Canadian Identity Research Articles

Nature connections: Cultural heritage, identity and wellbeing in Vancouver, Canada

Abstract I came to Vancouver, Canada in March 2014 to give a paper on ‘The Cultural Value of the Arts for Health and Well-Being’ at the 4th International Conference on Health, Wellness & Society: Holistic Health 1 at British Columbia University. I knew absolutely nothing about the First Nations people, their arts, culture and history, and how this relates to a Canadian identity. What I know now is that the cultural identity of many of these peoples is linked to their language, and that of the remaining thirty-two indigenous languages in British Columbia, some are near extinction. For these peoples, their language is their way of being and who they are. It is encouraging to learn that projects which promote language revitalization create the opportunity for cultural well-being, through the cultural connections via the traditional values embedded within each indigenous language. In the same way that we know that Western medicine treats the body, not the person, the First Nations peoples’ loss of language is holistically integrated into the whole of their history of colonization, beliefs, medicine, spiritual and cultural practices. Their cultural heritage is interwo-ven to their wellbeing.

‘Golden Deportees’ and ‘Reluctant Pioneers’: The redefinition of home in Mavis Gallant’s ‘Varieties of Exile’

Abstract This article argues that Canadian author Mavis Gallant’s short story ‘Varieties of Exile’ highlights the links between identity, perceptions of place and memory, suggesting that the notion of ‘home’ and experiences of displacement and exile for transnational or migratory individuals can be reinterpreted as a positive when placed in opposition to limited and static constructions of national identity. Gallant’s focus on marginal migratory figures allows for an interrogation of what it means to be ‘Canadian’ and ‘at home’, an interrogation that is not limited to Canadian identity and place but that Gallant leaves open for transnational, cross-cultural, global interpretations. Incorporating both modern and postmodern elements, ‘Varieties of Exile’ suggests that there is no ‘true’ self, that identity is mutable. This is linked with migration and with the things individuals choose to remember and forget in order for identities to be continually reconstructed in response to life events.

The displaced cosmopolitan: Canadian nationality and world citizenship in the fiction of Mavis Gallant

Problematic notions of Canadian identity in the work of Mavis Gallant provide an entry point into current debates on the topic of cosmopolitanism, and begin to challenge dominant modes of postcolonial and multiculturalism theory. Depictions of the cosmopolitan in her work reveal a spectrum of representation and experience, from euphoric visions of shared humanity to more complex pictures of global citizenship. The clear challenge that her work presents for literary theory and comparative study is to understand lives and ideas less settled in one culture or another.

The Politics of Language Roadmaps in Canada: Understanding the Conservative Government's Approach to Official Languages

AbstractThis article critically examines the Conservative government's approach to official languages, through a policy instrument framework. Special attention is paid to the third federal roadmap for official languages—the first having been unveiled by the Liberal government in 2003 and the second by the Conservative minority government in 2008—and how this roadmap conveys a new representation of official languages in relation to Canadian identity and citizenship. The focus on the linguistic integration of new immigrants in the 2013 language roadmap generates interest. The policy instrument framework also shows how language roadmaps represent the fourth generation of official language policies in Canada; the first three generations found their respective bases in the 1969Official Languages Act, theCharter of Rights and Freedomsand the 1988Official Languages Act. The article concludes that an analysis of language roadmaps elucidates transformations initiated by the Conservative governments in the area of official languages in Canada. It also promotes further exploration and analysis of language policies through the policy instrument framework.

Situational variations in ethnic identity across immigration generations: Implications for acculturative change and cross-cultural adaptation.

This study examined whether the acculturation of ethnic identity is first evident in more public situations with greater opportunity for intercultural interaction and eventually penetrates more intimate situations. It also investigated whether situational variations in identity are associated with cross-cultural adaptation. First-generation (G1), second-generation (G2) and mixed-parentage second-generation (G2.5) young adult Canadians (n = 137, n = 169, and n = 91, respectively) completed a questionnaire assessing their heritage and Canadian identities across four situational domains (family, friends, university and community), global heritage identity and cross-cultural adaptation. Consistent with the acculturation penetration hypothesis, the results showed Canadian identity was stronger than heritage identity in public domains, but the converse was true in the family domain; moreover, the difference between the identities in the family domain was attenuated in later generations. Situational variability indicated better adaptation for the G1 cohort, but poorer adaptation for the G2.5 cohort. For the G2 cohort, facets of global identity moderated the relation, such that those with a weaker global identity experienced greater difficulties and hassles with greater identity variability but those with a stronger identity did not. These results are interpreted in light of potential interpersonal issues implied by situational variation for each generation cohort.

