Chapter 11. ‘fucking close to water’: queering the production of the nation by Bruce Erickson (part 2, final)
Land
First ‘canoe’ that European colonists saw were likely Mi’kmaq gwitnn, birchbark boats designed for both ocean and river travel (318)
The colonist’s name is mentioned but the natives in these stories don’t ever get their names so…the colonist realized that to go further inland he would need the gwitn, he needed “the boat derived of the landscape realities of the new world” (Raffan 1999a, 24) (318)
the ‘canoe’ as a symbol unique to Canada (Jennings 1991, 1) (319), reworks essentialized aspects of indigenous cultures into a symbol of national health and success” (319) and as a “gift” from natives to settlers. The canoe as unique entity, because of the exploration done by canoe, the canoe is the guard that maintains the boundary of Canadian identity.
A vague connection could be made to the American symbol of the cowboy to the American west except the canoe is more ‘natural’ for being of the land and from the native people and further substantiated in its uniqueness by its use in colonialism.
Canada as a nation has ‘perfected’ the canoe; the only way the canoe can be made perfect is through its ability to be incorporated into European expansion (320) the connection of the land to the canoe as a discourse of inevitability illustrates the privileging of the European subject as the natural inheritors (indeed, the rightful inheritor) of First Nations land…and implicitly heterosexual and patriarchal subject (320-321)
Possibility
“We cannot possibly anticipate what might happen, if we were really to consider the ten million bodies at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean "(Shannon Winnubst, 190) (324)
“Rethinking nature that is not bent toward the utility of power” (324) Opening ourselves to the possibilities of history means addressing the ways in which the ideologies and concrete practices that have formed our current understanding of nature represent more about the desired human outcome than they do about anything nonhuman (324)
Similar to really considering 10 million dead bodies in the Atlantic Ocean, this would mean really considering (as a broad list) the malicious wars over land and fur, the forced conversions, the repeated exposure to flu epidemics, the establishment of reservations and classification of First Nations as wards of the state, and the widespread physical and sexual abuse in residential schools designed to assimilate and civilize a supposed “savage” population” (324).
The Kiss of the Fur Queen is a novel by Tomson Highway, Cree playwright and novelist. Two Cree brothers are taken from their parents to a residential school several hundred miles away at the age of six, baptized into the Catholic church and have their names changed, they forbidden to speak their language and are abused by the priests of the school. They are alienated from their parents by the education and sexual predation of the school priests, but also are disconnected from the land, language and culture of their people…(the canoe plays a central role in the story, where difficult conversations about their alienation take place). As they grow up one of the brothers finds “continual inspiration” from the traditional Cree culture and discovered a “need to know the cultures that were suppressed by the residential school”. “As the crowd dances to the migisoo, the eagle, Gabriel realizes its power: ‘Gabriel saw people talking to the sky, the sky replying.” (Highway 1998) (324-326) (this is a poor summary, i apologize.)
“The movement between tradition and innovation is always fluid and uncharted” (327)
“Thus, while as a quirky national joke, the idea of making love in a canoe surely belongs to the post-sexual revolution of the later twentieth century, we need to remember that as a national symbol, the connection it strives to make between the canoe, nature, and nation signals a sexual politic that was born of the age of imperialism. “
“As Foucault reminds us, the legacy of the Victorian repression of sexuality is held within the resistance of the sexual revolution that fails to move outside the biopower networks of modern sexuality.” (327)
