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Cet article montre comment la representation des ethnies, des genres et de la nature s'entrecroisent dans les ideaux nationalistes canadiens presents dans "Canada First Movement," Le Groupe des sept, Margaret Atwood, et Northrop Frye. Ces images forment un ensemble de ressources symboliques qui sont utilisees librement pour differencier et definir les frontieres de la nation revee tout en excluant et s'appropriant a la fois, le point de vue des populations marginalisees.
This paper examines the cultural politics of race, gender, and nature in the nationalist ideas of the Canada First Movement, the Group of Seven, Margaret Atwood, and Northrop Frye. It argues that symbols of nationhood are used flexibly to differentiate and define the boundaries of the imagined nation, often switching between defining "others" and nature as noble and/or ignoble savages, and the nation as male or female, depending on the needs of nation-building. The way such images are used reflect and reinforce the broader contradictions and inequalities of Canada's settler past and its current officially "multicultural" nationhood. This is because they sometimes exclude and sometimes appropriate the cultural symbols and points of view of marginalized populations, without creating genuine respect and equality. Nationalist representations of nature also reflect a central conflict about whose "native land" the settler nation of Canada now occupies.
Nature, power, and national identity
Of course we all want identities, and having a national identity is often seen as natural, necessary, and inevitable. The search for Canadian identity is long-standing and passionate (Mackey 1999), and Canada has produced a "veritable canon of strategical exploration and description of its ongoing identity crisis" (Berland 514). It is important to remember, however, that nations are rather recent phenomena, a result of specifically modern economic, political and cultural processes (Greenfeld). Nations, as Anderson points out, are "imagined communities" they do not emerge spontaneously from some primordial source, but are shared fictions created and maintained through media, education, cultural products, and government programs.
In nationalist mythology the nation is often represented as if embodied in the landscape itself (Mackey 1998). Not surprisingly, such natural/nationalist images of the nation also often reflect assumptions about gender and race. McClintock argues that "all nationalisms are gendered" (352) and Yuval-Davis shows how women have been important to nation-building in multiple...