Canadian Gothic: Literature, History and the Spectre of Self-Invention by Cynthia Sugars (review)

Cynthia Sugars. Canadian Gothic: Literature, History and the Spectre of Self-Invention. Cardiff: U of Wales P, 2014. Pp. x, 291. US$150.00. Cynthia Sugars' Canadian Gothic explores the ghosts of settlers past and how recent diasporic and Indigenous writers are unsettling their inherited traditions. Sugars argues that the use of the Gothic is a long-standing strategy for connecting the Old World and New World through shared literary mythologies and for infusing the untamable Canadian landscape with a narrativized past. This Gothic tradition, however, is founded on an exclusionary nationalism that renders non-white Anglo-Canadians as other. Building on her earlier work on the postcolonial Gothic and the unhomely, Sugars makes another significant contribution to the field of Canadian Gothic scholarship by examining the longstanding mutually constitutive relationship between Canadian nationalism, the land, and ghosts in a variety of literary genres. Canadian Gothic spans the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries to trace the Gothic literary in what is now called Canada; the book is divided into seven chapters that not only offer a historical survey and an analysis of multiple genres but also explore the distinctions between Anglo- and French-Canadian Gothic narratives. Canadian Gothic ultimately establishes the persistent presence of ghosts and the Gothic in Canadian literature. Canadian Gothic begins by analyzing the often overlooked ghosts in two famous Canadian poems, Robert Services Cremation of Sam McGee (1907) and John McCrae's In Flanders Fields (1919). The Introduction then turns to a myriad of writers, such as Susanna Moodie, Duncan Campbell Scott, Robertson Davies, James Reaney, and Margaret Sweatman, among others, in order to argue that from very early on the Gothic has held a precarious, even contradictory, position in Canadian because Canada had long been perceived as either a location of monstrous extremes or an empty terrain that was unhaunted by a historical tradition (8). Ironically, as Sugars asserts, the absence of a Canadian past or mythology is conveyed through Gothic sensations of horrific newness. Chapter One delves deeper into Gothic absence and the paradoxical phenomenon of being haunted by a lack of ghosts. Using white European explorers' encounters with the New World as case studies, the first chapter demonstrates how early explorers projected their psychic fears onto Indigenous peoples. The second chapter surveys the larger national investment in the Gothic as a strategy for defining a Canadian identity. Sugars asserts that settler Canadian literature has its beginnings been haunted by its efforts to 'story' itself (50); in short, absence of the Gothic is aligned with a failure of poetry and a failure of imagination--more specifically with a failure to write Canada into history (67). Sugars suggests that the Gothic not only captures the speciality of a lacking Canadian national identity but also, as a form of artistic creation, offers a solution to this absence. While Chapter Two equates Canadas lack of a national mythology with a lack of ghosts, Chapter Three develops an analysis of psychic projection by arguing that Anglo-Canadian writers started replacing the Indigenous other with a Francophone spectral threat. …

A Passport to Identity: The Decline of Duality and the Symbolic Appropriation of Québec

Canadian society is now marked by a growing vocalization of a distinct identity. Politicians promote this identity to overcome tensions that remain, due to a failure to reconcile institutionally the often-contradictory claims that emanate from a plural society. We explore one aspect of these tensions: the decline of duality and a questioning of Québec’s place in Canada. While there has been a symbolic rearticulation of the importance of Québec in the new “Brand Canada,” this has not been accompanied by a corresponding “doing” of duality, thus not satisfying nationalist pressures in Québec. Symbolic and rhetorical strategies are often employed to deal with public opinion that resists dualism. As we demonstrate in the case of the new (2013) Canadian passport, the Harper government has chosen to symbolically address Québec’s claims; however, this reduces Québec to a historical part of the Canadian identity puzzle. While political pressures may be temporarily addressed, the historic pressures that inform debates about the Canadian identity are likely to continue.

