Canadian Identity Research Articles

Canadian identity

This paper is in response to recent calls to conceptualize and articulate Canadian perspectives and experiences in international social work, given that the Canadian standpoint has been lacking in international social work literature. This paper contends that it is imperative, first of all, to critically examine and unpack our ‘Canadian’ identity in order to practice international work that is socially just and anti-imperialist. Drawing on the work of post-colonial authors, critical race theorists, and those who study national myth-making, this essay revisits Canadian identity because it is this identity that Canadian social workers often carry into their international work.

Indigenous Child Welfare in Canada

This paper is primarily a case study of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal case Caring Society v Canada and seeks to accomplish three things. First, create a theoretical foundation built upon historic instances of discriminatory/assimilationist policies based upon theoretical understandings of social reproduction, biopolitics, and neoliberalism. Second, to situate Caring Society within said theoretical framework for the purpose of determining the context in which it occurs and the role of the case's context in producing discriminatory/assimilationist policy. Third is the application of both the theoretical framework as well as Caring Society to determine how the Canadian state engages in nation building through processes of othering and framing Indigenous peoples as a foreign threat to the security of the Canadian identity. In doing so, I not only argue that Indigenous child welfare is the perpetuation of residential schools, but that it systematically breaks down Indigenous children and Indigenous communities in response to their perceived threat through processes of othering and nation-building.

The CCF and Canada's Socialist Streak

In the early 20th Century Canada saw the rise of a prominent socialist movement led by the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). The CCF's influence on Canadian politics was essential to the creation of Canada's modern political ideology, which can be described as reform liberal. This ideology took hold due to the pressure that the CCF exerted on the two major federal parties, which could both be characterized as classical liberal. Due to the settlement pattern of the prairies and the actions of the federal government in response to the Great Depression, the CCF was able to secure a strong support base that propelled it to federal politics and allowed it to form a provincial government in Saskatchewan. Though it never formed a federal government, the CCF pushed for old age pension, reforms of corporate taxation, and Medicare. As a provincial actor and a "third force" upon the two ruling federal parties, the CCF and its successor the New Democratic Party’s contributions to Canadian identity and policy are beyond dispute.

Echoes of Those Now Silent

This article examines the “great transformation” of Canadian women's self-understanding and identity in the period from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century. It argues that women's individual and collective energy was canalized through the creation of voluntary associations and social movements. It also explores a select few of the persons and innovative pedagogical projects and experiments in communicative action. Civil society expands significantly to accommodate women's needs, demands and dreams.

