveau livre de Cleary est dépourvu de
structure cohérente et de toute cohésion d’ensemble. Il est répétitif, rédigé
dans une langue brouillonne et victime, selon toute vraisemblance, d’une
révision linguistique laxiste. Salmigondis de souvenirs, d’anecdotes, de
déclarations pamphlétaires, d’autopromotion, de dénonciations acides et
de réflexions éparses, l’auteur y discute sans plan d’exposition précis d’un
peu tous les sujets qui se rapportent à la question autochtone. Des
négociations territoriales à la mesquinerie des fonctionnaires en passant par
les rapports entre Autochtones et non-Autochtones, l’intransigeance des
traditionalistes et la spiritualité autochtone, l’auteur dresse le bilan de ses
réalisations et défend sans complexe sa conception du dossier autochtone,
la seule, s’il faut l’en croire, qui ait quelque validité. Malgré ses faiblesses
considérables, l’ouvrage n’est tout de même pas sans intérêt, notamment
pour ce qu’il révèle : les clivages socio-économiques, les querelles
politiques intracommunautaires, les visions disparates et contradictoires
dans la manière d’aborder les problèmes auxquels sont confrontées les
communautés autochtones, la mauvaise foi des gouvernements et des
administrations publiques dans de nombreux dossiers relatifs à la gestion
des affaires autochtones – rien qu’on ne sût ou ne soupçonnât déjà, mais qui,
à travers la plume d’un vieux routier de la cause comme Cleary, parvient de
première source et confirme ce que l’on appréhendait. D’aucuns
prétendront sans doute et avec raison qu’il faille aborder les propos
hétéroclites de l’auteur avec un certain scepticisme – l’homme insiste un
peu trop sur ce qu’il considère comme ses bons coups et se fait trop souvent
la part belle – mais Capteur de rêves n’en constitue pas moins un
témoignage instructif d’un acteur clé de la question autochtone.
Derrière le fatras, s’articule tout de même une position simple,
inébranlable, qui permet de saisir toute la distance encore considérable
entre les vœux pieux qui alimentent la voie mitoyenne d’un Cairns et les
exigences minimales en-deça desquelles la question autochtone ne saurait
se régler à la satisfaction des Premiers Peuples. Cleary n’a rien d’un radical
et admet la nécessité de compromis étapistes, mais il est clair qu’une
solution à la Citizens plus lui semble tout à fait insuffisante et bien loin de la
reconnaissance que les Autochtones sont en droit de réclamer. Il renvoie au
projet de Déclaration sur les Droits des Peuples autochtones des Nations
Unies, au Rapport de la Commission royale sur les peuples autochtones,
aux droits collectifs reconnus aux Autochtones par la la Loi
constitutionnelle de 1982 et par de nombreux jugements favorables de la
Cour suprême. Pour Cleary, les gouvernements doivent reconnaître
maintenant et sans plus tarder la pleine autonomie des peuples autochtones
en tant qu’entités politiques souveraines, socialement et culturellement
distinctes. Ces derniers, croit-il, « souhaitent retrouver et actualiser les
formes de souveraineté et d’autonomie qu’ils avaient jadis avant l’arrivée
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de l’homme blanc pour mieux se développer selon leurs propres choix de
société. Ces choix respecteront la spécificité de leurs cultures, de leurs
langues et de leurs modes de vie » (146). Pareil objectif n’a rien d’insensé ou
de démesuré : « il ne s’agit pas là de sécession ou d’anarchie, mais bien de
l’acceptation d’une organisation politique, sociale et économique qui
corresponde à nos traditions et surtout à nos ambitions » (141). Cleary reste
ouvert quant aux modalités de reconnaissance de la différence identitaire
des peuples autochtones bien qu’il privilégie surtout la voie d’ententes
négociées qui permettraient la coexistence harmonieuse des Autochtones
et des non-Autochtones en tant que partenaires égaux et de plein droit
commis au développement social et économique des peuples autochtones.
L’auteur endosse sans équivoque les conclusions du Rapport de la
Commission royale sur les peuples autochtones et ne cherche rien de moins
qu’à établir la relation de nation à nation préconisée par la Commission.
En-deça de ce seuil minimum, nul ne saurait prétendre à la mise en place
d’un nouveau contrat social.
La perspective essentiellement politique que soutient Cleary suppose de
la part de l’État canadien et de la population non autochtone en général la
volonté de reconnaître inconditionnellement la différence identitaire
autochtone. Les ouvrages de Flanagan et de Cairns dont l’influence n’est
pas négligeable témoignent clairement qu’à cet égard la cause n’est pas
gagnée. En fait, l’exemple récent de l’opposition populaire à l’Approche
commune, le projet d’entente territoriale et administrative négocié par les
Innus du Lac Saint-Jean et de la Côte-Nord avec les gouvernements du
Québec et du Canada, démontre bien que sur le terrain on est encore loin
d’avoir agréer l’idée d’un rapport de nation à nation.2
C’est à tort, s’il faut en croire le juriste Patrick Macklem, que certains se
refusent encore à admettre la différence identitaire dont se réclament les
Autochtones et les revendications politiques qu’elle inspire. Dans son
dernier ouvrage, Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada, le
professeur de droit de l’université de Toronto soutient qu’il existe une
relation constitutionnelle unique entre les Autochtones et l’État canadien,
qui pose, de jure à tout le moins, le caractère distinct des Autochtones et
force à un traitement différencié de ces derniers. Macklem, qui s’est valu
pour ce livre le prix Donald Smiley de l’Association canadienne de science
politique et le prix Harold Innis de la Fédération canadienne des sciences
humaines et sociales en 2002, défend avec éloquence et conviction
l’argument selon lequel l’idéal égalitaire, que plusieurs croient menacé
dès lors que l’on admet la différence entre citoyens au point de l’inscrire
dans la constitution, se trouve en fait renforcé par la relation
constitutionnelle particulière qui lie les Autochtones et l’État canadien. À
son avis, la protection constitutionnelle des intérêts qui participent de la
différence autochtone3 garantit une répartition juste et équitable des
avantages qui découlent du pouvoir social et politique. Ainsi, les cultures
des peuples autochtones méritent la protection que leur offre la constitution
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canadienne parce qu’elles font face à des défis formidables qui entravent
leur capacité de survie et de reproduction. De même, sans protection
constitutionnelle, les peuples autochtones qui, après tout, occupaient
l’espace canadien bien avant l’établissement de l’État, n’auraient jamais
aucune chance de jouir des droits de propriété admis pour tous les
Canadiens. C’est la protection constitutionnelle, également, qui permet
d’asseoir le droit des peuples autochtones à un statut souverain en
reconnaissance, notamment, du fait que ces derniers étaient des nations au
même titre que les nations européennes au moment des premières prises de
contact, mais aussi afin de leur permettre de développer les outils politiques
et administratifs nécessaires pour juguler les inégalités auxquelles ils sont
confrontés. Enfin, la reconnaissance constitutionnelle de la validité des
traités signés au cours de années balise les termes et conditions de la
coexistence entre Autochtones et non-Autochtones. Bref, les protections
qu’accorde la constitution canadienne aux peuples autochtones ne sont que
justes remèdes à la dynamique de pouvoir injuste qui a historiquement
désavantagé les Autochtones.
