Inheriting a Canoe Paddle: The Canoe in Discourses of English-Canadian Nationalism by Misao Dean, and: Canoe Nation: Nature, Race, and the Making of a Canadian Icon by Bruce Erickson (review)

It’s hard to get more Canadian than the canoe, eh? In these two new titles, Dean and Erickson critically examine the relationship between the canoe and the Canadian nation. The books’ simultaneous publication supports their authors’ common argument that the canoe has played a significant role in the narration of the nation as a just, multicultural-but-primarily-white, environmentally conscious place. Erased from this version of Canada is the violence of colonialism and its impact on First Nations that challenge dominant ideas about the nation and that might also, but generally do not, appear in stories about the canoe. Dean and Erickson agree that the canoe possesses no inherent relationship to Canada – and indeed that the concept of the nation is itself constantly in flux – and state that their interest in the history of the canoe has nothing to do with the canoe itself, but with what it has been made to mean over time. That said, both authors situate themselves in relation to the canoe and argue that their love of and connection to paddling must also be challenged in order to decolonize (in Dean) and queer (in Erickson) the canoe and the territory it has helped to naturalize as the nation.

Dean’s title resonates with the central political question at the heart of both books: how do non-Aboriginal Canadians deal with our colonial inheritance, an inheritance that we have learned to take for granted not only through a convenient narrative embodied in the canoe, but also through the intimate action of paddling? The authors begin to answer this question by denaturalizing through critical analysis the connections among the canoe, the idea of Canada that the canoe has come to symbolize, and the territory the nation-state has come to possess. Both authors make amply evident – for those unfamiliar with the canoe in Canadian writing, museum displays, historical reenactments, travel narratives, and environmentalism – that such a connection clearly exists and clearly requires re-examination. As Erickson observes, it has become commonplace for summer camps and government offices to remove or cover up stereotypical and racist “Indian” images and to eliminate “Indian lore” from camping programs, yet the canoe, which is similarly implicated in a national narrative devoid of real Indigenous peoples and claims to land, continues to be celebrated unabashedly. Inheriting a Canoe Paddle and Canoe Nation interrogate a particularly salient national icon, and in so doing join a growing body of scholarly work that challenges the legacy of colonialism in the Canadian context.

Yes, you need to read them both. For two books on the same topic that make similar arguments, they are remarkably different. Although many of the same names of prominent canoeists appear in both books, the authors select different examples to analyze. For instance, Dean dedicates a chapter to the environmentalist filmmaker Bill Mason while Erickson concentrates on the infamous imaginary Indian Grey Owl. The fact that there appear to be so many examples to choose from that there is little overlap between the two texts supports the authors’ argument that the canoe has long played an important role in the nation. Along with using distinct examples, the authors create quite different tones with the texts through subtly different emphases. Dean, perhaps staying true to her literary roots, makes clear the prevalence and the fragility of the canoe-as-nation symbol through her careful reading of the works she studies. In her rendering, it is as though the many voices that have contributed to the creation of the symbol are somehow aware of (and haunted by) its inadequacy, its colonial erasures, even as they depend on them to make non-Aboriginal people appear indigenous to...