“We the North”? Race, Nation, and the Multicultural Politics of Toronto’s First NBA Championship

The Toronto Raptors’ 2019 National Basketball Association (NBA) championship win, a first for the franchise and for a Canadian team, “turned hockey country into basketball nation” ( CBC Radio 2020 ). Canadians’ burgeoning embrace of the team and the sport seemed to point to a growing celebration of Blackness within the nation. However, we problematize the 2019 championship win to tell a more expansive story about how sport and national myths conceal truths about race and belonging in Canada. We explore two particular cases—the “We The North” campaign and the media coverage of Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia—to highlight the contradictory ways that the Raptors coverage mobilized symbols of the North and multiculturalism to present the team as quintessentially Canadian and rebrand basketball for Canadian audiences. We further explore how these stark contradictions manifest in the racialized policing of basketball courts in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). These cases demonstrate that the celebrations of the Raptors and basketball not only continued to police racialized bodies, but also ensured that their inclusion was contingent on the maintenance of the status quo.

Reading (Re)conciliation in White Settler and Chinese Canadian Narratives: From Liberal towards Transformative Approaches

This article explores how four settler narratives situate themselves differently within the reconciliation discourse in response to the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. In my reading of Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s The Spawning Grounds (2016) and Jennifer Manuel’s The Heaviness of Things That Float (2016) alongside Doretta Lau’s “How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?” (2014) and Amy Fung’s Before I Was a Critic I Was a Human Being (2019), I show how these narratives express different degrees of critical reflection on the settler colonial state and differ in their acknowledgement of Indigenous resurgence. I adopt David B. MacDonald’s distinction between “liberal reconciliation,” which is based on a “shared vison of a harmonious future,” and “transformative reconciliation,” which “is about fundamentally problematizing the settler state as a colonial creation, a vector of cultural genocide, and one that continues inexorably to suppress Indigenous collective aspirations for self-determination and sovereignty” as a critical framework.

Ambiguously Hip: The Tragically Hip and Canadian Nationalism

The Tragically Hip are a remarkable, indeed unique, phenomenon in Canadian popular music. Their 2016 final tour, undertaken after lead singer Gordon Downie was diagnosed with brain cancer, spectacularly reinforced longstanding perceptions of a privileged link between the band’s music and Canadian national identity. This article probes this connection, asking why deeply ambiguous and often critical references to Canada sufficed to raise The Hip to an extraordinary status as icons of Canadian nationalism. Drawing from theories of “banal” and “everyday” nationalism, it argues that, while The Hip’s work may legitimately be read as nationalist, Canada's position as a culturally peripheral nation is the key to explaining the incongruous appropriation of the Hip’s work for nationalist self-celebration. The discourse around The Tragically Hip, then, helps to illuminate some of the ways in which nationalism works in a culturally peripheral context.

“Merely to see and touch it”: On Service, McCrae, and Literary Tourism in Canada

Long dismissed as a “critical error” ( Booth 2016 ) and still capable of inciting “embarrassment palpable” ( Watson 2006 ) among scholars otherwise happy to emphasize the material contexts that inform the circulation of texts, literary tourism has recently become the focus of serious academic inquiry. Recent work has begun to disaggregate the various forms of literary tourist sites ( Fawcett and Cormack 2001 ), but continues to have a methodological gap surrounding the specifically literary aspects of the practice itself, and—with the notable exception of Green Gables (Squire 1992; Devereux 2001 )—has left Canada predictably unexamined. This essay begins with a brief introduction to literary tourism in Canada before moving into a comparative analysis of two National Historic Sites associated with Canadian literary authors: the Robert Service cabin in Dawson City, Yukon, and the John McCrae House in Guelph, Ontario. The sites offer a compelling comparison as the former homes of two of the best-known Canadian poets of the early twentieth century whose works have become popularly synonymous with two of Canada’s most heavily mythologized eras. The enduring popularity of poems like “The Cremation of Sam McGee” reflect not only Service’s central role in mythologizing Canada’s north but also a strategic “cultural commoditization” of the area’s gold rush heritage ( Jarvenpa 1994 ; Grace 2001 ), while McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” retains its status not only as the “most popular poem” of the First World War in Canada and beyond ( Fussell 2000 ), but as also as a primary example of the ideological function of Great War literature within Canada ( Holmes 2005 ; Gordon 2014 ). Although the two author houses may initially appear a study in contrasts, I draw on recent work in literary tourist studies to argue they are linked in their function as “materialized fictions” ( Hendrix 2008 ), or concrete interpretative frames that aim to offer tangible evidence of the Canadian myths their former inhabitants helped to fashion.

Undermining Justice: The Political Framing of Actors in the Independent Assessment Process

This article presents findings from a critical discourse analysis of House of Commons debates about the Independent Assessment Process (IAP), an out-of-court compensatory adjudication process intended to resolve claims of sexual and physical abuse that occurred at Indian Residential Schools and one of five key elements of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. Our analysis is guided by the question: What do elected officials’ discussions about the IAP reveal about the implementation of compensatory transitional justice mechanisms in settler colonial states, and about colonial relations (specifically attempts at reconciliation) more generally? Our study focuses on debates that took place between 2004 and 2019. We explored elected officials’ framing of both Survivors and the Canadian State in their discussions about the IAP. Our analysis reveals the limited reach of dialogue based in a partisan and antagonistic context and supports those scholars who assert that transitional justice is incompatible with reconciliation and decolonization. By way of contributing to the larger interdisciplinary study entitled Reconciling Perspectives and Building Public Memory: Learning from the Independent Assessment Process, of which this article is part, we reflect on what our findings mean not only for public memory but also for studying the IAP moving forward.

