Introduction

Introduction JONATHAN BORDO, PETER KULCHYSKI, JOHN MILLOY AND JOHN WADLAND This issue of the Journal ofCanadian Studies is dedicated to our close friend and colleague Bruce Hodgins. After more than 30 yeats of devoted service to Trent University, Professor Hodgins has officially retired. To celebrate his distinguished career as historian, administrator, environmentalist, canoeist and outspoken advocate in defence of aboriginal rights, a group of his friends and professional associates assembled at Camp Wanapitei on Lake Temagarni, Ontario·on the Labour Day weekend of 1996, to reminisce and readpapets to one anotheron themes central to Bruce Hodgins's research. The scholarship assembled herehas been selected as representative ofthe work presented on i:hat memorable occasion. It is anchored by Bruce Hodgins's memoir that proposes and grounds the title that we have selected to frame the contents: Refiguring Wilderness. Bruce Hodgins has taught and written extensively .about Canada. His wideranging scholarship is united by three central themes: the North, wilderness and organic .and comparative federalism. His community and university s.ervice also reflects an energetic dedication to those themes. He chaired the History Department at Trent and later became director of the Frost Centre for Canadian Heritage and Development Studies. He is currently part of a community group that has established the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, and has already assembled over 600 examples of the craft that has linked the First Nations and other peoples via the country's waterways. Despite his demanding career, Bruce Hodgins along with Carol Hodgins has managed each summer to co,lead journeys by canoe across both the near and the most northerly reache8 of Canada, searching out, following and eventually describing the various waterways of generations of indigenous and other travellers. Indeed, the two have covered more of Canada by canoe than most people have amassed.in air miles. As his essay in this collection documents, Hodgins's scholarly adventures mirrored his experience on the land. He grew up in Kitchener, Ontario, and from an early age became active in the camping movement. Through his evolution from camper to camp director, from south to north, he learned to trea, sure the canoe notmerely as a vehicle, but as a sophisticated technology, a work of art containing the traditions ofits aboriginal creation. He also came to recog, nize the irony of the canoe's agency in the history of aboriginal colonization by Europeans. Bruce Hodgins has been heavily involved with. the Temagarni site since 1956, when his parents obtained qoth Camp Wanapitei and the Wanapitei Chateau. He has been president of the camp since 1971: In that year, he organized it.into a cooperative company that has involved many Trent colleagues and alumni. For 25 Journal ofCanadian Studies Vol. 33, No. 2 (Ete 1998 Summer) 3 years it has been the site of the September retreat for Trent Canadian Studies faculty , students, invited colleagues and students from other institutions. For some, it has been the threshold to experience, for the first time and in the flesh as it were, "North" and "Wilderness." · Those concepts of the mind and of experience, "North" and "Wilderness," have coalesced over the last century to constitute an imagined cultural version of Canada. That distant northern place of wilderness provides the setting for many socially and historically constructed places. It is a wasteland, a nest ofwild beasts, quelques arpents de neige, surmner camp and both a void and a voiding. It is "empty." It is peopled. It is a container of a myriad ofcomplex relationships. It is a landscape of the mind. Wilderness and north, place and direction, have their equivalents in many cultures. For the Greeks, wilderness was simply the space furthest away from the civilized space ofthe city-state, the locus ofuseless expense, the waste ground. For European expansionists, wilderiiess was possession, a source of wealth and power, sovereignty and empire. And finally, for former colonies in this land, it has functioned as the site for the symbolic staging of the imagined community of the federated nation-state. Over the past 10 years, a dialogue concerning wilderness has emerged at Trent, mostly between historians and theorists working within the disciplines ofCanadian studies; cultural studies, history and Native studies. Colleagues...