Bien qu’il soit écrit dans une langue claire, Indigenous Difference and
the Constitution of Canada n’est pas un ouvrage facile. Macklem fait
montre d’une maîtrise impressionante des aspects techniques de la question
et d’une érudition juridique remarquable qui ne laisseront pas d’intimider
qui n’est pas rompu, comme lui, à l’analyse jurisprudentielle et à la théorie
du droit. Mais justement parce qu’il repose sur des assises solides et
difficilement contestables, ce livre fournit des arguments de poids à qui
appuie les revendications identitaires et les prétentions politiques des
peuples autochtones – ou à qui, plus simplement, cherche à prendre le
contre-pied de perspectives qui nient ou minimisent la différence
identitaire autochtone. En ce sens, l’approche de Macklem a l’avantage
d’opérer au-delà d’objectifs politiques spécifiques. Un militant comme
Cleary revendique la différence identitaire pour des raisons politiques
évidentes qui ne manquent pas toutefois d’en discréditer la légitimité aux
yeux de qui ne les endosse pas. Macklem part de postulats similaires à ceux
qu’invoquent Cleary et la plupart des défenseurs de la différence identitaire
autochtone – distinctivité culturelle autochtone menacée par les modes de
vie non autochtones, occupation continue du territoire qui remonte à des
temps immémoriaux, existence d’une souveraineté politique antérieure à la
prise de contact avec les Européens, participation active des Autochtones à
la négociation des traités – mais il les inscrit en bout de piste dans un registre
argumentaire qui dépasse la seule raison politique. Son raisonnement est
simple : l’État canadien doit son existence à un projet colonialiste qui a
injustement nié la souveraineté pré-existante des peuples autochtones; par
ailleurs, il a pris des engagements constitutionnels qui confirment la
différence identitaire et civique de ces derniers; ne pas chercher à mettre en
place, ou résister à la mise en place d’arrangements constitutionnels et
institutionnels qui honorent ces engagements équivaut en quelque sorte à
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nier les fondements mêmes de la constitution canadienne et des principes de
démocratie, d’égalité et de justice sociale qui l’animent.
En fait, pour Macklem, la survie et la viabilité de la communauté
politique canadienne reposent sur la capacité de l’État à reconnaître la
différence identitaire autochtone et à lui donner les moyens de s’épanouir
selon ses termes propres. Mieux, la légitimité à long terme de la
souveraineté de l’État canadien dépend de la reconnaissance
constitutionnelle d’espaces territoriaux et juridictionnels autonomes à
l’intérieur desquels les sociétés autochtones pourront se développer
librement. Cet objectif suppose une conception pragmatique et non absolue
de la souveraineté qui laisserait cours à l’existence éventuelle d’une
pluralité d’entités disposant chacune d’une autorité souveraine à l’intérieur
de l’ordre constitutionnel canadien (7).
Macklem met la barre haute : son regard sur la nature et sur l’avenir du
rapport entre Autochtones et non-Autochtones au Canada est
manifestement exigeant et nous amènerait, s’il se concrétisait, bien au-delà
de ce que plusieurs sont prêts à imaginer ou à consentir. Malgré la force
magistrale de sa démonstration et de son analyse, la perspective qu’avance
Macklem incommode nécessairement ceux qui ne sauraient l’approuver
(d’autant plus qu’ils pourront difficilement le prendre en défaut du strict
point de vue technique et légal de son argumentation). Dans Citizens Plus,
Alan Cairns admet à contrecœur qu’il trouve peu à redire des travaux de
Macklem et de quelques autres juristes qui partagent sa manière de voir, si
ce n’est qu’il en a contre leur tendance à isoler et à autonomiser l’identité
autochtone; contre leur « unremitting focus on one of the communities that
make up Canada and an indifference, or at least a lack of attention to, the
Canada of which Aboriginal peoples are a part » (179). À l’opposé, d’autres
ont soutenu que de conceptualiser les relations entre les peuples
autochtones et l’État canadien en termes constitutionnels, comme le fait
Macklem, dénature la vision autochtone des rapports sociaux et impose aux
cultures autochtones une norme sociale et politique qui leur est
fondamentalement étrangère (Turpel 1990). Macklem ne récuse pas cette
assertion et admet même que le fossé qui sépare les visions autochtones et
non autochtones puisse empêcher qu’émerge la synthèse constitutionnelle
qu’il souhaite voir prendre forme. Mais comme il est impossible de savoir
d’avance si telle sera l’issue, il préfère penser que la création
d’arrangements institutionnels qui prendront véritablement en compte la
différence identitaire autochtone ouvriront la voie à la formation
d’allégeances interculturelles – une perspective qui lui sourit d’emblée.
Indigenous Difference and the Constitution of Canada interpelle la
conscience politique canadienne et la confronte implicitement à un choix
que d’aucuns trouveront malaisé : ou bien l’État canadien s’engage sans
faux-fuyant à mettre de l’avant des arrangements constitutionnels et
institutionnels qui admettent sans équivoque la différence identitaire
autochtone, quelle qu’assortie qu’elle puisse être d’aspirations
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souverainistes ou autonomistes; ou bien il s’y refuse ou se défile et
compromet du coup le renouvellement de la culture démocratique et
l’élargissement éventuel de la justice sociale au Canada.
Renée Dupuis, pour sa part, n’ergote pas longtemps sur les perspectives
qu’offre ce choix. Dans son dernier livre, Quel Canada pour les
Autochtones?, cette juriste bien connue au Québec pour ses écrits sur la
question autochtone est catégorique :
La situation actuelle ne doit pas durer (…). Le maintien du statu
quo ne fait qu’accélérer la détérioration de la situation générale des
Autochtones et des relations entre ceux-ci et les autres citoyens.
S’il persiste, le statu quo finira par révéler la vacuité des droits
particuliers qu’on a dit reconnaître aux peuples autochtones en
1982, quand on a officiellement reconnu leurs droits dans la
nouvelle constitution. On ne pourra adopter indéfiniment un
discours qui semble vouloir changer les fondements du statut des
Autochtones au Canada, mais qui, en réalité, n’a provoqué aucun
changement fondamental dans le traitement de ces questions par le
gouvernement. Des décisions doivent découler de ce discours,
sinon le choix politique qui s’est concrétisé en 1982 sera lettre
morte (37).
Dupuis connaît bien les enjeux de la question autochtone. Depuis 1972,
elle a agi à titre de conseiller juridique auprès de divers groupes autochtones
du Québec et en tant qu’expert-conseil en matière autochtone auprès des
gouvernements du Québec et du Canada. Elle a été commissaire à la
Commission canadienne des droits de la personne de 1989 à 1995 et a été
nommée en 2001 à la Commission des revendications des Indiens par le
gouvernement fédéral. Quel Canada pour les Autochtones?, son quatrième
ouvrage sur le sujet en une dizaine d’années,4 s’est mérité le prix du
Gouverneur général (catégorie essais) en 2001. Elle présente dans ce court
essai visiblement destiné au grand public une synthèse concise mais
efficace de la condition autochtone au Canada.
Elle rappelle d’abord, chiffres à l’appui, la marginalisation sociopolitique des Autochtones et la désorganisation sociale dans laquelle est
plongé un trop grand nombre de leurs communautés. Elle explique que
l’État canadien est largement responsable de cette situation qui s’est
développée au cours d’une longue histoire de rapports intercommunautaires et interculturels vécue au désavantage évident des
Autochtones. Le régime d’isolement mis en place par les réserves, le
remplacement forcé des pratiques politiques autochtones traditionnelles,
l’interdit d’accès aux institutions politiques canadiennes, le ravalement des
Autochtones au rang de pupilles de l’État et leur infantilisation subséquente
constituent autant des politiques délibérées qui ont placé ces derniers dans
une situation de dépendance et d’incapacité socio-économique chronique.
