Changing Places: History, Community, and Identity in Northeastern Ontario (review)

In Changing Places, an examination of community formation in the region of northeastern Ontario bounded by the settlements of Timmins, Iroquois Falls, and Matheson before 1950, Kerry Abel sets out to bridge two analytical divides that have often segregated scholars – Canadian and otherwise. The first of these divides splits those who understand community development primarily in terms of broad economic forces and social structures from those who highlight cultural factors. The second sets local historians against the proponents of national and international history – what the author calls ‘big’ history. With a sharp attention to detail and a deep appreciation for complexity, Abel reconciles these views while providing a rich and nuanced portrait of an understudied region. Her meticulous research provides compelling new ways to understand how people can develop a shared sense of identity in the face of challenge and change.

Initially a meeting ground and homeland for several Aboriginal groups, the northeastern corner of Ontario was increasingly drawn into international networks of commerce beginning in the seventeenth century as French and English fur traders moved to the region. By the early 1900s, local residents were witnessing the rapid spread of agricultural settlement and the emergence of new mining and pulp and paper industries in their communities as an expansionist provincial government came to view the northern hinterland as an engine for economic development. The old, stable fur trade society based on accommodation between Aboriginal peoples and newcomers suddenly began to unravel. Waves of newcomers from southern Canada, Finland, Russia, Italy, Ireland, China, the Ukraine, and elsewhere arrived to take advantage of new economic opportunities in the region, bringing their distinctive customs and politics with them. In the midst of these dramatic upheavals, sojourners and long-time residents gradually adapted to one another and developed a common set of values rooted in their working-class lifestyles, their relationships with their natural surroundings, and a shared sense of regional alienation. This process of community formation, Abel argues, had as much to do with imagined ideals, symbolic thinking, and specific local events as it did with broad social and economic structures.

Changing Places is divided into three main sections. The first provides readers with an introduction to the physical environment of northeastern Ontario, followed by a discussion of the development of the regional economy before 1914. By contrast, the second section examines what Abel regards as the key factors shaping local community life in the first half of the twentieth century. The author focuses here on ways that ethnicity, work, leisure, and politics influenced the patterns of daily existence. A particularly insightful chapter challenges prevailing interpretations of frontier communities by exploring how class, gender, and transience intersected to produce a distinctive ‘struggle for social organization’ in the new settlements. The third section of the book tackles the dynamics of community formation head on. First, it examines the factors that created disharmony and social strife among northern residents by focusing on the divisive impacts of language, religion, political ideology, and economic disparity. It then demonstrates how such community discord was eventually reduced through the operation of fraternal organizations, schools, community festivities, and as a result of common experiences of tragedy and hardship. The final chapter of the section focuses narrowly on the imaginative construction of community by highlighting how a range of ideas about masculinity, individualism, economic development, and the cultural superiority of northerners became the basis for a shared regional identity.

If this book has a significant flaw, it is primarily a matter of organization. The same themes and topics are addressed more than once in different chapters, making the reading repetitive at times. So, too, one might have wished for a tighter integration of historical narrative and analysis. As the book is structured, lengthy sections of its twelve chapters are largely descriptive, leaving this reviewer with the feeling that more attention to the interpretive significance of particular events and details was required at certain points. Moreover, some...