Water in the Wilderness: The Group of Seven and the Coastal Identity of Lake Superior

This paper challenges the wilderness ideology with which the Group of Seven’s coastal landscapes of the north shore of Lake Superior are often associated. Focusing my analysis around key works by Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, I offer an alternative perspective on commonly-adopted national and wilderness narratives, and instead consider these works in line with an emergent ecocritical consciousness. While a conversation about wilderness in relation to the Group of Seven often ignores the colonial history and Indigenous communities that previously inhabited coastal Lake Superior, this paper identifies these within a discussion of the environmental history of the region. That the environment of the north shore of Lake Superior was a primordial space waiting to be discovered and conquered only seeks to ratify the landscape as a colonial space. Instead, by engaging with the ecological complexities and environmental aesthetics of Lake Superior and its surrounding shoreline, I challenge this colonial and ideological construct of the wilderness, accounting for the prevailing fur trade, fishing, and lumber industries that dominated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A discussion of environmental history and landscape painting further allows for a consideration of both the exploitation and preservation of nature over the course of the twentieth century, and looks beyond the theosophical and mystical in relation to the Group’s Lake Superior works. As such, the timeliness of an ecocritical perspective on the Group of Seven’s landscapes represents an opportunity to consider how we might recontextualize these paintings in a time of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, while recognizing the people and history to whom this land traditionally belongs.

Tracing One Warm Line: Climate Stories and Silences in Northwest Passage Tourism

This article examines representations of polar cruise tourism in the Northwest Passage as climate change extends the geographic range of open waters and increases the number of ice-free days in the Canadian Arctic. It connects current cruise promotion to earlier exploration histories and investigates the paradoxes that arise in the drive to bear witness to climate change while accelerating its impacts through carbon-intensive travel. It also examines some of the ways that Franklin expedition tourism in particular is being used to reinforce claims of Canadian sovereignty over Arctic resources. Overall, the promotion of this kind of maritime tourism highlights many of the key fault lines between visitor expectations and geophysical and cultural realities in a changing North, raising doubts about whether expanded development of such tourism can succeed in creating climate change ambassadors. The article concludes that the potential for developing cross-cultural environmental justice solidarities depends in significant measure on the tourism industry’s greater inclusion of Inuit perspectives that understand the Arctic not merely as a place to travel through, but as a homeland of earth, sea, and the shifting ice between.

The Indigenous Public Child and Neoliberal Settler-Colonialism: Theorizing the Intersections between the White Possessive and Neoliberal Accountability Regimes

This article examines accountability discourses in Alberta’s legislative debates on child intervention during the years 2016–19. I demonstrate that the supposedly apolitical discourse of accountability functions as a form of neoliberal and settler-colonial governmentality that reaffirms the legitimacy of settler state intervention into the pathologized Indigenous family. Using the death of Serenity in Alberta’s child intervention system in 2014, and the subsequent legislative debates surrounding her death and the lack of accountability in the child intervention system as a case study, I demonstrate that accountability as both a discourse and a mechanism moves between positioning Albertans-as-Victims, Albertans-as-Stakeholders, and, finally, Albertans-as-Responsible-Agents. Ultimately, I argue that shifting discourses of accountability, which move from governmental to societal to individual accountability, re-centre a relationship of settler possession in relation to the Indigenous Public Child, whose life and death become available for consumption by settler publics in exchange for governmental credibility and accountability.

Arenas of Solitude: Social Forms and Textures of Togetherness in Hockey

Hockey and hockey arenas are often touted as pillars of Canadian identity and community. However, recent debates over inclusion in the sport question the game’s ability to facilitate social and cultural integration. This paper analyzes different forms of social interaction in hockey and hockey arenas in Halifax, Nova Scotia. In doing so, the paper identifies three social forms that hockey players and parents produce and reproduce in arenas. These are “friendliness without friendship,” “ritual togetherness,” and “transactional relationships.” Each form has textures of solitude embedded within the social form and has different social boundaries that separate in-and out-group members. We consider our findings in relation to literature on friendliness, solitude, and socio-cultural integration, as well as Atlantic Canadian and Canadian studies.

Framing, Suppression, and Colonial Policing Redux in Canada: News Representations of the 2019 Wet’suwet’en Blockade

In early 2019, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) intervened at the Gidimt’en Access Checkpoint in northern British Columbia (BC) and arrested 14 land defenders, garnering global media attention. To explore the ways that settler common sense ( Rifkin 2013 ) is assembled and perpetuated in Canada, this paper examines how Wet’suwet’en mobilization is framed in news media coverage. Situating our work in relation to settler colonial studies and informed by the writings of Indigenous scholars, we use critical discourse analysis to assess mainstream news media framings of the Wet’suwet’en struggle. Drawing from literature on social movement suppression, we discern three main themes in these texts that work to validate the RCMP’s excessive use of force against land defenders and delegitimize the Wet’suwet’en’s claim to sovereignty. While this framing set the stage for sustained corporate incursions, police surveillance, and occupation across unceded Wet’suwet’en territory, we suggest negative framing as well as activist use of social media to visualize state repression may have created the conditions for what Hess and Martin (2006) call backfire.