by Len Kuffert
University of Manitoba
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Peter Geller, Northern Exposures: Photographing and Filming the Canadian North, 1920-45 Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004, 258 pages. ISBN: 0774809272, $85.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 0774809280, $29.95 (paperback).
For many Canadians, the North is a distinguishing feature of Canada. As Peter Geller acknowledges in Northern Exposures, there is an established practice of referring to Canada “as a Northern nation, or suggest[ing] that the North is an integral part of the Canadian ethos[.]” (14) The North has been the scene of crucial episodes in a carefully constructed national past, and in that sense the Canadian comprehension of the North affects present action and colours plans for the future. Blame Mackenzie, Franklin, Stefansson, Diefenbaker, Berger, the giddy yet sad-eyed kids sniffing gas in Davis Inlet or the polar ice cap as it retreats to reveal a thousand irrevocable connections that run North to South and back again. Whether we link it with the rest of Canada geographically, culturally or economically, the North cannot be ignored, but neither has it ever been easily encountered. Owing to its vastness and distance from Canada’s core of population, the North appears for most southerners in photographs and films.
This is where Peter Geller “enters the picture.” He has set out, in Northern Exposures, to interpret a period during which southern institutions confronted and influenced northern space and modes of living as never before. He has chosen to interpret this period via the images and image-making practices of those institutions. Geller has succeeded in assembling a fascinating account of how these still and moving images served as more than snapshots and short bursts of action on the screen. He has been able to show us how the long process of remaking the Arctic into a less remote and more familiar place was aided by its depiction during the interwar period.
Three institutions—the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), the Anglican Church of Canada and the Government of Canada—provide the foundation for Geller’s look into what he considers a long colonising moment. The commercial, social, cultural and political impact of these institutions was immense, yet historians have previously pursued their stories via documents and oral sources. We have spoken of the “opening” of the North as beginning in the period before the First World War, and that certainly was a time of considerable activity on the part of the Dominion, missionary and HBC representatives to the North. However, as Geller notes, the structural transformation of the bureaucracy in charge of the North—the shifting of responsibility for the North into the hands of the Department of the Interior—meant an accompanying shift toward the “systematic creation of photographic and filmic records of branch activities.” (23) System implies order.
In his chapter on visualising the state in Canada’s Arctic, Geller first acquaints us with the earliest post- Confederation attempts to express sovereignty in the North, but moves beyond the story of strategically placed cairns to the masses of photographs made by Major L. T. Burwash and others charged with a long list of duties as they journeyed between widely-separated Arctic communities. While the photographs Geller includes here are mostly of people, the Northwest Territories and Yukon Branch (NWTYB) expeditions also collected weather and other scientific data, kept an eye peeled for Franklin relics, and otherwise amassed knowledge about the region. Indeed, knowledge stands as a central metaphor for Geller. If Canada were to exert any sort of claim to the Arctic, knowing the land and its people via the NWTYB and the Eastern Arctic Patrol (EAP) were prerequisites to such a claim, talismans against the Norse, Danes and Americans whose expeditions challenged Canadian sovereignty early in the twentieth century.
Competition also motivated the missionary impulse to know the North. In dealing with the Anglican Church’s photographic legacy, Geller correctly places this effort within the context of denominational imperatives. In other words, salvation was branded, and time was running out in the Arctic. “Pictures of the ‘Arctic Night’” is probably Geller’s most powerful chapter in terms of pushing forward the metaphor of colonisation. Images that might be jarring to observers in the post-Residential School age—Inuit children dressed in their Sunday best, babes declaring (via captions) that they really do want to go to school, an obedient line of Boy Scouts—would have pressed this point home to current or potential supporters of the missionary enterprise. The career of Bishop Fleming and the Anglican mission to the North comes to rely on pictures (much like “before and after” features in magazines or on television) to show southerners what a difference the whole apparatus was making to the lives of Northern people. We see the existing rhythms of life profoundly interrupted, but in the eyes (and cameras) of missionaries these were rhythms worthy of discard, and documenting their demise was testimony to progress. The brief story of Fleming interrupting a funeral was not photographed, but stands alongside the images shown here as a clear indicator of the missionary’s role and self-granted licence.
The HBC had been a presence in the North for 250 years when Geller picks up the tale. The year of the grand anniversary, 1920, set off an ambitious range of celebratory activities at the Company, and images figured largely in the self-celebration. “Real Indians” brought to Winnipeg for the Red River Pageant were display pieces, assets like any of the Company’s posts. The film project to accompany the anniversary, Romance of the Far Fur Country, had behind it a strong promotional campaign which presented the assembled staged scenes as a documentary through which audiences would behold “the real article.” (102) The Company’s own periodical, The Beaver, was re-invented during the interwar period as a vehicle for convincing influential business and political figures that the HBC knew the peoples of the North and were competently managing the economic and cultural transactions at the posts. Geller clearly demonstrates how images were probably the foundation of The Beaver’s new mission.
Filmmaker Richard Finnie benefited from his position with the government, and made films that, while not precisely glorifying the work of the HBC and missions, did not argue vigorously for a withdrawal from the northern frontier. Canada was moving north, and that process for him was inexorable. Finnie’s own reservations about “development” were clear, and he saw himself as the faithful recorder of ways soon to be lost. He contrasted his work with that of the “agents of ‘civilization’,” (164) claiming that his films and photographs conveyed real life. Geller interprets Finnie as a collector of cultures that were themselves literally and figuratively in twilight, and Geller’s decision to discuss Finnie’s career after he treats the three institutions shows how an individual could also, given time, have a considerable impact on southern visions of the North.
In a way, Geller’s final chapter brings all of these separate threads together. With still and moving cameras clicking and whirring, ethnography/evangelism/ commercial reconnaissance met the rude tourist impulse. What was the difference to the Dene or Inuit? Did they retain “creative control” of these images? Geller’s answer is an emphatic (and occasionally repetitive) “No.” He contends that the North was remade to suit the agendas of the institutions holding a stake in its “opening”—remade to be comprehensible in the south. It is unfortunate that there were not more extensive photographic records left by women like Florence Hirst, or by the HBC ship Nascopie, for such sources might well have rated their own chapters.
Geller writes clearly and carefully, and has set this specialized study into the broader historical context well, without trying to re-interpret that context for the reader. Errors of fact, when they appear, are not of great consequence. For example, it was 1965 (not 1964 as Geller writes) when Canada first flew its current flag. Lastly, a word on the book’s construction: the glossy paper used makes this feel like a birding book or travel guidebook. This was probably done to allow better reproduction of the photographs. Whatever the reason, for the southern reader looking at physically (and now temporally) distant subjects, this choice, like much of Geller’s argument about images of the North, is thoughtful and appropriate.
Inuit women and children in front of the ruins of Prince of Wales Fort, Churchill, circa 1920.
Source: Glenbow-Alberta Archives, NA-1964-1.Page revised: 24 April 2011