Making National Identity Salient: Impact on Attitudes toward Immigration and Multiculturalism

AbstractDoes national identity necessarily have exclusionary effects when it comes to immigration attitudes or is it possible that some national identities act as inclusive forces? While research in Europe and in the US points to the former, one of the long-standing explanations for Canada's success with immigration has been the central place played by immigration and multiculturalism in its national identity. Using the Canadian case, this research tests the possibility that some national identities might represent an inclusive force. It does so through a nationally representative survey experiment (N = 1500) where respondents' national identity was primed before answering questions on immigration and multiculturalism. The analysis shows that contrary to previous results obtained in the Netherlands, priming Canadian identity does not increase anti-immigration attitudes. A new prime designed to isolate the effect of national identity even decreased these exclusionary attitudes.

Contesting Epistemological Dependency and Contextualising Space: A Postcolonial Critique of Margaret Atwood’s Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature

Survival, on its first publication in the year 1972, was hailed as “a ground-breaking study of archetypal patterns” in Canadian Literature. One of the salient features of the book is its emphasis on contextualising Canadian literature in a space of its own, through an intrinsic study of its patterns, images and motifs. Space was celebrated as a source of pride by Canadians. To Atwood, Space hence, becomes a metaphor of the postcolonial literary landscape, wherein lies the inherent source of strength and pride of the Canadian writer, and therefore should be reclaimed or conquered from the imperialist onslaught. Therefore by advocating the need for an authentic Canadian literature that effectively expresses the Canadian identity and its cultural survival against the imperial cultural onslaught, Atwood argues for a postcolonial space or a space of intervention that not only challenges epistemological dependency, but also helps create positive new identities by writing back to the centre, and thereby negating the indebtedness of colonised peoples to colonisers‟ discursive constructions and modes of thinking

Branding History at the Canadian Museum of Civilization

In October 2012, the Canadian Heritage Minister announced that the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the country’s largest and most popular museum, would be renamed the Canadian Museum of History. In addition to the new name, three strategies—a strategy of engagement, a strategy of authority, and a strategy of expansion—were elaborated by museum and government officials as part of the transformation. We examine these three strategies as an example of the Harper government’s attempt to “brand” Canadian identity and history in its own image, arguing that the strategies were designed expressly to paper over near-unilateral changes in the museum’s mandate and transformation. Ultimately, these changes have problematic implications for the democratic management of cultural production in Canada.

Colonials in Camouflage: Metonymy, mimicry and the reproduction of the colonial order in the age of diversity

Abstract In this study we examine the narratives of international accountants migrating to Canada. We draw on postcolonial theory to theorize the mechanisms through which professionals are “othered” as they come to Canada and how, through mimicry some are able to gain recognition as professionals in the Canadian field. Our findings illustrate the barriers experienced by non-white, non-male, non-Western professionals despite the discourse of diversity that pervades the profession. Using semiotic analysis we show how metonyms are used by professionals in the field to construct an archetype of the Canadian Professional Accountant against which “foreign” professionals are implicitly assessed. Our findings illustrate how some international professionals use metonymy to overcome these barriers and reclaim their professional identity in Canada.

Western Canadian Identity and the American “Other”

This paper investigates the creation of settler identity in the North American West within a comparative Canada/US framework. The creation of a colonial “other” was an important aspect in the creation of settler identity on both sides of the border. It is argued that one particular image of the Native American “other,” that of the “ignoble savage” came to dominate the American imagination, while Western Canadians relied primarily on another image of the “other” in constructing their identity – the image of the inferior American. Whereas American and Canadian settlers both manipulated the imagery surrounding Native Americans to foster a sense of settler superiority, the image of the American as immoral, violent, and generally inferior to Canadians was the most persistent image of the “other” for Western Canadians. Through historical analyses of primary source material such as newspapers, popular fiction, and immigration pamphlets, and analyses of Canada/US relations, this paper explores the image of the inferior American “other” and its importance in the settling of the Canadian West.

