Our Rural Selves: Memory and the Visual in Canadian Childhoods 9780773558236

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Our Rural Selves

Our Rural Selves Memory and the Visual in Canadian Childhoods

Edited by Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona

m c g i l l - q u e e n ’s u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2019 isbn 978-0-7735-5698-0 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5699-7 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-5823-6 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-5824-3 (epub) Legal deposit second quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Our rural selves : memory and the visual in Canadian childhoods / edited by Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5698-0 (hardcover). –isbn 978-0-7735-5699-7 (softcover). –isbn 978-0-7735-5823-6 (epdf).–isbn 978-0-7735-5824-3 (epub) 1. Rural children–Canada–In mass media. 2. Rural children–Canada– Social conditions. 3. Collective memory–Canada. I. Mitchell, Claudia, editor II. Mandrona, April, editor ht453.o97 2019

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“Look out the window, Vahil,” I said. “The cultivated landscape of this farm has decayed so completely now it is difficult to believe that the fields and orchards ever existed outside of my own memories, my own imagination.” –Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line (2010)

Contents

Figures / ix Acknowledgments / xiii 1 Rural Beginnings / 3 Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona 2 George Agnew Reid’s Paintings in Relation to English Canadian Collective Memories of Rural Childhood in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Canada / 20 Loren Lerner 3 Making Green Gables Anne’s Home: Rural Landscapes and Ordinary Homes of Canadian Fiction and Film / 41 Frederika A. Eilers 4 Listening to the Rhythms of Rural Life, 1920–1940: Oral History and Childhood Agency / 62 Michael Krohn 5 “I Never Had a Childhood”: Narratives of Work, Play, and Loss in Postwar Rural Atlantic Canada / 80 Michael Corbett and Fred Horner

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6 Making Friends in the Middle of Nowhere: Handmade Dolls and a Back-to-the-Lander Childhood / 98 April Mandrona 7 Exploring Memory and Place through Wet Plate Collodion Photography: How a Newfoundland Childhood Inspired the Work Trace / 118 Karen Stentaford 8 How I Became Invisible: A Lesbian Childhood in the Woodsy North / 132 Marni Stanley 9 Documenting a Transgender Rural Childhood: Exploring My Prairie Home / 148 Barbara Pini, Elizabeth Marshall, and Wendy Keys 10 Pumpjacks, Social Class, and the Struggle for Belonging / 167 Maureen Kendrick 11 An “Indian” Doll: A Mohawk Child’s Identity in Crisis / 187 Sandra Owén:nakon Deer-Standup 12 Teaching Larry Loyie’s As Long as the Rivers Flow: Real and Imagined Childhood Memories and the Intransigence of the Cattle Truck / 206 Teresa Strong-Wilson and Amarou Yoder 13 Mapping Futures, Making Selves: How Rural Young People Experience The Real Game / 224 Kate Cairns 14 Our Rural Futures / 243 Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona Contributors / 263 Index / 269

Figures

2.1 George Agnew Reid, The Clockmaker, oil on canvas, 1893. Private collection. / 22 2.2 George Agnew Reid, Forbidden Fruit, 1889, oil on canvas. Art Gallery of Hamilton, Gift of the Women’s Committee, 1960. / 25 2.3 George Agnew Reid, The Berry Pickers, 1890, oil on canvas, 189.2 ⫻ 146.1 cm. Nipissing University. / 29 2.4 George Agnew Reid, Mortgaging the Homestead, 1890, 130.1 ⫻ 213.3 cm. National Gallery of Canada. Royal Canadian Academy of Arts diploma work, deposited by the artist, Toronto, 1890; acc. no. 86. / 31 2.5 George Agnew Reid, The Call to Dinner, 1886–87, oil on canvas, 121.6 ⫻ 179.8 cm. Gift of Moulton College, 1954, McMaster Museum of Art, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. Photographer: John Tamblyn. / 35 2.6 George Agnew Reid, Cloud Shadows, ca. 1915, oil on canvas, 90.8 ⫻ 122.5 cm. Art Gallery of Alberta Collection, gift of the artist, 1943; acc. no. 43.8. / 37 2.7 George Agnew Reid, photograph: artist in his Onteora studio (1893), page 175 of Scrapbook 1, 1892–93. Art Gallery of Ontario, Gift of Mary Wrinch Reid, 1957. Photo: Ian Lefebvre, Art Gallery of Ontario. / 38

