Canadians hope to indigenize themselves…” The canoe is a vessel in which non-Aboriginals can “go native,” imagining themselves at one with the land and its original inhabitants, erasing the distinction between Native and newcomer and claiming a right to ownership. “Canoeists,” Dean writes, “by virtue of their canoeing, are not European anymore, but something new, Canadian.” This, at any rate, is the myth. The fetishization of the canoe is based on a reading of history that is summed up in the phrase attributed to the historian A.R.M. Lower, “Canada is a canoe route.” Or in the filmmaker Bill Mason’s “statement of canoe faith”: “It is as if God made the canoe, and then set about making a country in which it could flourish. That country was Canada.” Mason was a particularly important purveyor of recreational nationalism. Once called “Canada’s guru of canoeing,” he made several films for the National Film Board about canoeing and conservation. For him, canoeing was a means of recovering a relationship with nature that non-Aboriginal Canadians had lost, or never had. But, Dean argues, the fur trade did not create Canada, nor did the pioneer canoe routes determine our borders. And how can a recreational activity engaged in by only a small minority of the population be said to define our nationality? The canoeing version of our history is not an objective account of the past but rather an argument for a particular version of events, whose purpose is to rationalize the European occupation of the land and assert a wildercentric view of the Canadian identity. A similar point is made in another new book, Canoe Nation: Nature, Race, and the Making of a Canadian Icon (UBC Press) by Bruce Erickson, a geographer at York University. Like Dean, Erickson believes that the canoe has become “a national fetish” that is “valued for its service to
particular national myths.” He writes about what he calls “the anxious relationship” between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians and argues that in the national imagination the canoe is a vehicle for resolving this anxiety. As he puts it, canoeing is “the national equivalent of saying, ‘I’m not racist; look, I have Native friends.’ ” Stated in shorthand, these claims might seem glib. Like Freud’s infamous cigar, isn’t a canoe sometimes just a canoe? But both Erickson and Dean make a convincing case that recreational canoeing is an example of a phenomenon known as “Indian masquerade.” At its most obvious, Indian masquerade involves dressing up in Aboriginal garb—usually including a feathered headdress— or even, in the case of Grey Owl, for example, taking on a permanent pseudo-Aboriginal identity. But the masquerade might also involve more subtle, even subconscious forms of
appropriation, such as canoeing. The canoe trip remains a common way for Canadians to go native, to masquerade as Indians and to assert our connectedness to the environment. “The canoe transports not just people and goods,” writes Bruce Erickson, “but also ideas and ideologies.” These ideas are most often unacknowledged. The virtue of these two new books is that they contradict the claims of “canoe nationalism” (the term is Dean’s) and reveal the ideology that lies behind the use of the canoe as an all-purpose symbol for Canada.
Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, among them The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Arsenal Pulp Press), a second edition of which was published in 2011. Read more of his work at geist.com and danielfrancis.ca.
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