Dupuis note que même si l’État canadien se dit prêt aujourd’hui à
reconnaître le traitement inique qui leur a été réservé et à en réparer les torts
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qui en ont résultés, il n’en reste pas moins qu’en raison d’un rapport de
pouvoir dont ils n’ont pour ainsi dire jamais contrôlé les paramètres, les
peuples autochtones se sont vu assigner une place on ne peut plus
défavorable au sein de la société canadienne qui les a littéralement
dépouillés de tout pouvoir d’agir sur leur propre destin. Les actes de
contrition étatiques n’y changeront rien, d’autant plus que de nombreuses
dispositions légales, administratives et juridiques qui ont permis
l’assujettissement des Autochtones sont encore en place et continuent
d’avoir force de loi. Rien d’étonnant, conclut Dupuis, à ce que les
Autochtones aient toujours tenté de résister à cette véritable et intolérable
mise en tutelle. L’intransigeance apparente et la radicalisation de certains
mouvements actuels de mobilisation politique autochtone ne doivent pas
surprendre : elles participent d’un profond et compréhensible élan
d’affirmation de droits injustement niés, du désir propre à toute
communauté humaine de se gouverner et de contrôler son destin selon des
balises qu’elle aura elle-même définies. Rien, en d’autres mots, que la
plupart des Canadiens ne devraient comprendre puisqu’ils bénéficient
eux-mêmes de ce privilège.
Dupuis fait surtout ici œuvre de vulgarisation, ce qui, bien sûr, n’est pas
sans mérite, particulièrement dans la mesure où elle réfute bon nombre de
préjugés populaires tenaces à l’égard des Autochtones. Toutefois, les
spécialistes de la question n’y trouveront guère un discours ou des données
qui ne leur sont pas déjà familiers. Le quatrième et dernier chapitre de
l’ouvrage présentera sans doute le plus d’intérêt, car il porte la discussion
au-delà des constats désolants qu’on a dû trop souvent faire – et refaire, tant
les choses évoluent lentement – et appelle à un changement de stratégie, à
des actions concrètes, susceptibles de changer la donne dès maintenant.
« On ne réglera rien », estime Dupuis, « si l’on continue de voler à vue dans
ce domaine comme on le fait depuis longtemps déjà ». « D’un problème à
l’autre », renchérit-elle, « on injecte de nouveaux fonds publics et l’on
change quelques méthodes ou personnes jusqu’au prochain problème avec
le même groupe ou avec un autre. La gestion à la pièce a largement
démontré ses limites » (125).
Dupuis identifie une demi-douzaine de ces actions concrètes qu’elle
souhaite voir prendre forme, à commencer par la révision en profondeur du
régime législatif et administratif en conformité avec les droits constitutionnels particuliers reconnus aux Autochtones par la Loi
constitutionnelle de 1982, même s’il faut pour cela abandonner l’autorité
discrétionnaire du gouvernement fédéral à l’égard des Autochtones et de
leurs terres. Le recours aux tribunaux comme voie privilégiée par les
Autochtones pour obtenir satisfaction auprès des gouvernements est
également problématique : l’option judiciaire a amené les tribunaux à jouer
un rôle dans la formulation des politiques publiques en matière autochtone
qui devrait être dévolu à la négociation politique. Non seulement la
judiciarisation des doléances autochtones braque-t-elle les parties les unes
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contre les autres et envenime leurs rapports, mais elle entraîne des
processus de règlement interminables et coûteux qui, au surplus, ne font
que modifier les lois concernant les Autochtones un seul article à la fois, au
gré des poursuites judiciaires. C’est donc là une stratégie qui, à long terme,
fait assez peu pour modifier et améliorer la situation et dont l’efficacité
devrait être sérieusement reconsidérée. Dupuis insiste beaucoup aussi sur
la création d’un forum politique et constitutionnel permanent qui
engagerait les gouvernements féderal et provinciaux et les peuples
autochtones, mais qui, surtout, favoriserait une plus grande participation
des Autochtones aux processus décisionnels qui les concernent
directement. Dans la vision des changements stratégiques proposés le
politique ne doit pas être seul en cause cependant : les institutions
d’enseignement supérieur doivent assumer une part importante de
responsabilité dans le processus de redressement de la situation des peuples
autochtones. Le manque actuel de ressources en matière de soutien et
d’intégration des étudiants autochtones aux milieux d’enseignement
supérieur de même que le faible appui à l’élaboration de programmes de
recherche et de formation destinés à mieux faire connaître la condition
autochtone constituent des obstacles importants à la transformation de la
situation. Cet état de choses doit changer et ne saurait perdurer plus
longuement.
Tous ces éléments de la nouvelle stratégie qu’appelle Dupuis de ses
vœux n’auront de sens toutefois que si l’on procède à l’établissement de
véritables gouvernements autochtones, libérés de la tutelle actuelle et
disposant d’une assise juridique qui leur serait propre, voire aussi de
capacités fiscales suffisantes. Il faut donc envisager de laisser les
Autochtones définir et décider des structures politico-administratives qui
correspondent à leurs valeurs et répondent à leurs priorités. Enfin, pour que
toutes ces transformations souhaitées par Dupuis se réalisent, il faut,
croit-elle, que changent l’esprit et la dynamique qui ont, jusqu’à
maintenant, dominé les négociations avec les Autochtones. L’improvisation, les rapports de force inégaux, les consultations insuffisantes
doivent cesser pour que s’opère un changement vers une approche qui
implique le public et qui soit fondée sur des objectifs clairement exprimés et
compris par tous, de manière à définir des paramètres de négociation plus
réalistes.
On serait sans doute mal avisé de ne pas se ranger du côté des solutions
que suggèrent Renée Dupuis. En fait, certains gouvernements ont déjà
commencé à élaborer des politiques qui vont dans le même sens. Le
gouvernement québécois, par exemple, opère depuis 1998 à l’intérieur
d’une politique cadre qui reconnaît le caractère national des peuples
autochtones, cherche à établir avec eux des partenariats et des ententes
d’égal à égal dans nombre de secteurs d’activité d’intérêt commun et vise à
rehausser sensiblement le degré d’autonomie administrative et
gouvernementale à leur disposition. Dupuis, à l’instar de Macklem et
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Cleary, renvoie aux termes de l’Acte constitutionnel de 1982 et à la
jurisprudence qu’il a inspiré pour soutenir qu’au fond les gouvernements
n’ont pas le choix. La mise en place d’une dynamique nouvelle et plus juste
de rapports entre Autochtones et non-Autochtones est imposée par la
contrainte institutionnelle et politico-légale que s’est fixée l’État canadien :
ne pas modifier aujourd’hui la logique relationnelle qui a historiquement
prévalu irait à l’encontre des paramètres fondamentaux du système
politique canadien et en dé-légitimerait à terme l’application générale.
À tout prendre, peut-on penser, mieux vaut cette contrainte qui permet
malgré tout de faire avancer quelque peu les choses et d’insuffler un
minimum d’équité trop longtemps absente dans le dossier autochtone, que
rien du tout. Cela ne va pas toutefois sans susciter quelques doutes quant à la
possibilité de voir un jour la question autochtone résolue à la satisfaction
des premiers intéressés. Ainsi, par exemple, dans la mesure où les actions
préconisées par Dupuis restent circonscrites par les règles de l’État
canadien, les peuples autochtones pourront-ils jamais tout à fait contrôler la
nouvelle donne et l’ajuster à leur priorités? Certains n’y verront peut-être là
aucun problème et trouveront à s’accommoder du cadre institutionnel et
constitutionnel canadien, mais ce pourrait bien n’être pas nécessairement le
cas pour tout le monde. Par ailleurs, la nécessité d’une contrainte, toute
éclairée qu’elle puisse être, laisse perplexe quant à la volonté réelle de l’État
d’agréer la différence identitaire autochtone et les revendications qui y sont
associées. La reconnaissance à laquelle on se dit prêt ne participe pas d’une
conscience politique large et généreuse, ni de quelque magnanimité
naturelle : qu’en serait-il vraiment sans la contrainte? L’histoire, à cet égard,
n’offre pas de perspectives bien encourageantes. L’expérience du passé
donnerait plutôt à penser en définitive qu’il ne pourra y avoir de
reconnaissance identitaire véritable et politiquement satisfaisante pour les
peuples autochtones sans une lutte de tous les instants tant et aussi
longtemps que leur destinée restera circonscrite par les balises de la
communauté politique et de l’État canadiens.
