The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation (review)

The Reluctant Land is a magnum opus in a double sense. The honour is usually bestowed upon a work of large scale. Further back in time, however, it also meant the successful transmutation of base matter into gold. On both counts, Cole Harris's most recent book fits the definitions. The Reluctant Land it is a lengthy work of original thought about the philosophical concept of 'being' in the emerging country of Canada. Simultaneously, it is a wide-reaching synthesis of the regional literature that is transformed into a larger whole as the reader is repeatedly shown patterns of similitude in what otherwise passes for a dissimilar corpus of historiography.

'The research I admire most,' Harris recently wrote in Canadian Geographer (52, no. 4 [2008]: 413), 'is weighted heavily towards steeping, to the time it takes to begin to know a complex place, society, or set of issues, and, out of this protracted engagement, to begin to understand them.'. Harris is talking about the geographical concept of territorialité, and in The Reluctant Land one senses a book steeped in intimate, firsthand awareness of the passage of time, landscapes, and life worlds. Nearly half a century in the making, The Reluctant Land brings together Harris's earlier work on French Canada (The Seigneurial System in Early Canada, 1966), his first attempt with John Warkentin at a national historical geography in Canada before Confederation (1974), his insights into the patterns and power relations of the colonial New World ('The Simplification of Europe Overseas,' 1977), his intimate contact with the historic cartography relied upon as editor of the first volume of the Historical Atlas of Canada (1987), and his reappraisal of indigenous peoples and colonialism in The Resettlement of British Columbia (1997). Frankly, the Canadian geographical and historical communities have been patiently waiting for Harris to place this corpus into a larger context and say something profound about the nature of early Canada. The Reluctant Land meets those expectations, situating itself among the most comprehensive geo-historical theories of early North American development.

At its core, The Reluctant Land is centred on the philosophical concept of indigenous and colonial 'life worlds.' Through generations of experience, Harris writes, unspecialized systems of knowledge were developed that allowed indigenous peoples to efficiently live in relatively harsh environments. 'Theirs was a far more intimate knowledge of the land than any that would follow … Everything that existed – people, plants, animals, rocks, places, the wind, the rain – was animate and sentient. People and elements of what modern Western culture considers nature interacted as common thinking and feeling beings.' In the well-known story of indigenous dispossession of their land and culture as a result of colonialism, region by region Harris continually returns the reader to the philosophical underpinning of life worlds, and how the unspecialized knowledge developed within indigenous life worlds was penetrated by specialized, rationalized, and institutionalized systems of colonial thought that eventually broke local ways and 'reshaped societies around the logics of specialised systems' (9, 14, 17–18).

For the pioneers, the northern environment played a preponderant role in the life worlds of Canada's colonial communities. The concept of northern environment is adroitly used to differentiate the Canadian experience from the Turnerian vision of the American experience. The border between the two nations, Harris writes, separated two very different environmental experiences. The American one was that of 'a broad frontier crossing the whole length of an essentially fertile land and moving west in a succession of stages.' British North America, in contrast, 'disappeared northward into rock, muskeg, and barrenness, and along the south presented only patches of [fertile] land … As drawn, the border would separate two landed experiences, one essentially generous, the other pinched.' The American past 'has to do with extension and abundance,' he argues, 'the Canadian, with discontinuity, paradox, and limitations.' Whereas the western frontier represented a continual safety valve for Americans, in Canada hard boundaries and their consequences cropped...