Water in the Wilderness: The Group of Seven and the Coastal Identity of Lake Superior

Abstract

This paper challenges the wilderness ideology with which the Group of Seven’s coastal landscapes of the north shore of Lake Superior are often associated. Focusing my analysis around key works by Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, J.E.H. MacDonald, and Franklin Carmichael, I offer an alternative perspective on commonly-adopted national and wilderness narratives, and instead consider these works in line with an emergent ecocritical consciousness. While a conversation about wilderness in relation to the Group of Seven often ignores the colonial history and Indigenous communities that previously inhabited coastal Lake Superior, this paper identifies these within a discussion of the environmental history of the region. That the environment of the north shore of Lake Superior was a primordial space waiting to be discovered and conquered only seeks to ratify the landscape as a colonial space. Instead, by engaging with the ecological complexities and environmental aesthetics of Lake Superior and its surrounding shoreline, I challenge this colonial and ideological construct of the wilderness, accounting for the prevailing fur trade, fishing, and lumber industries that dominated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A discussion of environmental history and landscape painting further allows for a consideration of both the exploitation and preservation of nature over the course of the twentieth century, and looks beyond the theosophical and mystical in relation to the Group’s Lake Superior works. As such, the timeliness of an ecocritical perspective on the Group of Seven’s landscapes represents an opportunity to consider how we might recontextualize these paintings in a time of unprecedented anthropogenic climate change, while recognizing the people and history to whom this land traditionally belongs.