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3.1 “Park Corner.” In Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island, edited by C.R. Allen, 1880, 57. Courtesy of Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill Library. / 45 3.2 Aerial shot of Megan Follows and Richard Farnsworth approaching Green Gables, from the film Anne of Green Gables (1985) © Sullivan Entertainment Inc. / 48 4.1 Susan Heller prepared several mock-up pages with drawings and sections of interviews she transcribed. With permission – Archives Hemmingford. / 64 5.1 1964 Oldsmobile Super 88. / 84 5.2 Marc in Amherst, Nova Scotia, mid-1940s. / 85 5.3 Fred aboard his boat the Jeannie, 2005. / 87 5.4 Mike’s Academic Persona. / 93 6.1 Our first home, the “Comfrey Cottage,” built mostly by my mother, Elaine Mandrona. / 101 6.2 Barbie dolls, 1987 to 1998. Private collection. / 109 6.3 Porcelain dolls. Private collection. / 109 6.4 Young April using miniature sewing machine, c. 1989. / 110 6.5 Cloth doll, made by eight-year-old April. Cloth, beads. / 111 6.6 Flower fairy doll, made by twelve-year-old April. Clay, silk flowers, cloth. / 111 6.7 Teddy with knit sweater, made by fourteen-year-old April. Faux fur, yarn, ribbon. / 112 6.8 Fairy queen, made by thirteen-year-old April. Clay, fabric, wool, acrylic, jewellery findings. / 113 6.9 Toothpick dolls, made by ten-year-old April. Toothpicks, embroidery floss. / 114 7.1 Sunday walks at a time when I had a pink coat, 2014, from the series Trace. Archival pigment print from glass negative, 70.86 x 91.44 cm. / 123 7.2 it always smelled like that in June, 2014, from the series Trace. Archival pigment print from glass negative, 70.86 x 91.44 cm. / 123 7.3 jump rocks or leap rocks, 2014, from the series Trace. Archival pigment print from glass negative, 70.86 x 91.44 cm. / 125

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7.4 forts behind my house, 2014, from the series Trace. Archival pigment print from glass negative, 70.86 ⫻ 91.44 cm. / 128 7.5 they sang from the hill, 2014, from the series Trace. Archival pigment print from glass negative, 70.86 ⫻ 91.44 cm. / 128 7.6 sometimes I wished I could go too, 2014, from the series Trace. Archival pigment print from glass negative, 70.86 ⫻ 91.44 cm. / 130 8.1 Our home quarter circa 1964. Photographer unknown. / 133 9.1 Fiilm poster for My Prairie Home © 2013 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Used with permission. / 150 9.2 Upside-down image of Prairie. My Prairie Home © National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Used with permission. / 155 10.1 Pumpjack on a rural lease road on the outskirts of town. Source: Author’s photo. / 174 10.2 “The Oil Patch” by Tom Innes, editorial cartoonist for the Calgary Herald, 18 May 1974. Source: Glenbow Archives, M-8787-66. / 178 10.3 Left: Potential for disaster. Source: Ottawa Journal, 20 December 1977. Right: Red Adair’s celebrity status. Source: Ottawa Journal, 30 December 1977. / 180 10.4 “Witch’s brew of methane, hydrogen sulfide, and liquid hydrocarbon vapour.” Source: Glenbow Archives na-2864-82-11-10. / 181 11.1 The original building of the Indian village prior to the fire in the 1940s. / 190 11.2 A postcard image of the front entrance of the same site. http://iroquoisbeadwork.blogspot.com/2011/03/historic-imagesof-kahnawake-1.html (accessed 16 October 2016). / 190 11.3 “Indian Village,” Chief Poking Fire Indian Museum. Photograph taken by the author, 15 December 2016. / 194 11.4 Indian doll image. http://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com (accessed 16 October 2016). / 197 12.1 Image from As Long as the Rivers Flow. © 2002 by Lawrence A. Loyie and Constance Brissenden, illustrations © 2002 by Heather D. Holmlund. Reproduced with permission from Groundwood Books Ltd, Toronto. www.groundbooks.com. / 209 13.1 Brochure for The Real Game. / 229

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13.2 One of the housing options available in The Real Game lesson “The Dream.” / 231 14.1 Back to basics children. / 253

Acknowledgments

The phrase “our rural selves” in a Canadian context could have many meanings, ranging from referring to some sense that we are all in some way rural (“a big small community”), through to a recognition that although Canada is an increasingly urbanized country, many of its inhabitants maintain rural roots. Not long ago we were involved in a seminar on rurality where the researchers studying rurality were sometimes quick to frame their real rural roots: “I am not from a rural area. I grew up in a large city.” “I grew up in a rural area but now I only visit rural areas for research.” “For me the rural area is first and foremost a holiday venue and has only [recently] become a research site.” Even the language of the group was revealing when researchers from time to time used terms such as “in the middle of nowhere,” “out there,” or “in the sticks,” sometimes intentionally as a way to provide context, and other times perhaps in an unconscious yet revealing way that reinforces the spatial injustices we might claim to want to overcome in our research. But across all of the narratives emerged a special outsider stance, since not one of the research team currently lives in a rural area. The contributors to this volume have all risen to the challenge of “being there” either physically or metaphorically, offering their own versions of “our rural selves,” by drawing on the tools of literature, art,

