Nature is a constant theme from the earliest texts by French and English settlers in Canada to the present.David Jackson/The Globe and Mail
Roseann O’Reilly Runte is the author of Canadians Who Innovate: The Trailblazers and Ideas That Are Changing the World.
In recent months, with headlines focusing on borders and tariffs, Canadians have been discussing questions of identity and nationalism. We can shed light on the current moment by remembering what has been written on these subjects over the years by poets and philosophers. We have perhaps read and forgotten them, but it’s a good time to look back at the literature that speaks to the idea of the northern land and the people who call it home.
Some of these works are lighthearted and humorous, such as Robertson Davies’s statement that Canada is torn between a ”northern, rather extraordinary, mystical spirit which it fears and the desire to present itself to the world as a Scotch banker.” Others are imbued with sadness, like Margaret Atwood’s poem about Susanna Moodie, mourning the death of her young son: “I planted him in this country like a flag.”
When Northrop Frye described early settlers as turning their backs on nature, building houses huddled in circles against the vastness of the forests or on the shore looking back across the ocean to the land from whence they came, he termed it a “garrison mentality” born of fear. Settlers were afraid of losing themselves and their religion, their values and their culture in the seemingly unending wilderness. Nature is a constant theme from the earliest texts by French and English settlers to the present. The cold and isolation are more than the setting of novels like Anne Hébert’s Kamouraska. From the outset, as the sled passes village after village, it becomes apparent that the attempt to name the bays and thus own them was impossible, and that the people were, in the end, possessed by the wilderness, where civilization and thus civility battled against man’s violent nature. Coming full circle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes in Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies of reclaiming land and escaping urban blight like the geese that “fly overhead in the sheer grace of a carefully angled formation designed to take them elsewhere.”
Oh, Canada! Our favourite books by homegrown authors
The difficulty of life and of obtaining a livelihood in our cold climes fills the pages of Canadian literature. From Margaret Atwood’s Survival to Gil Adamson’s The Outlander, nature is the factor that creates victims, heroes and heroines and is the basis for many of our myths, the mythology of the North and of Canada. In an essay on Ottawa in Local Colour: Writers Discovering Canada, British travel writer Jan Morris observed the wonders of the Canadian wilderness, writing, “Best of all, here and there around the capital you may see, as a white fuzz in a distant prospect, as a deafening marvel on the edge of some landscaped park, the fierce white waters – those thrilling hazards of Canada which have haunted the national imagination always … and which remind the stranger still, even when tamed with sightseeing bridges, picnic sites or explanatory plaques, that this is the capital of the Great Lone Land.” Rather than the spectacular falls and rapids, it is the cold that penetrates the texts of many writers like F.P. Grove in The Turn of the Year: “Like a desert of barren snow is my mind, a white blank, stunned into unconsciousness of all things about me.” Poet Jay Macpherson’s words are truly evocative: “All other winters shall break against hers / Such fire is wedded to her frost.”
When we speak of the North, we tend to use words like vast, solid, white. The North is indeed vast but the land and the ice are one, joined by water in an ever-moving configuration. This has been pointed out by Paul Okalik, the first premier of Nunavut, who said that the concept of land separated by water is incorrect when applied to the North. One must see water, not land as the unifying factor. The land has been tattooed with roads and scarred and is disappearing between the seasons of ice, which is melting with ever increasing speed. With environmental degradation, will we suffer an identity crisis along with an environmental disaster?
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor reflects that we live in a time when we search for meaning. If this is true, we need to articulate and share a national vision, identity and ideals. We need a strengthened understanding of our national identity. We are proud of our researchers, astronauts, builders, economists and poets and philosophers. But can we recall their names and their stories?
Opinion: A new nationalism is emerging in Canada
We shall always have a landscape but is it undeniably changing. We are faced with a choice. We can, like the pioneers described by Northrop Frye, be swallowed up by nature’s woes, which include fires and storms. We can be inundated by the flood of problems that we have inherited and caused. Small and large, they occupy our closets and the countryside. They inhabit our minds. We can simply turn our backs and watch an old movie.
However, we can also join with the Indigenous and other residents of the North and work together. We can follow Dr. Simpson’s advice, “Take very, very good care of each other, always, no matter what happens.” Together we can slow environmental degradation and compose a coda extending both the myth and the reality of the North for the next generation. We can distinguish ourselves as a nation that creates the positive story we wish to remember.
More profound than national sovereignty, defence or international privilege, the North is at the core of our identity and meaning. The narrative of Canada in this century can be one of people who work to improve an imperfect world. We are the custodians of both our dreams and our actions. The environment is a global language that offers us identity, unity of purpose and understanding. Time and the seasons mark everyone’s passage through life. Winds and tides know no boundaries and we all share the brevity of our existence. Nature is the element that unites people around the planet. If we are at peace at home, in and with our northern land, we can indeed be the nation and the people we aspire to be.
Myths are usually based on the memory of a past that cannot be recovered. Canada’s myth is not one of the past. Our myth is one of self-discovery. We never owned the narrative, rather our myth; the North owns us. This is perhaps as true for those who are born and live in the “true north” as for those who live along the southern border.
The Blackfoot name for Alberta’s Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park is Áísínai’pi, which means “is being written.” The rocks there contain petroglyphs whose meaning is pondered by passersby. In an essay in Local Colour, Mark Abley describes them as “oracles where a wanderer might glimpse, like a dream passing across the face of stone, the pattern written for his life.” I would posit that we are also etching our future in the boulders of time as we alter our land and trace the path to the future. Our continual discovery of “north,” and thereby, of ourselves, will make us indeed strong and free.