Los canadienses y el recuerdo de la Primera Guerra Mundial: cien años después

Pese a los resultados de una encuesta reciente que mostraban que un cuarenta por ciento de los canadienses no conocían el papel que su país jugó en el conflicto, los recuerdos de la Gran Guerra, reales y fabricados, continúan dando forma a la percepción canadiense de sí misma. Tal y como sucedió durante la guerra, las «dos soledades» (los hablantes de inglés y de francés) ven las cosas de distinto modo. El mito de la creación «el nacimiento de una nación» se mantiene como dogma para la mayoría angloparlante, y asegura que el conocimiento de la guerra (una guerra «buena» a pesar de una atroz pérdida de vidas) se centra exclusivamente en su impacto sobre la identidad canadiense. Igualmente de miras estrechas a la guerra Quebequense que se define por su victimización (a través del servicio militar obligatorio) por los excesos coloniales de sus conciudadanos. Asimismo, al menos entre los angloparlantes, la guerra se invoca en los debates sobre la identidad nacional e internacional de Canadá, en los que los defensores de una «Canadá Guerrera» orgullosa de su historia militar y de la tradición de la defensa enérgica de la «libertad» horrorizan y a su vez se horrorizan de los defensores de la interpretación del «Reino Pacífico». Dentro de este contemporáneo conflicto de ideologías la Primera Guerra Mundial constituye un apoyo histórico para ambas partes –un momento dorado ennoblecido por el sacrificio o una tragedia en la que se puede respetar el sacrificio pero no el enfrentamiento o su utilidad.

Vagaries of News Translation on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Television: Traces of History

This article describes a series of failed attempts by the English and French networks of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to present translated news. On one level, it is concerned with the impulse that prompts people during moments of crisis to suggest translated news as a solution to a problems related to Canadian identity and the reasons their suggestions to translate news programs are not acted upon. On a deeper level, it is concerned with a methodological and epistemological problem facing translation historians: what happens when the relevant documents are not preserved because journalists’ notions of translation differ from those of historians? It recommends that historians turn to “para-archives,” or collections created and preserved by non-news organizations, that contain descriptions of the documents journalists have not kept. These para-archives can provide evidence for the creation of plausible narratives about the competing interests shaping decisions not to produce translated news. They can also reveal how historians actively produce the categories they use to define their object of study.

Smile (snarl): A poem

In this poem, I examine issues of racial identity, Canadian identity, and racism through reflecting upon a lived confrontation. I question what it means to be Canadian and how our often limited understandings of the Canadian identity perpetuate the marginalization of some and the inclusion of others. This poem also addresses the ambivalence of living in the hyphen between two races. I consider how the challenges of defining our personal and national identities are often thrust upon us when we least expect it.

Gene Allen. Making National News: A History of Canadian Press.

The United States has always cast a long shadow over Canada; indeed, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau famously likened the Canada-U.S. relationship to a mouse lying next to an elephant. Yet, the overwhelming American presence in the Canadian reality has also paradoxically helped to form a distinct Canadian identity. A good example lies in the origins and development of one of modern Canada's nation-building institutions, the news agency Canadian Press (CP). As described by Gene Allen in Making National News: A History of Canadian Press, CP originated as a vehicle to transmit news via the Associated Press (AP) to Canadian newspapers over the telegraph wires in the late nineteenth century. In this detailed, exhaustively researched account, Allen, a professor and former professional journalist, describes how newspaper owners created the news cooperative to reduce the high costs of receiving American telegraphic news transmissions. Allen makes a good case for his argument that the growth and development of CP often mirrored Canada's coming of age as a twentieth-century nation. Canada's internal French-English conflict and the external Great Britain-U.S. dialectic for influence within the English-language population was evident in CP's attempts to accommodate the French-language press and the decades-long rivalry between the British news agency Reuters and AP. Moreover, CP's development was also beset by the overall Canadian issue of regionalism, whereby the Western Canada and Maritimes newspaper publishers were frustrated by the predominance of central Canadian interests.