Conclusion : question autochtone ou question de « nous »?
L’examen des ouvrages recensés dans cet essai critique permet de dégager
au moins deux observations. La première s’impose d’évidence : il existe des
écarts importants dans la littérature spécialisée quant à la manière d’aborder
et de concevoir la place que doivent occuper les peuples autochtones au sein
de la communauté politique canadienne. La distance qui sépare un Tom
Flanagan incapable d’admettre la différence identitaire autochtone par peur
des conséquences que cela pourrait avoir sur l’unité du sujet politique
canadien, d’un Peter Macklem que la coexistence de souverainetés
plurielles et différenciées n’effraie manifestement pas, est considérable et
n’a, politiquement, rien d’anodin. Elle témoigne de la difficulté qu’il y aura
sans doute toujours d’accoucher d’une politique autochtone globale qui
fasse consensus. Mais, plus fondamentalement, se profile aussi derrière
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cette distance l’incapacité quasi viscérale de la pensée politique libérale à
réconcilier ses prétentions universalistes, nécessairement intégratrices,
voire assimilationistes, et sa volonté presqu’intraitable de protection des
libertés individuelles et des souverainetés collectives. Les philosophes
politiques libéraux les plus avancés ont beau minimiser ce fossé
conceptuel, ils ont beau chercher à rassurer les sceptiques que la pleine
reconnaissance politique et institutionnelle de droits et revendications
identitaires minoritaires ne limite en rien les droits des individus
appartenant à la majorité, pas plus qu’elle ne mène à la fragmentation de
l’unité de la communauté politique (Tully 2000), il se trouve toujours
quelque incrédule que leur démonstration ne convainc pas. La perspective
de voir diminuer le pouvoir social réel et symbolique qu’il détient sur les
minoritaires l’effraie sans doute et l’empêche d’entendre raison. Quoi qu’il
en soit, la persistance de ce contentieux au sein même de la mouvance
démocratico-libérale entrave lourdement l’unité de pensée dans la
recherche d’une solution à la question autochtone et, partant, l’élaboration
même de politiques satisfaisantes.
La seconde observation que l’analyse des ouvrages retenus inspire est
qu’il y a dans ces textes une constante qui, par-delà les divergences de
points de vue, les unit : on semble s’entendre pour que la recherche de
solutions se fasse à l’intérieur de l’enveloppe systémique et institutionnelle
canadienne. L’horizon politico-institutionnel sur lequel tous paraissent
décider à opérer reste celui de l’État canadien, que ce soit pour en préserver
strictement l’intégrité (sans compromis chez Flanagan ; avec une ouverture
relative chez Cairns) ou pour en améliorer l’essence et la portée
démocratiques (c’est ce qui sous-tend les propos de Macklem et Dupuis, et
de Cleary également, quoique dans une moindre mesure chez celui-ci). Au
fond, le Canada, ou plus précisément une certaine image du pays, reste
l’enjeu central de la question autochtone et constitue la principale raison
pour laquelle l’imagination sociologique s’y attarde maintenant avec tant
d’anxiété. C’est d’abord un regard sur nous – un « nous » a priori non
autochtone – qui est posé à travers elle. Que l’urgence de ce regard participe
d’une certaine impatience à l’égard des revendications autochtones, d’un
sentiment de culpabilité ou d’un authentique désir de changer les choses
importe assez peu. Le fait est que la question autochtone interpelle d’abord
les Canadiens beaucoup plus qu’elle ne procède d’une véritable
préoccupation pour l’Autochtone.5 Elle leur renvoie une image d’euxmêmes qu’ils ne peuvent plus esquiver et qui demande à être confrontée.
Les ouvrages recensés ici révèlent des manières différentes et opposées
d’appréhender et, éventuellement, de gérer cette image. Étonnamment
toutefois, alors que tous tiennent l’État canadien responsable de l’état
actuel des choses (pour des raisons qui varient, il est vrai), personne ne
suggère pour autant d’en déborder le cadre précis pour reformuler la donne.
Or, le véritable défi qui se pose maintenant à l’imagination sociologique ne
consisterait-il pas plutôt à penser la question autochtone en dehors des
158
impératifs de correction ou d’ajustement institutionnel de l’État canadien?
L’intellectuel kanien’kehaka Taiaiake Alfred a expliqué les limites
auxquelles se condamne toute démarche politique autochtone poursuivie à
l’intérieur des frontières institutionnelles de l’État :
In the midst of Western societies that pride themselves on their
respect for freedom, the freedom of indigenous people to realize
their own goals has been extinguished by the state in law and to a
great extent in practice (...). The problem is that at present Native
politics is still understood and practised in the context of the law as
structured by the state. Within this context, the state has nothing to
fear from Native leaders, for even if they succeed in achieving the
goal of self-empowerment, the basic power structure remains
intact. From the perspective of the state, marginal losses of control
are the trade-off for the ultimate preservation of the framework of
dominance. What we need is a nationalist perspective that directly
challenges that framework (…). We must deconstruct the notion of
state power to allow people to see that the settler state has no right
to determine indigenous futures (Alfred 1999: 47).
Alfred laisse entendre sans équivoque que malgré la bonne volonté et les
intentions honorables, tant qu’on abordera la question autochtone du point
de vue de la norme étatique en place, on peut douter que la dynamique
actuelle soit amendée au profit réel et durable des peuples autochtones. Au
fond, pour ces derniers, toute la question de la reconnaissance identitaire
tient dans ce dilemme : accepter ou ne pas accepter de fonctionner à
l’intérieur d’une norme qui leur est étrangère et qui, au surplus, est à la
source de bien des maux. Voilà aussi posée du coup, froidement et sans
artifice, toute l’exigence de la reconnaissance identitaire : il faut, pour
qu’elle soit pleinement authentique, que les cultures minoritaires aient le
loisir de choisir sans entrave et sans condition les termes et les moyens de
l’expression de leur identité, au prix même de la déconstruction de l’entité
politique qui les englobent. Malgré le capital de sympathie considérable à
l’égard de la cause autochtone que recèlent certains des ouvrages recensés
ici, aucun ne penche clairement dans cette voie. On ne saurait
nécessairement en tenir rigueur aux auteurs, mais soyons assez réalistes en
contrepartie pour admettre que dans l’éventualité où la perspective
d’Alfred mobilisera les peuples autochtones sans trouver en même temps
un écho favorable du côté des populations non autochtones, le fossé qui
sépare les uns et les autres pourrait bien ne pas être comblé de sitôt.
Notes
1.
2.
Pour un exemple du dialogue que les deux auteurs entretinrent, voir leur échange
épistolaire dans le numéro 10 (2001) de la revue Inroads (repris dans l’édition de
septembre 2001 de la revue Policy Options/Options politiques).
Le projet d’entente reconnaît à quatre des neuf communautés Innues du Québec la
pleine propriété sur près de 2,600 km2 de territoire (elles en occupent en ce
moment 270) et accorde la prépondérance administrative aux Innus dans 17
domaines – dont l’environnement, la formation de la main-d’œuvre et l’éducation
159
3.
