The map of Canada, 50 years on
On comprehending the colossus
I loved the map of Canada. I memorized, imperfectly, the capitals of the world. I’d always miss some, but I never forgot the capitals of the provinces.
I CAN’T REMEMBER when I was first able to form an understanding of what Canada is. For me, as a child, it was the vastness of the woods at the end of my street and the cold in the winter.
We used to play in those woods, my friends and I, wild, like “Indians,” we were told, and we never did get to the other side of them. (There was an end to them, of course. Literally. They’re all gone now, replaced by houses and roads. The winter’s still there, where I grew up, but, like everywhere else, a few degrees warmer.)
I knew I lived in something called Canada and that, because I lived here, I was, among other things, a Canadian. An accident of birth, like my freckles.
I guess when I was old enough to read a map, realize what the shapes represented, I looked at the colossus of Canada sprawled across the top of North America and began to appreciate it. What a big country we are. What a lot of lakes. But in terms of Canada politically, I still couldn’t get my head around the idea of a nation-state. Why would I, as a kid? A nation-state? What is that? And even when I did get my head around it, I didn’t recognize the idea for the absurd presumption it is.
They used to talk about Canada’s two founding nations, England and France, neither of which, by the time Canada got “explored,” was really a “nation” any more in the truest sense. As early as the Renaissance, England and France were mass societies, bent on conquest, increasingly bureaucratic, corporate and even pluralistic, though perhaps not by today’s diverse standards.
Back then, my childhood, when the official adults of the day described our “two founding nations,” I don’t know if they benignly neglected to mention the First Nations; deliberately ignored them either as inconsequential or to be feared; or felt they’d been so thoroughly plowed under that they were, in effect, subterranean, invisible, and didn’t count.
IN 1967, when Canada turned 100, I lived in Montreal where pavilions to the various nationstates of the world sat like candles on our Expo 67 birthday cake. I guess it was a credit to the organizers, but they did include something called Indians of Canada Pavilion.
The different nations of those Indians were lumped into one building. At least they got their own building; but then so did Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean so small that its map has to be telescoped out of the surrounding scale of the continents, as an inset, in order to be seen.
Like so many Montrealers, I adored Expo 67. I went every day, stamped my passport. I would go home and study the map of the world. I was 12. It fostered in me a love of geography.
I loved looking at the specific way the world fit together, the shape of the continents, the water around them, inside them. I had a big map on the wall of my bedroom.
The boot of Italy, the V of the Indian sub-continent, the near-kiss of the Seward Peninsula (Alaska), and the Chuchki Peninsula (Russia) as they lean into each other across the Bering Strait. (I think, over geological time, they’re actually pulling away, but I prefer happy endings). The planet we have, the irregularity of the Earth’s surfaces and outlines, products of contingency and the roughcast of climate, erosion, tides, glaciation.
The near-kiss across the Bering Strait was only possible to see on my globe. On the map, the two peninsulas were as far away from each other as they could be; yearning lovers — the whole world literally standing between them, but only on a map, only in our heads.
Funny how we make sense of our realities, drawing imaginary lines over land to which we have less claim of dominion than the worms underneath it.
My dad would come into my room sometimes, go over the map with me, quiz me on country capitals. One day he sat on the bed and explained about the Soviet Union (it was a long time ago), this immensity draped across 11 time zones; how
they were in something called a Cold War, with the United States.
The United States. There it was, below us on the map, kind of shapeless, nondescript cartologically, bulging at the sides, as though from too many big Macs, and with its sad little spigot, Florida. But Canada. I thought we looked like the rugged, muscular chest of North America. And those fantastically-shaped islands in our Arctic Archipelago — Baffin, Ellesmere, Cornwallis, Victoria — groping toward the North Pole. Top of the world, Ma.
I loved my map of Canada. I memorized, imperfectly, the capitals of the world — I’d always miss some, but I never forgot the capitals of the provinces. I knew their shapes, the roots of their names in the British imperium — Alberta, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick.
And yet there was nothing on the map, politically, to suggest the First Nations of the country; only the sounds of some of our place names — Ottawa, Saskatchewan, Mississauga — hinted that there were original people, nations, with histories, cultures and languages of their own from whom these lands were taken.
I went to Expo every day the summer of 1967. I read the headlines when De Gaulle came over from France and said, “Vive le Quebec libre!” Hmm. How would that look on a map? Politics. Geography. Nationalism. There were other controversies, however, that didn’t get nearly as much play.
As I say, I went every day. I liked the Indians of Canada pavilion. I liked the clever architecture of it. After a few visits I would notice the writings that greeted visitors.
“You have stolen our native land, our culture, our soul ...” And: “An Indian child begins school by learning a foreign tongue,” “Dick and Jane in the storybook are strangers to an Indian boy.”
At 12 years old, I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But I’d forgotten about that for years until it came up once in something I read. “You have stolen our land.” You have erased the maps of our nations.
I didn’t know this at the time, but Expo organizers were surprised by the wording that was going into that pavilion when they first saw it, mere days before Expo opened. They tried to have the content changed, but failed.
The Queen, it is said, cut her visit to the pavilion short as a result of such content. When the pavilion was praised for shining a light on our native people’s audit of historical injuries, Canada came off looking more progressive perhaps than it should have.
Today I’m noticing something more and more at public meetings. Speakers acknowledging that the land the people are meeting on is traditional territory of, say, the Haudenosaunee. That and a wave of a dream-catcher gets them nothing concrete, I suppose, but still it is right to remember and to acknowledge; perhaps it’s a start.
When the Bering Strait was, I don’t know, the Bering isthmus, in another geological time, when the map of Canada looked different, people came across that land bridge. They did something with North America different from what is being done now.
The textbook for the American history course I took in university, 1974, started by saying the native peoples north of Mexico did not develop the resources of the continent as fully as they might have. Yeah, not like white America, lurching between genocide and institutional slavery. Remind me again — when exactly was America great?
But back to Canada. On the streets of Hamilton these days many are waking up in houses that have tripled, quadrupled in value, at an absurd rate, driven insane by pressure from a wildly hormonal Toronto housing market. This “land” never was your land, never my land, not in truth and not over time, and it’s now priced out of reach of our children. Canada. We just happen to be the animals squatting on it right now.
We stole from the ancestors of these lands; are we now stealing from our own descendants?
So how to understand Canada, 50 years after Expo 67? It is a flawed giant but still, for all that, one with strengths, whose massive rugged chest on the map, one hopes, needs to be so, to contain — again one hopes — a great heart and an even bigger conscience.
So we seem at least to begin to recognize our flaws. Unlike the U.S., which acknowledges nothing, never having apologized for slavery, Canada has owned up, for what it’s worth.
Many will groan that it’s not worth much; lip service and window dressing. Maybe. To prove it’s not, Canada has to at least try to keep going on a path to reconciliation and reparation in humility and good faith, redrawing maps. Because of our many defects, the course we take along that path will stand in need of constant correction and revision, but such is the adventure of history, of building a nation, perhaps building it right out of such outdated ideas as “the nation-state.”