Bordering on African American: Wayde Compton and the Readability of Blackness

This essay attempts to establish a critical context for the African Canadian literary imagination that situates itself in Western Canada and, specifically, British Columbia. Wayde Compton's poetry offers several sites for questioning black identity in Canada by visiting the trope of borders. Blackness in Canada is more readily viewed apart from rather a part of the central histories of the nation. In Western Canada, this tendency is even more apparent since regional black histories do not conform as easily to the master narratives of underground-railroad rescues and benevolent abolitionism that are more readily accessed in the central and eastern provinces. In response, Compton's poetry attempts to negotiate a regional black diasporic aesthetic by challenging the fixity of race and place. This essay shows that in engaging the ephemerality of black communities in British Columbia, Compton's poetry underscores filiation through chance relationships and demonstrates black belonging through discursive readability.

Constructing Métis Identity in Canada

Constructing Métis Identity in Canada

“Canadian-First”: Mixed Race Self-Identification and Canadian Belonging

Not being read or identified by others as “Canadian” was a common thread in semi-structured in-depth interviews I conducted with 19 young adults of mixed race in a Western Canadian urban context. In this paper, I address moments of (in)ability for people of mixed race to claim “Canadian.” Mixed race people have a complex relationship with identifying and narrating their identities as “Canadian” through the operation of race and ethnicity in the Canadian context, and because of ambivalent and contradictory readings of their bodies. I found that they deploy the term in three ways: by expressing a sense of being “Canadian-first,” by stating that there exists an understanding that “Canadian means white,” and by strategically using the term “Canadian” in their interactions with others, signaling an active appropriation of the term. However, none of these deployments are mutually exclusive: they overlap and bleed into each other, playing off and impacting one another. This paper adds to nascent Canadian Critical Mixed Race studies and also redresses a gap in the literature on “Canadian identity” by examining how the ability to claim “Canadian” is racialized through a consideration of the experiences of mixed race people. Le fait de ne pas être lus ou identifiés par d’autres comme “Canadiens” était le dénominateur commun dans les entrevues semi-structurés que j’ai menées en profondeur avec 19 jeunes adultes de races mixtes dans un contexte urbain de l’Ouest Canadien. Dans cet article, je mets en exergue les moments d’ (in)aptitude des personnes de races mixtes de se réclamer “Canadiens”. Les gens de races mixtes ont une relation complexe avec l’identification et la narration de leurs identités en tant que “Canadiens”, à cause des perceptions ambivalentes et contradictoires de leurs corps. J’ai trouvé que ceux-ci déploient leur terme de trois façons: en exprimant le sens d’être “Canadien en premier”, en affirmant qu’il existe une compréhension du “Canadien qui veut dire Blanc” et en usant stratégiquement du terme “Canadien” dans leur interactions avec les autres, signalant une appropriation active du ce terme. Cependant, aucuns de ces déploiements ne s’excluent mutuellement: ils se chevauchent et s’empiètent entre eux, jouant au large et s’impactant l’un de l’autre. Ce papier s’ajoute aux études critiques canadiennes naissantes sur les races mixtes et répare aussi une lacune dans la littérature des “identités canadiennes”, en examinant comment l’aptitude de se réclamer “Canadien” est radicalisée à travers une considération des expériences des personnes de races mixtes.

Preservation of Minority Languages in North America: French Immersion Programs in the Province of Alberta

Canada, which was officially declared a bilingual nation after the proclamation of the Official Language Act (1969), counts with a low percentage of French speaking population who hardly reaches a quarter of the total population. We must add the fact that there is a very little fraction of the population who speaks French outside the province of Quebec. Social, cultural and ethnic realities which are present within the Canadian territories enable us to observe and investigate the diversity of identities and the different linguistic assimilation processes experienced by non Anglophone citizens. Facts seem to indicate that the francophone minority groups, living in areas of the country where the most spoken language is different from their mother tongue, struggle for the preservation of their cultural heritage at the same time that keep alive their Canadian identity. The possibility of contrasting the situation of the Francophones in Western Canada with the reality of other minority groups which represent a similar percentage with respect to the total population—such as the Germans and the Ukrainian origin citizens—constitutes a valuable resource in order to predict the evolution of the demographic patterns and the use of French as a heritage language within the Canadian territories. The present work reviews the diverse political, linguistic and demographic contexts that may support our idea that using an additional language—French and English in the case of most Francophones in Western Canada—represents an advantage from a cognitive, social and linguistic point of view. The high degree of acceptance of the francophone schools and the popularity of the French immersion programs set up by Albertan authorities are considered within this article in order to support this hypothesis.