Embodied heritage on the French River: Canoe routes and colonial history

Abstract

In 1985, Ontario's French River was designated one of the inaugural Canadian Heritage Rivers by the Canadian Heritage Rivers System (CHRS), highlighting the important natural and cultural heritage of the French River to the Canadian nation. Specifically, the designation noted the role the French River played in the fur trade as a major link between the port of Montreal and the trading posts of the interior. Important to the CHRS is the ability to recreationally experience the French River by canoe, replicating the voyageur mode of travel. The connection between landscape, colonial heritage, and recreational vehicles is emblematic of a particular historiographic reading of Canadian rivers that celebrates the land of the nation as an encounter with the nation's origins. In this heritage production, the tangled politics of colonialism, particularly the dynamics of the fur trade, are elided in the celebration of the nation as emerging from the landscape—not the social and political history of that landscape. By promoting this heritage through the embodied experience of a canoe trip, heritage promotion on the French risks reading history through a very limited lens, thus missing the value of understanding the historical geography of the French River as a contested space.

Re‐animating Gros Morne's storyless space: From natural heritage to ecological heritage

“…These wilderness spaces function as relics of bygone eras, spaces that mark the passage from a pre‐modern to a modern period. Many wilderness spaces around the globe are constructed as timeless in virtue of having somehow escaped historical developments and the impacts of modern “progress.” “Anachronistic spaces,” writes Erickson, are especially “valuable for colonial nations as they provide a connection to antiquity that anchors a nation to its territory” (, p. 323).…”

“…Most pertinent to the case described in this paper is the research by Erickson () on the significance of an Ontario heritage river, the French River. Erickson finds that the French River is constructed simultaneously as a historical marker of the nation and as a wild natural space.…”

“…But in inviting tourists to experience the nature of the river, Erickson notes, “this embodied heritage … roots the nation not in history of social and political interaction (of trade, of war, of treaties, of residential schools, of reconciliation, etc.) but in the land itself as a record of both the conquest and what came before” (, p. 318). This results in erasing the social, cultural, and political dynamics that have given shape to the river.…”

Reconsidering the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River: History, cartography, law, and ecology

“…Waterways in particular were considered to be at the roots of Canada's economic development, opening up the interior of the continent to European markets (Reid et al 2009). This role is somewhat less attributed to the Great Lakes portion of the basin than it is to the St. Lawrence, which is presented both as the framework for development and the place of origin (Erickson 2015). The strength of the Laurentian thesis-still referenced today, though mostly in passing-is that it views the hydrographic basin as the anchor of Canadian history.…”

“…The strength of the Laurentian thesis-still referenced today, though mostly in passing-is that it views the hydrographic basin as the anchor of Canadian history. This role is somewhat less attributed to the Great Lakes portion of the basin than it is to the St. Lawrence, which is presented both as the framework for development and the place of origin (Erickson 2015). In a country more or less lacking in national heroes, the St. Lawrence has thus been elevated to a mythic status.…”