4.
5.
– et le pouvoir de légiférer dans une dizaine de domaines – produits pétroliers,
normes du bâtiments, protection des forêts, etc. Elle prévoit également le
versement de plus de $375 millions au moment de la signature et 3% des
redevances payées au gouvernement du Québec pour l’exploitation des
ressources naturelles. L’approche commune reconnaît les droits ancestraux et le
titre aborigène et admet, ce faisant, l’existence des Innus comme groupe national
distinct. Bien qu’il réponde à des impératifs judiciaires et constitutionnels
auxquels le gouvernement du Québec ne peut se soustraire, le projet d’entente a
soulevé de nombreuses protestations remarquées, d’abord au sein de la classe
politique – Ghislain Lebel, un député du Bloc québécois et Jacques Parizeau,
ancien premier ministre du Québec, s’y sont opposés publiquement avec
véhémence – puis au sein des populations non autochtones avoisinant les
communautés Innues touchées par l’entente. La Fondation Équité territoriale et la
Société du 14 juillet au Lac Saint-Jean et l’Association de défense des droits des
Blancs sur la Côte-Nord ont été créées dans la foulée de l’entente. Ces
organisations s’emploient à en dénoncer le caractère « injuste », racial et
anti-libéral, et remettent même en question le droit des Innus à être reconnus
comme nation.
Cette protection est surtout assurée à travers l’article 35 (1) de La loi
constitutionnelle de 1982 en vertu duquel les droits ancestraux des peuples
autocthones du Canada sont explicitement confirmés et formellement reconnus.
Voir Dupuis (1991, 1997, 1999).
Cette affirmation ne saurait s’appliquer intégralement au livre de Cleary, il va
sans dire. Il y a malgré tout chez cet auteur un flou qui persiste. Voué sans
contredit à la cause autochtone, il ne renie pas son intégration et sa participation
active à la société québécoise et canadienne. Nombre des ses commentaires
donnent à penser qu’il reste aussi préoccupé par l’avenir socio-politique du
Canada et du Québec.
Références
Alfred, Taiaiake (1999). Peace, Power, Righteousness. An Indigenous Manifesto.
Toronto, Oxford University Press.
Alfred, Taiaiake (2000). « Of White Heroes and Old Men Talking », Eastern Door, vol.
9, no. 19.
Cleary, Bernard (1989). L’enfant de 7000 ans. Le long portage vers la délivrance.
Québec, Septentrion.
Delâge, Denys (2000). « L’histoire des Premières Nations, approches et orientations »,
Revue d’histoire de l’Amérique française, vol. 53, no 4 : 521-527.
Dupuis, Renée (1991). La question indienne au Canada. Montréal, Boréal.
Dupuis, Renée (1997). Tribus, peuples et nations. Montréal, Boréal.
Dupuis, Renée (1999). Le statut juridique des peuples autochtones en droit canadien.
Toronto, Carswell.
Flanagan, Tom (1983). Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered. Saskatoon,
Western Producer Prairie Books.
Flanagan, Tom (1991). Metis Lands in Manitoba. Calgary, University of Calgary Press.
Flanagan, Tom (1996). Louis “David” Riel: “Prophet of the New World. Édition revue,
Toronto, University of Toronto Press.
Hawthorn, Harry (1968). Étude sur les indiens contemporains du Canada. Besoins et
mesures d’ordre économique, politique et éducatif, vol. 1. Ottawa, Imprimeur de
la Reine.
Rotman, Leonard (2001). « Recension de First Nations? Second Thoughts », Isuma,
printemps : 130-133.
160
Tully, James (2000). « A Just Relationship between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal
Peoples of Canada » dans Curtis Cook et Juan D. Lindau (dirs.), Aboriginal and
Self-Government, Montréal, McGill-Queen’s University Press : 39-71.
Turpel, Mary Ellen (1990). « Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian Charter:
Interpretive Monopolies, Cultural Differences », Canadian Human Rights
Yearbook, 6: 3-45.
161
Katalin Kürtösi
Books on Québec Theatre, Playwrights, and Michel
Tremblay
Dramaturgies québécoises des années quatre-vingt. Jean Cléo Godin et
Dominique Lafon. Montréal : Leméac. 1999. 264 p.
Le théâtre québécois 1975-1995. Sous la direction de Dominique Lafon.
Montréal : Fides. 2001. 527 p.
Michel Tremblay, l’enfant multiple. Marie-Lyne Piccione. Bordeaux : Presses
Universitaires de Bordeaux. 1999. 197 p.
Le théâtre québécois 1975-1995 is the second volume examining theatre in
the series Archives des Lettres canadiennes; the title of each volume makes
it clear that by “lettres canadiennes” the research centre responsible for the
series means writing in French in Canada. Volume V, Le théâtre canadienfrancais, summarized theatrical activities and plays from their origins up to
1975, while the present volume–Volume X in the series–concentrates on
the two decades between 1975 and 1995. The size of the two books reflects
the dimensions of theatre in their two respective periods: Volume V
covered 370 years in 1,000 pages–more than two thirds of which dealt with
the mid-twentieth century–while Volume X analyzes twenty years of
Québec theatre in 527 pages. The two volumes are structured differently:
Volume V contains papers as well as profiles of contemporary playwrights
with short excerpts from their plays and a bibliography. Volume X,
however, is strictly academic. Editor Dominique Lafon arranged the
twenty-four papers around five areas, namely, “État des lieux,”
“Dramaturgie,” “La mise en scène,” “Scénographie et écriture scénique,”
and “Échanges, diffusion et réception,” followed by a selected
bibliography. The two volumes accomplish the mission to which they were
dedicated, namely to offer an indispensable source on theatrical activities in
the French language in Canada. In both volumes the contributors are
outstanding experts in their respective fields–some, including John Hare,
Hélene Beauchamp and Josette Féral, participated in both projects.
This brief detour was necessary to fully evaluate Le théâtre québécois
and to put it in context. Dominique Lafon was able to concentrate on topics
strictly connected to the theatre because by the end of the 1990s there were
other books dedicated to playwrights and plays. This decision is in line with
the latest tendencies in theatre studies: emphasis is put on dramaturgical
and semiotic aspects, production and reception, and aspects of the
performance text, while the analysis of the play-text is left to literary critics.
The two decades under scrutiny mark a significant change in the role and
place of theatre in Québec society; after the strong political implications of
the late sixties and seventies, the second part of the period examined in
Lafon’s volume is more concerned with aesthetic aspects. After 1980, to
borrow Jean Cléo Godin’s term, a “richesse intellectuelle” (57) replaced the
conservative, anti-intellectual, nationalist approaches. The new dramaturgies of the last two decades of the twentieth century appeared after the
1980 referendum and underline,
une rupture avec le théâtre essentiellement socio-politique de la
décennie précédente. Elles [...] privilégient l’onirique, l’hétérogénéité, l’éclatement formel et autoréférentialité. [...] une bonne
partie de la production théâtrale de cette période se caractérise par
l’emploi de la métafiction.
La métafiction signale un théâtre en introspection, qui conjugue la
création d’un univers fictif et son commentaire voire sa
déconstruction. (Shawn Huffman, 73)
The most frequent strategies for these purposes are intertextuality,
métissage, and theatre within the play: the majority of important
playwrights of the period, for example Michel Marc Bouchard, Normand
Chaurette, René-Daniel Dubois, Dominic Champagne, and Michel
Tremblay in Le Vrai Monde?, use them abundantly.
