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Technology and Culture 42.3 (2001) 587-588



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Book Review

Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communications, and Canada


Citizens and Nation: An Essay on History, Communications, and Canada. By Gerald Friesen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Pp. x+307. $55/$22.95.

Within the last decade, a battle of words has broken out among Canadian historians. On the one side of this so-called history war are those who want a unifying, patriotic national history, a seamless story that will instill pride in Canada's accomplishments. On the other side are the social historians who wish to uncover the darker flank of the nation-building theme, to expose the price paid by workers, women, aboriginal peoples, and minorities--in other words, those on the periphery of the national story. One of Canada's most eminent historians, Gerald Friesen, has written Citizens and Nation as a mediation between the two camps.

In this fascinating, fluidly constructed book, Friesen places findings of the new social history within the national narrative. He relates the stories of ordinary people in each of four different stages in Canada's history. These periods Friesen identifies according to their principal means of communication, namely: oral-traditional, textual-settler, print-capitalist, and screen-capitalist. Each of these phases, which occurred in different parts of the country at different times, had a unique approach to time and space and therefore made a different contribution to the nation's history.

The initial two stages in Friesen's schema are closely related. The first is the aboriginal era, when the dominant conceptions of time and space emerged from oral communications in which the distinctions between the spiritual and natural worlds were blurred. Space was the current locality; time was the seasonal cycle of nature. The arrival of Europeans in North America introduced a second phase, the textual-settler phase. Although the establishment of the printed word bestowed a perceived superiority on the newcomer, the two cultures lived in relative harmony, both learning from each other and often sealing their relationship in business and marriage. The perceptions of time and space in the new era remained close to the natural environment, its cycles and boundaries. According to Friesen, the textual-settler stage, in which aboriginals and colonists lived in relative harmony, was the most important in defining Canada's identity. Deeply rooted [End Page 587] in their particular place and time, natives and new settlers alike created a strong affinity to their northern environment.

The third and fourth periods--print-capitalist and screen-capitalist--caused much greater change in the common person's perceptions of time and space than the settler phase had brought. Technological advances in transportation (the railway) and communication (the telegraph) carried the tenets and effects of capitalism throughout the country, eroding localism and replacing it with national or global concerns. Wages, property values, and prices defined daily life, rather than region, religion, and ethnicity. In the print-capitalist era, the ordinary person was a citizen of a transcontinental nation; in the screen-capitalist or television age, she or he became enmeshed in local, provincial, national, and continental as well as global communities. Modern, appliance-riddled homes and air-conditioned offices designated space while money defined time.

Covering a nation's entire history and proposing an overarching interpretation thereof will inevitably arouse controversy and carping. Most obvious perhaps is Friesen's contention that aboriginal dimensions of time and space are not yet eclipsed. Unfortunately, despite the resurgence of the First Nations and recent land-claims settlements, one can only question whether the religious and ecological views of this small minority still have an influence on the perceptions of the vast majority of urban, secular Canadians. Can native views, suppressed for many generations by a dominant liberal European culture, counteract the prevailing alienation from nature? For most urban Canadians, the experience of nature comes only from recreation (snow or ice storms excepted) and understanding of the food supply only from the local supermarket. Ironically, and significantly, in the later phases...

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