The Iconic North
Cultural Constructions of Aboriginal Life in Postwar Canada
Explores how the “modern” South crafted cultural images of a “primitive” North that reflected its own preconceived notions and social, political, and economic interests.
Description
Resilient ideological assumptions, shifting economic priorities, and government policy in the postwar era influenced how northern culture was represented in popular Canadian imagery. In an enlightening exposure of Canada’s cultural landscape, The Iconic North lays bare the relationship between settler nation building and popular images of Aboriginal experience. Joan Sangster redirects the debates about the geopolitical prospects of the North by addressing how women and gender relations have played a key role in the history of northern development. She reveals how assumptions about both Indigenous and non-Indigenous women shaped gender, class, and political relationships in the circumpolar north – a region now commanding more of the world’s attention.
Reviews
This book fills an important gap in the field of Canadian cultural history.
- Robyn Schwarz, Western University
Few authors possess the skill to take an everyday image and turn it just slightly, in Twilight Zone fashion, to reveal a startling and intriguing truth. Professor Joan Sangster of Trent University does just that in The Iconic North. To read Sangster’s account is to question every common media depiction of the Arctic.
- Holly Doan
“Sangster … is not the first to focus on the North and its place in the Canadian identity, but her effort must be celebrated because it is so candid.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and up.
- J. S. Krysiek, Gettysburg College
What makes Joan Sangster’s The Iconic North stand out is the way she links so many cultural forms – television and film, novels, periodicals, report and travel writing – with the political economy of northern development in post-war Canada. Though Sangster’s reading of these works is skillful, this is not a study in discourse analysis. Rather it is a richly contextualized interpretation that makes clear how cultural constructions of the North served to legitimate, justify, and explain internal colonialism.
- Mary-Ellen Kelm, Simon Fraser University
The Iconic North brings fresh insight and evidence of what these images tell us about how post-war Canada saw the North: as its own colonial other.
- Renee Hulan