Dominique Lafon’s own paper looks at plays from a thematic point of
view, specifically the family, as shown in the work of Tremblay, Marie
Laberge, Pol Pelletier, Jeanne-Mance Delisle, Michel Marc Bouchard,
Jean-Pierre Ronfard and others. The family has been of central importance
in the dramatic genre since the late nineteenth century, when Ibsen and then
Strindberg analyzed the male and female roles in this small unit of society;
dramatic conflict was the result of basic differences between husband and
wife, parents and children. In the second half of the twentieth century, North
American plays seldom show a complete family on stage, and Québec
drama is no exception: fathers are mainly absent, mothers dominate or
become tyrannical, and frequent incestuous and homosexual relationships
prove that in these plays we witness a “renversement de valeurs familiales,
leitmotiv du théâtre des années 80.” (108) The first three papers of the
“Dramaturgie” chapter, namely “Création et réflexion : le retour du texte et
de l’auteur” by Jean-Cléo Godin1, “Les nouvelles écritures théâtrales:
l’intertextualité, le métissage et la mise en pièces de la fiction” by Shawn
Huffman, and “Un air de famille” by Dominique Lafon address the same
topic. Even though the papers adopt different perspectives, they often
(unavoidably) overlap and refer to the same works in their analyses. This
overlapping occurs in the remainder of the volume as well; the work of
Jean-Pierre Ronfard, Gilles Maheu and Robert Lepage are examined from
164
Books on Québec Theatre, Playwrights, and Michel Tremblay
the point of view of collective creation (by Jean-Marc Larrue), as subjects
of individual chapters (by Paul Lefebvre, Louise Vigeant, Irène
Perelli-Contos and Chantal Hébert), or as outstanding directors of the
period (by Josette Féral). As previously mentioned, it is unavoidable that a
collection of twenty-four papers about the same topic will deal with the
same works and the same artists more than once. One shortcoming of this
volume (as well as the other two works under review) is the lack of a
reference index at the end.
Theatre addressing and representation of particular segments of the
audience (young people, women, the English minority of Montréal) is
introduced and analyzed in separate papers. Claire Dé writes about costume
in Montreal theatres, and Marie-Christine Lesage examines the
relationship between theatre and the other arts. Two papers are dedicated to
theatrical activities in Québec City, provincial towns, and franco-Ontarian
theatre; Madeleine Greffard writes about Québec acting companies and the
international theatre scene; and Diane Pavlovic researches foreign
productions and translations of Québec plays. Alvina Ruprecht’s enquiry
into the role of festivals in theatre life not only provides a basic foundation
for this generally neglected aspect of the genre, but emphasizes that
festivals lead us back to the origins of theatre. At the same time, they point to
the future, as many young artists first appear for large audiences as part of
festival programmes. In Ruprecht’s paper, the Festival de Théâtre des
Amériques is given exhaustive attention; the FTA, particularly in its first
decade, introduced the most remarkable performances, not only from North
America, but from Europe and Asia as well, to Montréal audiences, in
conjunction with a showcase of Québec and English Canadian plays. Her
critical remarks in the conclusion, however, are worthy of consideration:
[…] ces festivals ne reflètent plus les complexités de la dynamique
culturelle actuelle. Ils évoluent comme si le Québec était toujours
culturellement homogène, autonome et immuable, non pas
multiculturel, migrant, pris entre l’Europe, les Amériques et tous
les continents […] le festival ne serait-il pas le moment idéal pour
réfléchir sur les discours culturels internes, les rapports avec
l’autre parmi nous, où se rencontrent les cultures hôtesses et les
cultures transplantées? (440)
The latest festival, which was held after the period examined by the present
volume (2001) moved in this direction: parallel with the FTA, a festival of
smaller scale was dedicated to First Nations plays and theatres with some
exciting shows. Le théâtre québécois, however, does not open in this
direction; the papers do not look at Aboriginal or immigrant theatre,
although from the mid-1980s to the present, they have played an important
role in the theatre scene of Montréal. Another research area of modern
theatre studies neglected by this volume is the study of audience: who are
the patrons of Le Théâtre du nouveau monde (TNM), the FTA events, Le
Théâtre de la Manufacture, or of Le Théâtre du Nouvel Ontario? The theatre
165
of Québec made many gains during this twenty-year period and these
questions may have been worth asking.
Dramaturgies québécoises concentrates on the 1980s–a period which
was covered in Le théâtre québécois, as well–offering one chapter about
outstanding performances and metteurs en scène and four chapters about
individual playwrights (Michel Marc Bouchard, Normand Chaurette,
René-Daniel Dubois and Marie Laberge). The “Introduction” section
outlines the general tendencies of the age, highlighting the move from
politically connected theatre towards a more aesthetically conscious
concept of the art, with a strong poetic presence both in the texts themselves
and in the visual qualities of the shows. In “Du texte emprunté au texte
scénique,” Jean Cléo Godin stresses the influence of German writers and
directors on the theatre of Québec in the 1980s with its definite theatricality,
“combinant la précision méticuleuse du jeu et la profusion décadente
véhiculée par la tradition du cabaret berlinois” (27). Another important
aspect of Québec theatre was the impact of Shakespeare, both on
palimpsests of plays and in staging plays by Robert Lepage, Alice Ronfard
and others. The plays and performances of this decade share one common
theme–self-reflection at the expense of theatrical illusion. With regard to
these elements, both J. C. Godin and Dominique Lafon speak about a new
dramaturgy as most typical of the second-last decade of the twentieth
century (and they both stress that this approach continues well into the
1990s). This change in focus indicates that the theatre of Québec had come
of age by the 1980s. Its innate evolution was accompanied by a sensitive
reaction to new tendencies of world theatre, and therefore theatre artists
from Québec could actively participate in this process and contribute to the
new understanding of theatre as an art form.
The chapters analyzing individual playwrights in Dramaturgies
québécoises are not only well researched but place Bouchard, Chaurette,
Dubois and Laberge in the context of both Québec drama and theatre of the
time, and the international theatre scene. The chronology at the end of the
volume mentions the most remarkable historical and cultural events of each
given year in Canada and Québec, the performances that took place, as well
as the publication of play-texts and essays about the theatre. Because of
their dedication and accuracy, the authors’ works should be recommended
to future contributors on this topic.
Marie-Lyne Piccione’s book is different from the previous two volumes
in several respects: it is a monograph about one author, Michel Tremblay,
whose writing reaches beyond the realm of drama and theatre, and Piccione
examines this remarkable oeuvre in its totality. The five chapters are
arranged around topics and problematics, such as “Menteur-usurpateur,”
“La toile et le tricot,” “Quand l’autre est le même,” “Palinodies et
palimpsestes,” and finally “Les voies de la création.” The short conclusion
is followed by appendices containing the summary of Tremblay’s major
works, an exhaustive list of his characters in alphabetical order and the
166
Books on Québec Theatre, Playwrights, and Michel Tremblay
works in which they are featured, a “family tree,” a bibliography, essential
biographical data and an interview with Tremblay himself. It might be of
interest to quickly look back at Renate Usmiani’s monograph of 1982 about
Michel Tremblay, which treated him principally and almost exclusively as
a playwright; seventeen years later his work demonstrates completely
different proportions. (Piccione does not mention Usmiani’s book in her
bibliography.)
Piccione points at key elements, returning motifs and metaphors of
Tremblay’s universe with exceptional sensibility, her phrasing often
displaying poetic dimensions. She can convince us that Tremblay is much
more than the author of Les Belles-Sœurs; in her view this popular–but not
populist–novelist, playwright and “autobiographe” surpasses clichés. With
his “système d’échos, de mises en abymes et de scènes spéculaires” (21) he
introduces his readers to a Daedalian labyrinth, however one does not get
lost in it. She goes beyond the superficial evaluations of Tremblay’s work,
which claim it is easy to understand; although the heroines of his
best-known plays tend to be against high culture, Tremblay himself
frequently uses literary allusions and artistic references “au point
d’imprimer parfois à ses ouvrages des allures encyclopédiques” (22).
