Unsettling North of Summer: Anxieties of Ownership in the Politics and Poetics of the Canadian North

Canadian writers continue to struggle with their ambivalent settler-colonial inheritances, especially as they relate to Canada’s North. By troubling invaluable but thus far incomplete considerations of Canada’s settler-colonial history, this essay examines why Canada’s relations with its Arctic territories remain unsettled: settler-invader practices of land possession hinge on agricultural-cum-epistemological limits that find resistance in the Canadian North’s environmental conditions. Drawing predominantly from Al Purdy’s 1967 collection North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island and secondly from CBC Radio’s 2011 feature “Northwords,” this essay demonstrates some of the ways that incompletable practices for colonial land claims, those that could only fail in the face of Arctic environments’ natural resistances, have fostered anxieties of (dis)possession that linger throughout poetic representations and political policies concerning Canada’s northern territories. Behind these anxieties are as yet unanswerable questions that shape Canada’s relationship with the North and with its colonial history: it goes without saying that certain landscapes trouble colonizing practice, so can a landscape, through its physical conditions, also be said to resist an ideology? If so, what are settler-colonialism’s ontic limits? Can we imagine an end to settler-colonial modes of relating to landscape in Canadian literature? This essay contends that resistances to settlercolonialism are not solely conceptual—for example, the failure of colonial language to represent colonized landscapes, the focus of so much critique at the crossroads of postcolonial and ecocritical thought—or even anthropocentric, though the North’s Inuit and Indigenous communities ably demonstrate that colonization is never an uncontested project. In addition to these indisputable embodiments of resistance, there are also physical limits to colonizing ideology, limits rooted in environmental conditions that, without any human agency or intent, deny colonial understandings of nature and the natural. Here, literary works help demonstrate how environmental resistances foster a disconnect between Canada’s southern and northern experiences of colonization.