E. J. Pratt and Canadian Identity —Focusing on 'Towards the Last Spike'

E. J. Pratt and Canadian Identity —Focusing on 'Towards the Last Spike'

Musicians' Lives and National Identity: The Year in Canada

Musicians' Lives and National IdentityThe Year in Canada Alana Bell (bio) A notable trend this year in Canadian life writing has been the proliferation of texts by and about Canadian musicians. Canadians have been the subjects, writers, and directors of powerful music biographies, memoirs, and documentary films. This year also saw the culmination of one of the most significant music life writing events in Canadian history—the death from terminal brain cancer of Gord Downie, lead singer of the iconic Canadian rock band the Tragically Hip, and the publication of numerous texts by and about Downie composed in the final year of his life and immediately after. Here I consider several music life narratives of significance: Measha Brueggergosman's Something is Always on Fire, Tom Wilson's Beautiful Scars, and three other recent texts concerning Downie. Taken together they exemplify a range of possibilities for life writing about music, and their deployment of the familiar music life writing themes of work ethic, community, and professional success juxtaposed with personal challenge—all portrayed against a backdrop of regional and cultural history—help to present a timely portrait of Canadian identity as we entered our 151st year as a nation. Something is Always on Fire, Measha Brueggergosman's unflinching and formally interesting memoir, radically inscribes contemporary women's experiences into classical music biography—a groundbreaking achievement given that few Canadian women classical musicians have been the subjects of biographies or writers of memoirs at all. Brueggergosman, an award-winning opera singer who has achieved a celebrity status rare for classical performers in Canada, acknowledges that she is young to be writing a memoir. However, she is prompted to examine her life because she finds herself at a moment of significant flux: she is turning forty, her "marriage has broken down," and she "is shocked to discover" she's "broke" (135). She is wrestling with "the implications of starting to parent my boys on my own … while also maintaining my career," and "putting out fire after fire" has become overwhelming (135). The "fires" in her life are not unprecedented. Brueggergosman's divorce and financial struggles are simply the fire of the moment. Addressing topics [End Page 20] such as body image—Breuggergosman was once morbidly obese and underwent gastric bypass surgery—illness—she experienced a torn aorta in her early 30s—and loss—shortly after her aorta surgery, she lost her twins in utero—this book not only writes the female body into classical music, but explicitly links the body to the work. Brueggergosman repeatedly reminds the reader that her "body is [her] instrument" and that what happens to her body necessarily affects her career as well (52). Brueggergosman's premise that despite career success something is always on fire is a revisiting of a popular celebrity life writing trope that professional eminence is often accompanied by personal challenge. While the high points of her career have been very high, Brueggergosman writes frankly about how being a child prodigy affected her relationships, convincing her that her needs were "the only ones that matter," an attitude that leads to her ongoing marital infidelity, and, ultimately, divorce (4). She also emphasizes the multi-faceted work that goes into her career, noting that "The phases of [her] creative process" include everything from administrative work to the mundane tasks of parenting, thus integrating her domestic life with her opera career and refusing to romanticize her celebrity (16). The passages in which Brueggergosman addresses the music business and the more technical aspects of her process are fascinating, but the focus here is primarily on her attempts to balance her demanding career with her roles as a wife and mother. While Brueggergosman's memoir is a highly personal portrait of her as wife, mother, and singer, it is also the story of a racialized woman working in a field not known for its diversity. Though she recognizes "it might make for a juicier memoir for me to tell a coming-of-age story about a scrappy black opera singer pulling herself up by the bootstraps in the face of small-town racism," she refuses to dwell on racial inequity that she feels does not apply (23). She...

#WelcomeToCanada: Performing Asylum, Defending Nation

In this article, the author traces the evolution of Canadian identity through the performance of immigration and immigration policies. The article details the history of migration to Canada and problematizes a national identity built around the representation of “Canadian as host” as depicted by the state media. She explores how the national identity acts in dichotomy by expecting citizens to perform as welcoming hosts for those “from far and wide” while also demanding that citizens “stand on guard.”

The Motif of Ageing in the Modern Canadian Literature: A Feminine Aspect (“The Bear Came Over The Mountain” by Alice Munro and “Torching The Dusties” by Margaret Atwood)

The article focuses on the analysis of artistic peculiarities in terms of the depiction of the motif of ageing in the short stories “The Bear Came over the Mountain” and “Tourching the Dusties” written by two outstanding Anglo-Canadian authors Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. The attempt has been made to reveal the range of representative features, which serve to embody the abovementioned motif in modern Anglo-Canadian short stories, throughout the comparative analysis of works, similar in their plot. The motif of ageing as well as the idea of discrimination against elderly people (ageism) are widely presented in the modern Canadian literary heritage, which corresponds to the general tendency of the considerable increase in number of plots about the representatives of this age group in well-developed countries. Drawing on the example of the chosen short stories, it turns out to be possible to assume that both gender and national identities are vividly embodied in terms of realization of motif of ageing. The protagonist is a woman that reveals the peculiarities of a way of living, typical for elderly Canadian citizens: problems of existence in the nursery home, loneliness, loss of family relations and the necessity of new social contacts. Deep-laid psychologism, revealed through the images of nature, morally strong, creative personality of the main heroine are typical features of Canadian identity manifestation. Peculiarities of woman’s attitude towards ageing are embodied in her self-perception through the lens of fading beauty, problem of self-continuation through children, self-realisation and lack of financial stability in the old age. These components of narrative and problematic aspect establish the typical Anglo-Canadian variant of ageing theme, reflected through the lens of feminine outlook.

