Montreal and Its Environs: Imagining a National Landscape, c. 1867-1885

Abstract

Historians of nationalism have demonstrated that national identity is as much a cultural as an ideological construct. Like other identities (class, gender, race), national identity has to be imagined, performed, and witnessed if it is to achieve widespread recognition and produce a common consciousness. Participating in indigenous activities such as snowshoeing and tobogganing, and turning them into organized sports, allowed urban anglophone colonists in Victorian Montreal to invent for themselves a new Canadian identity. On their tramps over Mount Royal and into the countryside outside the city, they envisaged themselves as latter-day Nor’Westers setting out into the wilderness—an indigenizing experience that linked them to the national landscape and the historic pasts (both Native and French-Canadian) of the new Dominion, and allowed them to imagine themselves as “sons of the soil,” a new British type of native Canadian. This essay explores the role played by the landscape of the city of Montreal and its rural environs in this cultural performance.