The Iconic North: Cultural Constructions of Aboriginal Life in Postwar Canada by Joan Sangster (review)

Joan Sangster's The Iconic North examines cultural representations of the Canadian North and Aboriginal peoples from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s. Sangster describes how the state promoted Canada's northern landscape as its last frontier of development during the post-war period. Utilising theory on Canadian identity, settler colonialism, and race, Sangster shows that Indigenous–settler relations in the North after 1945 represented a form of internal colonialism for Canada. This book fills an important gap in the field of Canadian cultural history. Sangster argues that cultural constructions of the North served both the state's promotion of resource development and embodied the changing values of Euro-Canadian society. Cultural producers viewed Aboriginal peoples with increasing tolerance by the end of the 1960s, but the state's advancement of a narrative of progress in the North remained unquestioned.

Sangster examines Euro-Canadian cultural constructions of the North through six case studies. The first chapter explores images of Indigenous life in white women's travel narratives published from the 1940s to the 1970s. These sojourners acted as participants in state modernising projects in the North by reinforcing the view that Indigenous peoples needed guidance. Sangster shows that white women's writing used orientalist techniques, describing the Inuit as children and whites as their paternal protectors for the Canadian public (pp. 47–9). Chapter 2 focuses on visual and textual renderings of northern Aboriginal peoples in The Beaver, which Sangster argues represents the 'dominant ideologies concerning race and Indigenous cultures circulating in Canadian society' in the post-war era (p. 70). The Beaver claimed to present an objective view of the North, but ultimately reinforced the colonial dichotomy of a primitive society struggling with modernity for its Southern readers. Chapters 3 and 4 look at visual representations of the North in the CBC television series RCMP (1959–60) and National Film Board documentaries. Both show Indigenous peoples benefiting from northern development. Chapter 5 focuses on Irene Baird's fictional and creative writing, where Sangster argues Baird acted as an intermediary figure. Baird's writing shows a shift from the celebratory narratives presented in the earlier women's travel writing to the beginning of a more critical assessment of Inuit–white contact. Finally, Chapter 6 looks at the Royal Commission on the Status of Women's visit to the North to collect witness testimonies. Sangster argues that the RCSW subtly challenged the white paternalism that dominated the book's earlier case studies. RCSW commissioners sought to incorporate Indigenous women's voices, but were largely unsuccessful.

For Canadian women's historians, Sangster's book offers an important glimpse of how white women helped construct and perpetuate discourses that turned Indigenous women into colonial objects. White women acted as symbols of modernity in the North and continued to view Indigenous women through the lens of colonial paternalism. While not a history of northern Indigenous women, Sangster makes every attempt to contextualise and understand their experiences. She ends her study by inviting future historians to explore the views of Canada's northern Indigenous people during the post-war era.