Conrad Boyce is the editor and publisher of the Cosmos. He has a BA in English from the University of Alberta and a diploma in journalism from Grant Macewan Community College in Edmonton. He lived and worked in the Yukon and Vancouver Island before arriving in Ontario in 1995. Beyond these pages, he is the Artistic Director of OnStage Uxbridge, and the technical manager of the Uxbridge Music Hall.
Symbols
Suppose you were given a quiz on Canadian cultural symbols, and somewhere along the way you encountered the following multiple choice question:
What is the iconic symbol of the first nations of northern Ontario? Is it the:
a. totem pole
b. birchbark canoe
c. inukshuk
If you had travelled Highways 400, 69 and then 17 between Muskoka and Eliot Lake with me a couple of weekends back, you would have almost certainly responded “c”, because every half-kilometre or so along those rock-bordered roads, somebody or other had erected on the nearby cliffs an inukshuk, more or less resembling this:
I lost count, but I’m quite certain there were in the neighbourhood of 200,000 inukshi (which I’ve decided is the plural form of the sculpture) in those 300 kilometres.
Of course, if you did choose “c” in response to the question, you are wrong, quite wrong. The inukshuk is by no means an Ontario symbol; it belongs rather to the Inuit of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories, who used it for centuries along the Arctic coast as a kind of signpost. It’s supposed to represent a man, pointing the way homeward.
Then, sometime in the 60’s, around the same time Inuit art was becoming the hottest thing among the upper classes, someone decided the inukshuk would make a neat soapstone carving. Canadian roadsides, at least those with any sizeable rocks within a dozen yards, would never be the same. In early July, I’m going to be travelling the Icefields Highway in the Canadian Rockies for the first time in decades, and I fully expect it to be littered with inukshi.
Someone once theorized that this roadside epidemic was spread by a team of Inuit in Ontario exile, who erected the little guys out of homesickness for their native shores.
I highly doubt this theory. If I were Inuit, rather than erecting inukshi along Ontario highways, I would instead be tempted to take a baseball bat or similar blunt instrument, and go on regular night-time rampages, bent on eradicating them from a landscape so foreign to them. I suppose the reason this hasn’t happened is either the inukshuk is such a cherished Inuit symbol that, no matter how badly made, it’s a little sacrilegious to willfully destroy one. Either that, or there are no Inuit in Ontario.
Say, though, that despite travelling the byways of Ontario North, you are secure enough in your knowledge of Inuit culture to eliminate “c” from the possible answers to our question. You emerge from the north to the edge of Muskoka, and decide to drop in to the French River Trading Post, about 45 miles south of Sudbury, for a lunch in their well-reputed café.
There, on the porch of the café, like a greeter at WalMart, is a large red totem pole! Aha, you think, there’s our answer. The proper response must be “a”.
Well, no..... In fact, a quick glimpse at Wikipedia will remind you what you learned in Grade 7 social studies, that the totem pole was used by First Nations on the Pacific coast of British Columbia and Alaska. It sat outside their houses, indicating which family or clan resided within, and telling a little bit about the history of that family.
I could be wrong, but I strongly suspect the totem pole sitting on the porch at French River had very little to say about the family, or families, who own the Trading Post (I saw no evidence that anyone resided there). All it indicated was that the Trading Post was a place for the tourist to purchase a great variety of kitschy “Indian stuff”, including, of course, toy totem poles and “make-it-yourself” inukshuk kits. You could also buy a miniature birchbark canoe which, by elimination, is the answer to our cultural question (although for Canadian history students, that canoe is as much a symbol of the French-Canadian voyageur as it is the Algonkian native).
Most Canadians, I imagine, see no problem with the Ontario usurpation of icons like the totem pole or the inukshuk. They’re uniquely Canadian, why shouldn’t we adopt them? My issue is that in adopting them, we take them totally out of context. The inukshi along Highway 69 aren’t guiding anyone anywhere; the French River totem pole’s animal symbols bear no relationship to any family within 3,000 miles. When we see them, we recognize them as vaguely Canadian, but they’re empty of meaning.
The French River, linking Lake Nipissing and Lake Huron, was one of the main water highways for the coureurs du bois and for generations of aboriginal Canadians before them. Like the Big Nickel an hour north in Sudbury, the folks at French River should have a giant canoe on a wooden pedestal outside the Trading Post. Trouble is, you might miss the totem pole.
