Exploring Canada: Exploits and Encounters

At the Akureyri conference, NACS joined forces with the University of Akureyri and the local Stefansson Arctic Institute. The conference was only made possible as we worked together. Without local university co-operation, NACS would neither have been able to bring the 2018 conference to its rather stunning North Icelandic location nor attract the Canadian speakers who flocked to Akureyri and made the Canadian contingent much larger than in several previous NACS triennials.

Between the NACS triennials in Turku 2015 and Akureyri 2018, big political changes took place in North America. Very soon after the Turku conference in August 2015, Canadian voters said goodbye to the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper and elected the first Liberal government led by Justin Trudeau. Trudeau immediately began to speak about changing Canada’s image in the world, and certainly in government communication some things changed almost overnight. In November 2016, voters in the United States elected a president whose activities have since given a lot of food for thought for Canadians, certainly Canadian politicians, but also Canadianists in Canada and abroad. Observing and understanding the long-term impact of such changes was at the heart of several of our Akureyri conference panels pondering society and politics, showcased in this volume in the article by Kim Richard Nossal. Nossal and others in this volume ask the question of what to make of North America at a time when great desires for change, possibly in opposite directions, were channeled into federal voting in both Canada and United States? What to make of Canada now on its own and in various comparative contexts?

At the time we are writing this Introduction, it is October 2020, and looming changes in the global political order and hopes of a budding recovery from the covid-19 pandemic once again remind us of the vital importance of a multidisciplinary field of study like Canadian Studies. The uneven impact of such massive, unpredictable change on different communities can best be addressed through respectful listening and exchange within a community which speaks as equals in multiple voices. This volume continues in the best tradition of Canadian Studies: it brings together voices hailing from a global academic community whose debates are a crucial part of building and preserving prosperous, stable and just societies. The Canadian studies community speaking in this volume continues to insist that we are strong when we speak together.

Of the nearly sixty papers presented at the conference, fourteen are gathered here. They range from politics to history and language studies, literary studies and philosophy, as well as psychological exploration and questions of identity, perhaps particularly questions concerning immigration, migration and integration. This is not surprising, considering that we are dealing with a culture in many ways based on exploring difference, political as well as individual, national as well as multicultural.

The contents of this volume are divided into four thematic parts: Spaces, Writing Absences, Immigrant Voices and Icelandic Connections. Part 1, Spaces, opens with two articles which engage with the Canadian North and continues with contributions which focus on indigenous experience in Canada. The section argues that space is to be understood much more broadly than simply in terms of region or geography. The North as a space is shown to offer alluring opportunities to remake individuals and nations, but it may prove to derail the ambitions of anyone who enters with the aspiration of making the North serve them. The discussion of indigenous experience further illustrates the necessity of understanding space, concrete or metaphoric, as a fluid construct in which voices that were once silenced in Canada are now carving a lasting imprint. The writers in Part 1 engage with spaces and voices that were once subjugated and silenced in the colonial processes that crafted Canada. The opening article by Aritha van Herk paves the way for authors in Part 1 to show such spaces regaining their agency; in the words of the Alberta author Robert Kroetsch (1927–2011), engaging with these spaces raises “a doubt about our ability to know” (Kroetsch 1989, 23), a doubt which also becomes an obligation to keep exploring Canada.

Kim Nossal also engages with the North in the article “Northern Approaches: The Harper government’s Arctic Policies Reconsidered”. Nossal writes about the Harper period and that fascination for the North and the Arctic which has been characteristic of many governments and Canadian prime ministers, but which became unusually prominent during Stephen Harper’s premiership. “Playing the ‘Arctic card’ is always a winner in Canadian politics”, Nossal argues, striking an intriguing link with Aritha van Herk’s argument above, but from a very different, more practical-tactical political perspective.

How do two cultures with vastly different language systems manage to communicate, make themselves understood? In today’s world there are many ways to overcome such barriers, but two or three centuries ago that was not the case, particularly if one of the cultures did not have a written language. Karim M. Tiro, in cooperation with Roy Wright, Montreal (deceased 2018), contributes the article “The Mathematical Encounter: Land, Language and Numbers in the Creation of Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory”. Tiro and Wright discuss a historical issue with far-reaching implications for today’s scholars as they analyze documents written by the Mohawk chief John Deserontyon (c.1742–1811) in connection with a land settlement treaty. The article argues that although the Indigenous understanding of concepts like quantity and area was different from that of the Europeans, it was in some ways just as “correct” or sophisticated as that of the colonial/British officers or administrators.

Part 1 closes with the article “From Ontario to the United Nations: An Introduction to the Thought and Influence of John McMurtry, FRSC” by Giorgio Baruchello, who places the internationally known Canadian philosopher John McMurtry at the forefront of contemporary holistic theory and thinking. Baruchello’s discussion of McMurtry suggests that other English-speaking countries have tended to overlook McMurtry’s holistic vision and theory, and shows how as a public intellectual McMurtry has been highly influential both within Canada and outside its borders.

Part 2, Writing Absences, highlights a selection of the several papers at the conference which focused on literature dealing with cataclysmic changes. The authors in Part 2 engage with changes which may be brought about by war but also by loss of the comfort of knowing provided by hegemonic narratives. This turns the authors’ attention to absence, whether in the concrete terms of the forced absence of a mother from a child’s life or the metaphysical absences readers and critics face when they seek the genealogies of a literary text in an archive and find the archive refuses to fulfill their expectations. The silences and absences the authors encounter in Canadian writing may echo devastating experiences, but the articles in Part 2 propose that the literary echoes of such experiences need not become accounts of debilitating loss of voice.

Writing Absences opens with the article “Becoming Bird(ie): Exposing Canadian Government Complicity with Forced Adoptions in Christina Sunley’s The Tricking of Freya”, in which Jennifer Andrews discusses some of the lesser known aspects of, or cracks in, Canada’s supposedly liberal culture in post-World War II North America. Andrews argues that Sunley’s novel reveals a much more tradition-bound bourgeois social value system as it challenges the ways in which Canada has concealed the stories of mothers and children of forced adoption.