Inheriting a Canoe Paddle: The Canoe in Discourses of English-Canadian Nationalism by Misao Dean (review)

Perhaps the best testament of a book’s relevance is its ability to continually resonate. Over the past months, every time I have picked up Misao Dean’s Inheriting a Canoe Paddle, I have been excited by the implications of her ideas for both my own scholarly work and my own position within Canadian society. Using a canoe paddle she inherited from her father to organize the book’s theoretical focus on decoloniality, Dean takes the reader through an intensely personal, though academically rigorous, journey. From the 1950s onward, Dean argues, canoe-focused literature, film, and exhibitions have crafted a nationalist “ideology of the canoe” that sought to render Canadian identity as indigenous to the land. In so doing, this ideology occluded Canada’s legacy of settler colonialism and its impact on First Nations. The book therefore has important lessons for scholars working in Canadian studies (and its allied disciplines), literary and cultural critics, and canoeing enthusiasts, as well as the broader Canadian public.

The first chapter sets the book’s overall tone by applying the concept of “uncannyda” to Duncan Campbell Scott’s “Night Hymns on Lake Nipigon.” Here, this concept, which focuses on the familiar being rendered foreign, is developed through the contradiction between Campbell Scott’s poetry, which depicted Indigenous homelands as a natural and familiar Canadian landscape accessed only by canoe, and the assimilationist policies he implemented as deputy superintendent of Indian affairs. This incongruity, according to Dean, symbolizes a whole generation of early twentieth-century writers whose efforts to create and foster a national literature remained frustrated by similar tensions within Canada’s colonial subtext. From this foundation, Dean lays out how canoe nationalism developed as an effort to unsuccessfully reconcile these tensions between Canadians’ desired relationship to the land and Indigenous sovereignties (past and present) over it. The genesis of this effort at reconciliation is found in the work of three iconic historians: Harold Innis, Arthur Lower, and Donald Creighton, who collectively developed the idea – to use Lower’s phrase – that “Canada is a Canoe Route.” Through their, and subsequent generations of historians’, accounting of Canada’s eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the canoe was symbolically deployed to mend the colonial rift between settlers, the land, and Indigenous peoples. Thus was born a Eurocentric, middle-class, and often masculine “myth of the canoe” that has since been developed through recreational canoeing literature, canoe pageantry, film, and museum displays.

Inheriting a Canoe Paddle is at its strongest when it emphasizes the canoe as a symbol of Canada’s settler colonial history. Many readers will find the book unsettling as they grapple with memories of their own recreational canoe trips or outdoor activities. Dean prepares the reader well for these moments by relating her own struggles with the book’s subject matter. Her identification of the key figures in propagating this settler mythology is also useful. The book has a clear trajectory, revealing the influence of a relatively small and geographically defined community of canoeing enthusiasts. The names ring out like a who’s who of recreational canoeing in Canada: author Eric Morse, filmmaker Bill Mason, and University of Toronto professor Kirk Wipper are all featured prominently.

It is here that Inheriting a Canoe Paddle misses an important opportunity. Though she makes little of it, Dean’s evidence suggests that this culture emanates almost exclusively from Canada’s golden triangle (the area between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal), if not from Ottawa itself. Of the central players in the book’s narrative, Morse, Mason, and Pierre Trudeau all called Ottawa home. Is this geographical concentration important to the development and deployment of canoe nationalism? What does this mean in terms of the canoe’s place in Canadian culture? Is the canoe really a national symbol, or does it reflect sentiments held mostly in Ontario and western Quebec? These questions are touched on in chapters 3 and 4, but as the book...