Piccione follows the relationship of Tremblay’s heros with their bodies,
their sexual lives, as well as the institution of the church. The framework of
his stories–be they novels, or plays–is the family, but “la famille
traditionnelle se meurt, entrant dans l’ère de son apocalypse” (51). The
crisis of this institution was also the focus of attention in the two volumes of
papers about Québec theatre and drama previously alluded to. Piccione
emphasizes that this phenomenon is not restricted to one genre of
contemporary Québec writing. The third chapter, casting light on the
problematics of the “other” and the “same,” situates this typically
post-modern feature in the context of the Québec-Canada relationship:
Miroir du miroir, le texte fait de la réduplication une modalité
essentielle de son appréhension du monde : du travesti au
schizophrène, les héros y sont à la fois double et scindés, pris dans
le tourbillon d’une dynamique conflictuelle qui reflète, en
l’exacerbant, la dialectique indéfiniment recommencée d’un pays
voué à une structurelle binarité. (69)
The mirror can serve several goals: as a stage prop, it draws attention to
theatricality in the play, in novels it may act as a tool for self-admiration,
self-hatred or self-correction. In the mirror, objects are doubled–theatre is
perhaps the most spectacular vehicle for this duplication and Le Vrai
Monde? directs our attention to this eternal question of the art. In
Tremblay’s latest works the writer’s interest in complex theoretical
questions goes hand in hand with his attraction to ludic solutions, inviting
the reader-audience into an intellectual game. Piccione’s book convinces
us that Tremblay is not only an “enfant multiple” but also a leading writer of
the previous decades, with forthcoming works “in reserve.”
167
Each of the above volumes accomplishes its goal–to supply the reader
with reliable systematization, invaluable data about plays, playwrights, and
the theatre, or provide information about Québec’s best-known author
internationally. Because of their wealth of information, I would strongly
recommend these three volumes not only to experts of Québec theatre and
literature but also to all who are interested in this particular area of North
American culture.
Notes
1.
In this volume both the table of contents and the title of the paper itself puts his
name with a hyphen, while the title page of Dramaturgies québécoises has his
name correctly, i.e. without a hyphen.
Works cited
Le théâtre canadien-francais. Évolution, témoignages, bibliographie. Archives des
Lettres canadiennes, Tome V. Montréal: Fides. 1976. 1005 p. (Comité de
rédaction Paul Wyczynski, Bernard Julien, Hélene Beauchamp-Rank).
Usmiani, Renate. Michel Tremblay. Vancouver: Douglas &McIntyre. 1982. 177 p.
168
Authors / Auteurs
Ian ANGUS, Department of Humanities, Simon Fraser University,
8888 University Drive, Burnaby, B.C., V5A 1S6.
Robert CUPIDO, Professor, Department of History and Canadian
Studies, Mount Allison University, Hart Hall, 63D York Street,
Sackville, New Brunswick, E4L 1G9.
Richard J.F. DAY, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology,
Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, K7L 3N6.
Ryan EDWARDSON, Doctoral Candidate, Department of History,
Queen’s University, Watson Hall, Kingston, Ontario, K7L 1A5.
Andrea KUNARD, Assistant Curator, Canadian Museum of
Contemporary Photography, 1 Rideau Canal, P.O. Box 465,
Station A, Ottawa, Ontario K1N 9N6.
Katalin KÜRTÖSI, Egyetem U.2, Szeged, H-6722 Hungary,
comparative literature, twentieth-century theatre, with special
interest in theatre and drama in Canada.
Daniel SALÉE est professeur titulaire de science politique et
directeur de l’École des affaires publiques et communautaires,
1455 boul. de Maisonneuve Ouest, Université Concordia,
Montréal, Québec, H3G 1M8.
Johanne DEVLIN TREW, Research Fellow, School of Music and
Department of Folklore, Memorial University of Newfoundland,
P.O. Box 4200, Station C, St. John’s, Newfoundland, A1C 5S7.
Tamara VUKOV, Doctoral Student, Joint PhD in Communication,
Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd, Montréal,
Québec, H3G 1M8.
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Editor/Rédacteur: Robert Thacker (St. Lawrence University).
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in Korean/Publication de langue coréenne. Korean Association for
Canadian Studies (KACS), Centre de recherches sur la francophonie,
Faculté des Sciences Humaines, Université Nationale de Séoul, 56-1
Shinrim-dong Kwanak-ku, Séoul, Corée du Sud.
Editor/Rédacteur: Jang, Jung Ae (Université nationale de Séoul).
Québec Studies. Biannual/Semestriel. US$45; US$35 (Student/ Étudiants);
US$50 (Libraries/Bibliothèques). Outside the U.S., please add US$6/
Abonné à l’extérieur des É.-U., prière d’ajouter 6$US. Professor Jane Moss,
French Department, Colby College, Waterville, ME 04901 USA.
Editor/Rédacteur: Patrick Coleman (University of California at Los Angeles).
Revista Española de Estudios Canadienses. Yearly/Annuel. 4.000 ptas; 8.000
ptas (Institutions). Asociacion española de estudios canadienses, Espronceda, 40,
28003, Madrid, Spain.
Editor/Rédacteur: Kathleen Firth (Universidad de Barcelona).
Revista Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses. Biannual/Semestriel. 70$.
Asociación Mexicana de Estudios Canadienses. RMEC, Coordinación de
Relaciones Internacionales, Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales,
Ciudad Universitaria, UNAM, C.P. 04500, México.
Directora: María Cristina Rosas (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México).
Revista Venezolana de Estudios Canadienses. Biannual/Semestriel. 500 Bs.
Asociacion Venezolana de Estudios Canadienses. Subscriptions/
Abonnements: Embajada de Canadá, Torre Europa, Piso 7. Ave. Francisco
de Miranda. Apartado 63.302. Caracas 1060, Venezuela.
Editor/Rédacteur: Vilma E. Petrash (Universidad Central de
Venezuela).
Revue internationale d’études canadiennes/International Journal of
Canadian Studies. Biannual/Semestriel. $Can40 (Institutions); $Can30
(Regular/ régulier); $Can20 (ICCS Members, retirees and
students/Membres du CIEC, retraités et étudiants). Outside Canada, please
add $Can5/Abonnés à l’extérieur du Canada, prière d’ajouter 5$can. Plus
7% GST in Canada/TPS de 7 p. 100 en sus au Canada. IJCS/RIÉC, 75
Albert, S-908, Ottawa, Canada K1P 5E7.
Rédacteur en chef/Editor-in-Chief: Robert Schwartzwald (University
of Massachusetts Amherst).
Rivista di Studi Canadesi. Annual/Annuel. 30.000 lire; Foreign/Étranger,
40.000 lire. Rivista di Studi Canadesi, Grafischena, n. 13147723, Viale
Stazione 177-72015 Fasano di Puglia, (Br-Italia).
Director/Directeur: Giovanni Dotoli (Università di Bari).
Zeitschrift für Kanada Studien. Biannual/Semestriel. DM25. Zeitschrift für
Kanada Studien, Pädagogische Hochschule, Kunzenweg 21, D-79199
Freiburg, Germany.
Editors/Rédacteurs: Udo Kempf (Universität Freiburg), Reingard
Nischik (Universität Konstanz).
