Temagami’s Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature by Jocelyn Thorpe (review)

Jocelyn Thorpe’s Temagami’s Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature argues that wilderness is a historically specific, discursively produced construct, one that has used racialized and gendered definitions of the nation to conceal the dispossession of First Nations peoples from their ancestral lands. Drawing on Foucauldian genealogical theory, as well as on post-colonial and social nature theory, Thorpe seeks to denaturalize both the “Canadianness” and the “wildness” of the region known popularly as Temagami. Thorpe traces the rhetorical and material means through which Teme Augama-Anishnabai First Peoples’ claims to the land as “n’Daki Menan,” their traditional home-land, became marginalized amidst the emergence of Euro-Canadian characterizations of the region as “Temagami,” an icon of the dominion’s wilderness. This process, she suggests, contributed to broader projects of nation-building and constituted Canada as a white settler society.

Thorpe analyzes a series of episodes in which conflicts between Teme Augama-Anishnabai and Euro-Canadians over n’Daki Menan became particularly acute. Beginning with the effects of industrial development and tourism upon the region, Thorpe argues that timber extractors, forest conservationists, and cottagers may have differed in their views on resource exploitation and wilderness preservation, but they shared a common vision of the land that did not acknowledge Indigenous residents’ rights. Despite First Peoples’ efforts to pressure Ontario for a reserve, the province opted instead to create a forest reserve. Teme Augama-Anishnabai rights to the land were increasingly restricted, while industrialists and tourists were granted greater liberty to occupy and exploit Temagami.

Temagami’s Tangled Wild also explores the effects of legal discourse upon First Nations’ claims to n’Daki Menan. After a period from 1929 to 1943 when Teme Augama-Anishnabai residents refused to pay rent to Ontario, the province established a conditional reserve but rejected an Indigenous proposal for joint management of the Temagami Forest Reserve. First Peoples clashed with the province in the courtroom again in the 1970s; drawing upon a precedent set in a similar case in British Columbia, legal authorities denied Indigenous claims to n’Daki Menan by constructing band members as insufficiently Aboriginal in their supposed failure to prove historical and spiritual attachment to the land in question.

That nature is made, that nations are constructed entities, and that race and gender are historically contingent categories of existence are not particularly novel arguments; still, Thorpe’s analysis is valuable in its elaboration of the very real, material consequences of racialized and gendered discourses of nation and nature upon the lives of Teme Augama-Anishnabai. Thorpe is careful to emphasize that the transformation of n’Daki Menan into Temagami was not a simple, top-down imposition of colonial power. First Nations actively defended claims to their lands and contested non-Aboriginal definitions of Indigeneity, seeking to make the best of situations not of their own making. For instance, Thorpe points out that although Indigenous peoples often worked as guides for Euro-Canadian sportsmen, they determined what aspects of n’Daki Menan tourists experienced, thus directly shaping Euro-Canadian perceptions of the landscape.

Temagami’s Tangled Wild is a crucial reminder that historical interpretation matters, that competing readings of the past have profound cultural and political consequences upon the present. The question remains whether Thorpe’s interpretation of n’Daki Menan’s history as the rightful homeland of the Teme Augama-Anishnabai can displace dominant narratives of Temagami as a site of pristine Canadian wilderness, valuable to the state for tourism and resource extraction, and whether Thorpe’s analysis can help redress the colonial dispossession of First Nations peoples in Canada more broadly and promote Indigenous self-determination.

A few issues appear throughout the text. One stems from Thorpe’s decision to use Temagami as opposed to n’Daki Menan in the title of the book. Given her intention to denaturalize colonialism and to emphasize Indigenous narratives...