Nationalism from the Margins: Italians in Alberta and British Columbia by Patricia K. Wood (review)

274 letters in canada 2002 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 and immigrants B play out at time scales ranging from the 1870s to the First World War and back to the election of Laurier and over the broad spatial scale of the West. The domestication game is also inextricable from the early conservation /sport shooting movement and it=s difficult to know whether Colpitts=s use of separate chapters hinders or helps our comprehension. In the final analysis however, his take-home message is clear: homogenous pockets of society, each with perceptions of wildlife, advance that perception to an end, often one that marginalizes an >other.= Colpitts argues, for example, that early fish and game >protective= societies were motivated not by an environmental ethic but by social concerns: an attempt to conserve core British values in the face of >eastern European settlers, papist sodbusters, Asian labourers and Native hunters.= Colpitts=s final period comes after the First World War. He credits newly available cold storage with finally breaking the link between wild meats and the diets of the majority of westerners. Sport hunting comes into its own with wide-ranging attempts to make Nature more efficient: the purging of >unwanted, coarse fish,= from streams and their replacement with hatchery fry; elimination of predators from parks; ranching of fox, mink, and other furbearers: a sad wish that >bringing Nature under control offers hope of bringing society under control= after the tragedy of the war to end all wars. Colpitts leaves us on the cusp of the Second World War in a utilitarian world where >westerners do not see wildlife as part of the world in which they live.= Colpitts seems to recognize this as an over-generalization, and though he continues to talk about the >west,= his articulation of the next view of the garden B ecologists advancing a complex argument for the natural capital value of wildlife B points to involvement of all humanity. (ANN ZIMMERMAN) Patricia K. Wood. Nationalism from the Margins: Italians in Alberta and British Columbia McGill-Queen=s University Press. xx, 180. $65.00 Despite all their best efforts, Canadian historians who >do= immigration and ethnic history still have a hard time convincing many people that immigration and ethnic history is Canadian history, and profoundly so. Patricia Wood=s Nationalism from the Margins is a laudable attempt to make this very case by using the history of Italians in Alberta and British Columbia to say something new about the nature of Canadian national identity. Yet, despite its good intentions, Nationalism from the Margins promises more than it delivers, and misses an opportunity to connect the history of immigration to broader themes in the Canadian story. humanities 275 university of toronto quarterly, volume 73, number 1, winter 2003/4 Wood wants readers to approach this book as a study in the construction of Canadian identity. In fact, Nationalism from the Margins wants to tell the story of Canadian national identity in a way that moves us beyond what Wood calls the familiar >battle lines= of English/French and Native/nonNative . >Canadian nationalism,= Wood insists, >has a diverse history.= And, according to Wood, the story of how Italians in Alberta and British Columbia constructed an identity for themselves as individuals and groups in their new home is an important part of the diverse history of Canadian nationalism. Put simply, Nationalism from the Margins is >a history of one idea of what it means to be Canadian.= The Italians of western Canada, Wood argues, had a >different construction of the Canadian nation.= Their idea of what it means to be Canadian was formed by a >different historical reading= from that of English or French Canadians; it was shaped by a >different experience of race and class, different goals for their lives in this nation, and different expectations for how this idea was supposed to work.= So far, so good. Wood also invites her readers to explore a neglected theme in historical scholarship: landscape. To the various matrices of identity which scholars have been toying with over the past few decades B class, ethnicity, region, and gender B Wood explores how the physical landscape...