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CANADIAN STUDIES
Call for Papers
Health and Well-Being in Canada
Volume 29 (Spring 2004)
The Canadian State has, from time to time, come to the defense of
“real” Canadian values, based on public involvement and a sense
of community. Over the past several years, however, health care
has become an area of confrontation between the federal
government and one provincial government in particular. The
Government of Alberta has proposed nothing less than attempt to
reshape Canadian identity by developing a new health care system
patterned on the U.S. model that leans heavily toward private
sector involvement. In this confrontation, we see how the issue of
health touches on a variety of complex questions that go far beyond
the specific dimension of managing health care services insofar as
two sometimes contradictory logics of Canadian identity are at
loggerheads.
The issue of health also extends to the concept of well-being in the
broader sense. What do we mean when we say that someone is
“doing all right” in Canada? On the other hand, is it possible to
speak of Canadian malaises? In what ways do discourses on
Canadian rights, immigration, ageing, youth, leisure, women’s
health issues, sexuality, and work relate to the overall issue of
health in a Canadian context? In what ways are these issues of
health and well-being represented through academic, political,
and cultural (including literature, the media, and the visual arts)
channels?
The IJCS invites submissions that address issues of health and
well-being in a variety of dimensions, including comparative
studies that evaluate the Canadian experience in relation to other
experiences throughout the world.
Please forward paper (and an abstract of 100 words max.) before
September 1st, 2003 to: IJCS, 75 Albert, S-908, Ottawa,
Ontario, Canada K1P 5E7. Tel.: (613) 789-7834; fax: (613)
789-7830; e-mail: [email protected].
REVUE INTERNATIONALE D'ÉTUDES CANADIENNES
Appel de textes
La santé et le bien-être au Canada
Numéro 29 (Printemps 2004)
L’État canadien s’est parfois porté à la défense des « vraies »
valeurs canadiennes, fondées sur l’engagement public et un sens
de la communauté. Or, le domaine de la santé a fait l’objet au cours
des dernières années d’un affrontement entre le gouvernement
fédéral et une province en particulier, l’Alberta. À l’opposé de
la vision du fédéral, le gouvernement provincial de l’Alberta
prétend ni plus ni moins renouveler l’identité canadienne en
développant un nouveau système de santé inspiré du modèle
américain où le recours au secteur privé deviendra une voie
importante.
Cette question de la santé touche donc des aspects complexes qui
débordent la seule dimension de la gestion des services de santé
dans la mesure où deux logiques identitaires « canadian » parfois
contradictoires s’y affrontent. Puis elle s’étend au bien- être dans
le sens le plus large. Qu’est-ce qu’est « être bien dans sa peau » au
Canada? En revanche, y a-t-il des « malaises » canadiens?
Comment les discours sur les droits, les loisirs, la jeunesse, le
vieillissement, l’immigration, la santé des femmes, la sexualité et
le travail visent-ils la santé dans le contexte canadien ? Quels sont
les modes de représentation de ces questions de santé à travers la
production culturelle (littérature, médias, arts visuels),
scientifique et étatique question.
La RIÉC invite donc les soumissions qui s’adressent à la question
de santé dans ces multiples dimensions, y compris les études
comparées qui mettent l’expérience canadienne à l’épreuve
d’autres expériences autour du monde.
S.v.p. faire parvenir votre texte (et un résumé de 100 mots max.)
d’ici le 1er mai 2003 au Secrétariat de la Revue internationale
d’études canadiennes : 75, rue Albert, S-908, Ottawa, Canada,
K1P 5E7. Tél. : (613) 789-7834; téléc. : (613) 789-7830;
courriel : [email protected].
Call for Open Topic Articles
The Editorial Board of the IJCS has decided to broaden the format of the
Journal. While each future issue of the IJCS will include a set of articles
addressing a given theme, as in the past, it will also include several articles
that do not do so. Beyond heightening the general interest of each issue, this
change should also facilitate participation in the Journal by the international
community of Canadianists.
Accordingly, the Editorial Board welcomes manuscripts on any topic in the
study of Canada. As in the past, all submissions must undergo peer review.
Final decisions regarding publication are made by the Editorial Board.
Often, accepted articles need to undergo some revision. The IJCS
undertakes that upon receiving a satisfactorily revised version of a
submission that it has accepted for publication, it will make every effort to
ensure that the article appears in the next regular issue of the Journal.
Please forward paper and abstract (one hundred words) to the IJCS at the
following address: 75 Albert, S-908, Ottawa, Ontario K1P 5E7. Fax:
(613) 789-7830; e-mail: [email protected].
REVUE INTERNATIONALE D’ÉTUDES CANADIENNES
Soumission d’articles hors-thèmes
La Revue internationale d’études canadiennes a adopté une politique visant
à modifier quelque peu son format. En effet, la Revue continuera à offrir une
série d’articles portant sur un thème retenu, mais dorénavant elle publiera
aussi des articles hors-thèmes.
Le Comité de rédaction examinera donc toute soumission qui porte sur un
sujet relié aux études canadiennes indépendamment du thème retenu. Bien
entendu comme toute soumission, celle-ci fera l’objet d’une évaluation par
pairs. La décision finale concernant la publication d’un texte est rendue par
le Comité de rédaction. Une décision d’accepter de publier un texte est
souvent accompagnée d’une demande de révision. Une fois qu’elle aura
reçu une version révisée qu’elle jugera acceptable, la Revue essaiera, dans
la mesure du possible, d’inclure cet article dans le numéro suivant la date
d’acceptation finale.
S.v.p. faire parvenir votre texte et un résumé (100 mots maximum) au
Secrétariat de la RIÉC : 75, rue Albert, bureau 908, Ottawa, Canada,
K1P 5E7. Téléc. : (613) 789-7830; courriel : [email protected].
REVUE INTERNATIONALE D’ÉTUDES CANADIENNES
SUBSCRIPTION/ABONNEMENT
Rates per year (for subscriptions in Canada, please add 7 % GST; for subscriptions outside
Canada, please add 5 dollars)/Tarif par année (au Canada, prière d’ajouter 7 p. 100
de TPS; les abonnés à l’étranger prièrent d’ajouter 5 dollars:
$40
$30
$25
$20
Institutions
Regular subscription/abonnement régulier
Members of associations affiliated with the Learned Societies/membres des associations
affiliées aux Sociétés savantes
Members of ICCS Associations, retirees or students, include proof/membres des
associations du CIEC, retraités ou étudiants, joindre une preuve
Please indicate year of subscription/Veuillez indiquer l’année d’abonnement désirée :
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
No17
No 18
No19
Representation/La représentation
Diaspora and Exile / La diaspora et l’exil
Articles from Foreign Canadian Studies Journals / Articles de revues
d’études canadiennes à l’étranger
No 20 Rebellion and Resistance / Rébellion et résistance
No 21 Sexuality / La sexualité
No 22 Canada and the World in the Twentieth Century / Le Canada et le monde
au XXe siècle
No 23 Spirituality, Faith, Belief / Spiritualité, foi et croyance
No 24 Territory(ies) / Territoire(s)
No 25 Post-Canada
No 26 Performing Canada / Le Canada mis en scène
No 27-28 Transculturalisms / Les transferts culturels
(Double issue / Numéro double)
No 29 Health and Well-Being in Canada / La santé et le bien-être au Canada
No 30 To be determined / sera annoncé sous peu
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Ê
IJCS/RIEC
75 Albert, S-908, Ottawa, Ontario, K1P 5E7, Canada
(613) 789-7830
¿ [email protected]
http://www.iccs-ciec.ca

Editorial Board / Comité de rédaction Advisory Board / Comité

Transcription

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