Narrating a Nation

1. Narrating a Nation Themes in the production of Canadian National Identity

2. Imagined Communities • Benedict Anderson (1991) • He defines nation as an “imagined political community” (Anderson, p. 6). • As an imagined (or discursive) entity, nations are best described not as political realities as such, but as “cultural artifacts of a particular kind” (Anderson, 1991, p. 4), rooted within the larger cultural systems of meaning that surround and produce the idea of nation. • It is important to connect with the constellations of meanings we described as ‘discourse’.

3. Imagined Communities Because the nation cannot be remembered (i.e., Canada cannot be remembered because not long ago it did not exist), “it must be narrated” (Anderson, 1991, p. 204). This becomes one of the important functions of education and of schools, the rendering of a particular narration of nation as valid, as reasonable, as true. Combined with other narrators, such as religion and popular media, schools are a discursive site where the public is “continuously reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life” (Anderson, 1991, pp. 35-36). The nation, then, emerges as something reified, and schools play a large role in this reification.

4. Law and Order NWMP RCMP

5. Purity • Snow & Cold • Caucasian Narrative • The races of the North (symbolizing “energy, strength, self-reliance, health, and purity” [Berger, 1970, p. 129]) and of the West were generally assumed/described as superior to the races of the East and the South, which were characterized by “decay and effeminacy, even libertinism and disease” (Berger, 1970, p. 129). • Canada was to be a Northern nation “inhabited by the descendants of Northern races” (cited in Berger, 1970, p. 53). Because of our Northerness, as William Foster suggested, Canada was “the true out-crop of human nature, more manly, more real, than the weak marrow-bones of superstition of an effeminate South” (cited in Berger, pp. 62-63).

6. British / Anglo-Saxon British culture is seen as the pinnacle of culture and politics, in part because “in the West, with the Anglo-Saxon race, arose the consciousness that all are free; man as man is free” (Horne, 1904, p. 135). Progress and the impulse to progress and freedom are linked with the British Constitution and “racial capacity” (Berger, 1970, p. 116). This culture was so powerful that it could require and guarantee the success of assimilation. The “Slavic racial or religious ideals” would never become dominant because the children of these immigrants had “found a higher social level” (Anderson, 1918, p. 61) in an Anglo education. J. T. M. Anderson (1918) warns teachers of the importance and vitality of the work of Canadianizing new immigrants lest “the future of our Canadian citizenship … fail to reach that high level of intelligence which has ever characterized Anglo-Saxon civilization throughout the world” (p. 240). Anglo-Saxons might “shudder” at the thought of their descendants marrying “Poles or Bohemians or Ruthenians or Russians” (Anderson, 1918, p. 158), but a considerable number of these ethnic immigrants will guide Canadian national destiny bearing “the Anglicized forms of such names” (p. 178). Anglo-Saxon culture has uplifted them, marking and remaking them in both name and substance.

7. Protestant Who was easily defined as Catholic? It was the French (given their history in Canada vis-à-vis the English they could be considered second rate), the Italians and, of particular relevance to Saskatchewan, many Eastern European peoples such as the Ukrainians, the Ruthenians, et cetera. The earlier descriptions of the limitations of these kinds of people and the division between Northern and Southern peoples—the masculine versus the feminine, the moral versus the libertine—seem especially salient. Given the context of the immigration to Saskatchewan, it was Protestants who were easily connected with those desirable groups, Anglo-Saxons and Northern Europeans. Their whiteness was not in question; rather, it often stood out as exemplary. Therefore Anglicans, and at least Lutheran Protestants, were desirable immigrants.

8. Protestant The earlier descriptions of the limitations of these kinds of people and the division between Northern and Southern peoples—the masculine versus the feminine, the moral versus the libertine—seem especially salient. Saskatchewan was to become a Northern place—White, pure, strong, moral, Christian. Religion here carries racist and racializing baggage; to be Catholic or to be Protestant meant to carry the (in)capacity of being more fully White and more or less desirable. In this way, religion is also a racial marker; Protestant Christianity is a marker of whiteness.