What direction north? A UBC professor ponders the impact of the Canadian North on our culture

The Canadian North is as enduring a myth of cultural and national
significance as the American West is to the United States, says
Sherrill Grace, an English professor at the University of British
Columbia.

Grace is writing a book to be called Canada and the Idea of
North
in which she is exploring the impact the North has had
for 150 years on the Canadian psyche, shaping our politics, art,
music, culture and geography.

What does the North really mean to Canadians, she asks. How is
it used to shape cultural identity and government policy? And where,
exactly, is the North? All Canadians believe they live in “the true
north strong and free,” but residents of Inuvik or Churchill would
scoff.

“The North has a powerful hold over our imaginations, but we have
an extremely vague notion of what the North really is and one that
has nothing to do with the real people who live there and the issues
they face,” says Grace, who has made three trips to the Arctic in
the course of her research.

One of the key elements in the construction of Canada’s cultural
identity that she is exploring is how artists have portrayed the
North.

Group of Seven painters Lawren Harris and A.Y. Jackson both made
trips to the Arctic and sub-arctic. Their work had a direct influence
on poet F.R. Scott and playwright Herman Voaden, among others, and
helped to establish a pattern that continues today in works by Judith
Thompson, Margaret Atwood, Rudy Wiebe and Mordecai Richler.

But artists are not the only ones concerned with the North, as
Grace points out.

“The North has been used since Confederation to try to unite the
country. Whenever there has been a crisis and a need to build confidence
in our future, people invoke what Glenn Gould called `the idea of
north’ to encourage national pride and spirit.”

It worked for John Diefenbaker, whose “northern vision” helped
give him the greatest landslide victory in Canadian electoral history
in 1958.

During her research, which has taken her to Baffin Island, Bathurst
Inlet and by car up the Dempster Highway to Inuvik, Grace has begun
to understand how the concept of North is sometimes used to exploit
northerners and manipulate those of us in the south.

“It’s completely changed the way I think about this country. North
of 60 degrees, people are often living in Third World conditions
and face many social problems and issues that are ignored in the
south,” she says.

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