Book review: The Politics of the Canoe
Reviewed by Karl Hele
The Politics of the Canoe is a collection of essays designed to complicate and unsettle the canoe as an icon of Canadian culture. The work includes all forms of canoes – wood, bark, and modern forms – in its exploration of how the “canoe as a dynamic and multifariously meaningful vessel that can illuminate political and cultural histories.”(21) For the authors, the canoe, as many Canadians envision it, is a product of colonization which serves to erase millennia of Indigenous history and interactions with the land and waters. Yet, in their essays’ explorations of the canoe’s politics, the authors see the vessel not only as a colonized and colonizing object, but also as an agent of Indigenous sovereignty, resurgence, decolonization, and reconciliation. The essays are asking Canadians to focus on learning, recognizing, and reconnecting the canoe with the Indigenous past, present, and future as a method for reconciliation.
The volume is organized into three sections. The first section, “Asserting Indigenous Sovereignty”, consists of three Indigenous-focussed and constructed essays that seek to show how the canoe can be at the heart of reasserting sovereignty, reconnecting to lands and waters, passing knowledge between generations, as well as instilling pride in nationhood and its spirituality. In reading these papers, the reader is immediately struck by how the canoe for the Heiltusk, Chinook, and Tłįcho have inspired entire communities and individuals to reconnect with both the human and non-human landscapes and waterscapes while recasting and strengthening community in a resurgence of knowledge. These essays are all about getting back to the land by getting back to the water. Each article reminds or teaches the reader that the canoe is a living being that is part of a family or community. This section is my favourite part of the entire volume; its power, promise, pride, and heart within the articles show how the canoe is intimately tied to our cultural resurgence and exercise of sovereignty.
The second section, “Building Canoes, Knowledges, and Relationships,” similarly consists of three chapters. These essays illustrate how the knowledge of constructing canoes can create and sustain relationships within and between Indigenous Nations as well as between Indigenous and Settler communities. The knowledge of the process of gathering the materials creates and binds relationships that “are connected with the revitalization of … [Indigenous] …. practices and communities as well as with reconciliation”(167).
Four chapters make up the third and final section titled, “Telling Histories.” These chapters seek to “illustrate the choices that we make when we retell … stories” and by “illustrat[ing] the impact of canoes on the way we interpret these histories” (18). Together, the papers unpack the historical legacy of colonialism while offering promise through the retelling or re-examination of these stories of understanding and reconciliation. The last chapter of this section and the book serves as a (un)intended conclusion to the volume by tying all the themes of the preceding essays together through a personal exploration of family, colonialism, changing landscapes, and memory.
Overall, The Politics of the Canoe is an engaging and thought-provoking collection of essays drawn from Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The overall style of the articles makes them readily accessible and enjoyable reads that connect the authors’ knowledge and passion with the reader. By complicating an iconic symbol of Canada, the collection is challenging people to think about the canoe’s connection to colonization, how contemporary visions reinforce that colonialism, and how to engage in decolonizing the canoe. The essays authored or co-authored by Indigenous peoples are the best feature of the volume, readily connecting the reader to powerful visions of the canoe as a means to reconnect and reestablish relationships with each other as well as our lands and waters. They call on us to remember that the canoe is alive and has the potential to help steer all of us towards reconciliation.
Bruce Erickson and Sarah Wylie Krotz, eds. The Politics of the Canoe. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2021.
ISBN: 0887590993