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Canoe Nation

Canoe Nation

Nature, Race, and the Making of a Canadian Icon

by Bruce Erickson

Published by: UBC Press

Imprint: UBC Press

11 b&w illustrations, 1 map

Digital download
9780774822503
Published: June 2013

Description
Contents
Authors
Praise

This book will have wide appeal to scholars in the humanities and social sciences, especially in the disciplines of Canadian studies, cultural geography, environmental studies, and Native studies; it will also appeal to a more general audience that has an interest in these subject areas.

Preface: Canoeing Matters

Introduction: Canoes and the Nature of Canada

1 Pedagogical Canoes: “Forced Intimacy,” Suffering, and Remembering National History

2 I Fish, Therefore I Am: Recreational Canoeing and Wilderness Travel at the Turn of the Century

3 Regimes of Whiteness: Wilderness and the Production of Abstract Space from Seton to Grey Owl

4 Recreational Nationalism: Canoeing as Political Activism

Conclusion: Future Politics and the Production of the Nation

Notes

References

Index

Bruce Erickson is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at York University in Toronto.

Canoe nation explores how the canoe is not only an important object of Canada’s understanding of itself as a nation, but also a vital and changing practice that is key to historically specific configurations of economics, landscapes, and modes of governance and citizenship. Ranging from the fur trade to celebrity wilderness paddling and tracing complex connections among economic, colonial, pedagogical, recreational, and environmental desires, Erickson’s brilliantly original analysis shows that the canoe is, quite literally, a vehicle of power in the Canadian national landscape. ~Catriona Sandilands, Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University