“International Friendliness” and Canadian Identities: Transnational Tensions in Canadian Junior Red Cross Texts, 1919-1939

As the youth wing of the Canadian Red Cross Society, the Junior Red Cross (JRC) program of the 1920s and 1930s aimed to teach school-aged children and youth habits of good health, good citizenship, and service to others. Inspired by a transnational ethic of humanitarianism, the program tried to build international ties of friendship between JRC members in Canada and those elsewhere, while shaping Canadian Juniors in a particular mould of national citizenship. Through an examination of adult and child contributions to the national JRC magazine, and the portfolios Juniors created to send overseas, this article explores the tensions inherent in the national and transnational lessons conveyed by adult JRC leaders as well as the ways young Canadians embraced, modified, or rejected those perspectives.

Transitions and Transformations: Extracts from a Duoethnographic Exploration of Gender Identities in Canada and China

Employing the research method of duoethnography, two researchers participate in a co-learning journey, making meaning of their personal stories through writing, critical reflections and theoretical discussions about gender identities. By sharing narratives concerning their significant lived experiences, the researchers compare and contrast major cultural and economic influences on themselves and their families. The authors demonstrate in vivid ways how their perceptions of their identities as girls, women, and mothers have changed over time. Through this process, they create a platform to discuss ways in which their identities and life experiences have been and continue to be influenced by societal and institutional expectations. Keywords: Gender identities, participatory inquiry, extended epistemology, duoethnography

Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy

Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy

Unsettled ground: The ruins of closed residential schools and Canadian identity

Unsettled ground: The ruins of closed residential schools and Canadian identity

Transgressing the nation-state: Constructs of Canadian identity

Transgressing the nation-state: Constructs of Canadian identity

Whiteness and Ambiguous Canadianization: The Boy Scouts Association and the Canadian Cadet Organization

Between the 1920s and late 1960s, the Boy Scouts Association of Canada and the Canadian Cadet Movement proved to be ambiguous institutions for the Canadianization of certain ethnic minorities. While nationally, as agents of Anglo-conformity and settler colonialism, these movements remained rooted in a British Canadian identity, at the local level they gradually became more accommodating of particular white ethnic identities. However, this did not extend to non-white cadets and scouts, especially Aboriginal boys, who were targets for assimilation into the larger Anglo-Canadian mainstream. As such, this is in part a study of Anglo-Canadian whiteness and the ways in which shifting definitions of whiteness and national identity can be viewed through the local accommodations made by two Anglo-Canadian youth movements Aboriginal youth were subject to assimilationist programs within cadet and scout units, but, at the local level, both national movements provided greater cultural accommodation to white ethnic and religious minorities, primarily through the intervention of ethnic and religious institutions that sponsored their own Cadet or Scout units. This began during the interwar years with two of the largest white linguistic and religious minority groups, French Canadian Catholics and Jewish-Canadians, spreading to white ethnic Eastern Europeans during the postwar period.

From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood: Children’s Literature and the Construction of Canadian Identity by Elizabeth A. Galway

Focusing on children’s literature from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, From Nursery Rhymes to Nationhood provides scholars of folklore, literature and history with a much-needed text that examines the role children’s literature played in forming Canadian national identity. As a whole, the book is well-written and free of academic jargon, and Galway, using 115 primary sources (i.e. 19th and 20th century children’s literature) and at least twice as many secondary sources (largely contemporary academic texts from various disciplines, including history and English), details well the many themes and ideals that permeated children’s literature in this formative era.

From Britishness to Multiculturalism: Official Canadian Identity in the 1960s

The 1960s was a tumultuous period that resulted in the reshaping of official Canadian identity from a predominately British-based identity to one that reflected Canada’s diversity. The change in constructions of official Canadian identity was due to pressures from an ongoing dialogue in Canadian society that reflected the larger geo-political shifts taking place during the period. This dialogue helped shape the political discussion, from one focused on maintaining an out-dated national identity to one that was more representative of how many Canadians understood Canada to be. This change in political opinion accordingly transformed the official identity of the nation-state of Canada.

