Canada and the Idea of North, and: Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture (review)

As their titles suggest, these two books, published in 2002 by the same press, share much in common. Each offers a survey of the cultural significance of the North in Canada. Each, though written by an academic based in an English department, takes a broad interdisciplinary approach. (Sherrill E. Grace investigates a variety of cultural media: music, art, drama, poetry, and fiction; Renée Hulan also discusses literary representations but emphasizes non-fictional accounts that include ethnographic descriptions, travel narratives, and adventure stories.) Each carefully sketches its theoretical positions in detail. And each owes a debt to Foucault: Grace characterizes Canada and the Idea of North as a Foucauldian attempt to describe 'the discursive formation of the North,' and, while Hulan never explicitly cites Foucault, much of the analysis in Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture reflects her ideas about discourse as a form of power.

Despite these similarities, Canada and the Idea of North and Northern Experience and the Myths of Canadian Culture take opposing positions on most issues. For example, at the outset each notices the way Canadian culture has often failed to distinguish between the idea of 'Canada-as-North' - a concept that has served Canadian identity formation - and the physical reality of North as a geographical location, but Hulan views the failure to distinguish between the two as dangerous, especially to indigenous people and others who inhabit the North as a physical location; Grace, though certainly sensitive to such issues, treats the slippage as value-neutral and integral to her topic.

Grace, the senior scholar, draws together the thoughts, reading, and experiences of twenty years to provide a panorama of Canadian depictions of North and to orchestrate these into a meditation on how the 'idea of North' (a phrase borrowed from the title of a Glenn Gould soundscape) has functioned in Canadian culture. Hulan, the newly minted scholar (her book has its genesis in a 1996 Ph.D. thesis), offers a survey that is critical of the geographical determinism she sees deriving from this 'nordicity of national identity' and creating a dominant discourse that 'seeks to unify and to shape collective experience and, in so doing, smooth over differences.'

Perhaps the differences between these two scholars are more than generational; perhaps they arise from distinct personal or political visions. Grace says she has written her book 'because I am Canadian and [out of] my love for and desire to understand this stubborn, complex, infuriating place that I call home.' Hulan, in contrast, identifying the idea of North as a dangerous myth that needs to be delineated only so it can be demystified, moves in the direction of polemic and tells us that that such understandings are fundamentally ideological, gendered, and 'tainted by reactionary history.' (She concludes one chapter with the warning: 'Study and critique of these myths must be vigilant in reading the romantic and mystifying views that have their roots in nineteenth-century ideas about race, gender, and nationalism, especially when considering calls to place the north at the centre of future national imagining.') Tracing out 'the familiar quest position of separation, initiation, and return' in ethnographic scholarship and popular adventure tales, Hulan thinks the Native perspective and presence has been overwritten by the appropriation of the North as a cultural symbol that produces stereotypes useful to the dominant culture. Grace, in contrast, sees the dominant discourse as more flexible and complex- and as evolving and subject to challenge. (She takes Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen as exemplifying the possibility of an effective response to tradition: 'In one magical stroke Highway has indigenised the Christian Holy Family, and inscribed the Cree version of how babies arrive on earth into the discursive formation of the North.')

As correctives to one another, it is good to have...