Engaging with Identity Politics in Canadian Political Science

AbstractThis paper critiques the deployment of the term “identity politics” in Canadian political science. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of research articles in leading English language academic journals in the Canadian social sciences, we examine whose politics are labelled identity politics and what intellectual work transpires through this label. Identity politics tends to be applied to scholarship that foregrounds analyses of ethnicity, race and gender, but with a lack of analytical rigour, indicating a degree of conceptual looseness. Moreover, the designation identity politics is not neutral; it is often mobilized as a rhetorical device to distance authors from scholarship that foregrounds analyses of ethnicity, race and gender, and to inscribe a materialist/culturalist divide in claims-making. We argue that the effect of this demarcation of identity from politics is to control the boundaries of political discourse, limiting who and what gains entry into the political. This serves to reassert an exclusionary conception of Canadian identity.

Redeemers or Destroyers of Empire? The Irish, State-Directed Colonization, and the Fight for a British-Canadian West, 1880–1883

This article analyzes a proposal to have impoverished western Irish families then suffering from famine and distress colonize the Canadian prairies. London and Ottawa hoped that this “New Ireland” would solve several problems simultaneously. Their masculine, yeoman, loyal, “British” character would be rejuvenated as they pioneered homesteads. A state-directed colonization would ensure that this redemption occurred under the watchful eye of London and Ottawa. As they were rehabilitated, they would serve simultaneously as pioneer producers, consumers of British-made goods, “kith and kin” bolsterers of “Britishness,” and as soldier-settlers defending Canada and the Empire against Irish nationalism, the United States, French Canadians, the Métis, First Peoples, and immigrants from continental Europe. Yet this scheme never materialized. The British were publicly torn between rehabilitating the Irish and ridding itself of a poor, rebellious population. This led Canadians to believe the British would “shovel paupers” onto their shores. The Irish regarded the scheme as nothing more than “transportation” wrapped in a more benign guise. They were also caught between the ethos of self-help and the “New Imperialism” and growing state paternalism. If they could not be redeemed, as Social Darwinism and continued Irish unrest was arguing, then they might actually debase Britishness, and even potentially join the Métis and First Peoples in their disaffection. A growing Canadian identity led many to believe Canada would be better off settling seasoned American and New Immigrant farmers instead. The assisted Irish might undercut western Canadians' hard-won economic and social status as yeomen. Employers too routinely dismissed the Irish as unreliable, lazy, impertinent, and irredeemable.

Without a Paddle: Schitt’s Creek, CBC, and the Return to Community and Family in Uncertain Times

Background The Canadian television landscape is a key site through which national identity is expressed and debated. This article examines one such site—the recent CBC hit comedy Schitt’s Creek(2015–)—that depicts economic uncertainty, family, and community. Analysis A textual analysis of the show and a cultural analysis of its production highlight the parallels between precarious Canadian identity and precarious economic conditions in the neoliberal era. Conclusions and implications Schitt’s Creekbuilds on other “retreatist” texts that portray small-community life and family as sites of stability in times of uncertainty. Yet it de-localizes this community from the Canadian context, using stars and the CBC platform, rather than content, to signify place. The author argues that these alternative signifiers of “Canadian-ness” along with a marked shift in tone potentially account for the show’s broad appeal.

Neoliberal Multiculturalism and Western Exceptionalism: The Cultural Politics of the West

The tradition of the west defines its modernity as a radical rupture with endless possibilities for egalitarian futures; yet western modernity was rooted in the genocide of indigenous populations, transatlantic racial slavery and colonialism. Moreover, as the war on terror demonstrates, racial/gender violence continues to be linked to the formation of western identity, culture and politics in the early twenty-first century. This paper examines how the histories of race and coloniality feature in the contemporary formation of the west, with a particular focus on US nationalism and Canadian multiculturalism. These nation-states are most often defined as antithetical, with the latter confirming that western society has transcended its originary racial/colonial politics. I begin with a brief discussion of the reformation of the west in the mid-twentieth century as the USA became the dominant western power. I then move to compare the contemporary national politics of the USA and Canada to highlight the divergence and convergence in their delineation of their identity and values. My study demonstrates that although the white supremacist discourse that presently constitutes US nationalism is at variance with the multiculturalism that shapes Canadian identity, these discourses can be defined as twin aspects of the racial/colonial politics that continue to give meaning to the idea of the west.