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media studies, architecture, memory-work, visual studies, and autoethnography. Growing up in rural Canada ourselves, we have so appreciated the thoughtfulness and enthusiasm of all the authors. Digging into the rural roots of Canada has been fascinating, and as editors we have enjoyed seeing how Our Rural Selves could come together. We thank Ann Smith for her careful editing of the manuscript, and Pamela Lamb for her insightful indexing. We thank Fatima Khan, who managed everything else! We are so grateful to you both for keeping this book going. We would like to acknowledge Tony Kelly, who coined the term “our rural selves” when writing his doctoral dissertation at McGill University several years ago. Finally we thank Jacqueline Mason at McGill-Queen’s University Press, whose eyes lit up at the idea of this book. Thank you for your ongoing support for this book. Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona

Our Rural Selves

1 Rural Beginnings Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona

Introduction “Like one big small town,” wrote a reporter for the Globe and Mail, describing the outpouring of support from Canadians in response to the forest fires in and around Fort McMurray in May 2016 (Lederman 2016). The reporter was writing about the generosity of Canadians at a time of crisis, and her description is perhaps not far off the mark in capturing something of what Canada is. Geographically, Canada is 95 percent rural and remote, and 20 to 30 percent of Canadians live in rural and remote areas and small towns. Given the relatively recent urbanization of Canada, many of Canada’s city dwellers have roots in small towns and the countryside. Statistics Canada’s Rural and Small Town Canada Analysis Bulletin reported in 2005 that half of Canadian domestic tourists visited this country’s rural regions, as did 39 percent of American tourists and 33 percent of overseas tourists. The phrase “our rural selves,” then, says more than we might at first think about Canada. In Our Rural Selves: Memory and the Visual in Rural Canadian Childhoods, memory-work (through visual and other approaches to studying memory) is presented as a framework within which to generate knowledge about growing up rural; it also offers a creative challenge to the myths that surround rural young people. In a sense, this book is

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a companion to our recent book addressing rural childhoods in a global context, Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods (Mandrona and Mitchell 2018). Bringing memory and the visual together offers a way of looking at things differently; it also provides access to the often neglected experiences of rural children, past and present, real and imagined. The formulation “rural Canadian childhoods” in the title of this book suggests a multi-faceted look at both the past and the future. Many authors, artists, and cultural theorists have noted that childhood memories are a rich area of study; in particular, memory-work is now a burgeoning area of investigation. Factoring the visual into memory-work (rural childhood in paintings, television shows, films, video games, picture books, and photographs) helps bring to light a world that is often implied or overlooked, as authors like Patricia Holland (2004) and Anne Higonnet (1998) have pointed out. The various contributors to Loren Lerner’s edited volume, Depicting Canada’s Children, draw attention to the multitude of ways in which childhood can be visually represented. As Lerner notes: More than an examination of images in formal settings such as art galleries and museums, visual culture takes into account the components of an image and the role of the making of pictorial works in everyday life. It also looks at how the making of images relates to intellectual, cultural, and political history, as well as to theoretical constructs such as semiotics, psychology, and feminism. All types of pictures – oil paintings, children’s drawings, architectural renderings, photographs, snapshots, commercial reproductions, cartoons, advertisements, and films – are given equal weight in this treatment. Whether canonical or not, the images discussed here advance our understanding of Canada’s children and Canadian childhood. (2009, xv) The visual also serves as a prompt in relation to studying the afterlife of childhood as deliberated on in Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2002). That work draws attention to the use of the film Toy Story as a memory text in and of itself, but also as a prompt for evoking memory of childhood.

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Other tools include the use of family photographs in memory-work related to childhood, as can be seen in Valerie Walkerdine’s (1989) Schoolgirl Fictions, Annette Kuhn’s (1994) Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination, and bell hooks’s (1996) Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood in the context of race. In the Canadian context, Margaret Mackey’s richly visual account of growing up in St John’s, Newfoundland in the 1950s, One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography, offers a reader’s history that includes family photographs as well as images of games, children’s books, and television series. While she is not writing explicitly about a rural childhood, she is writing very much about what she terms “a contingent setting” (2016, 27). As she observes: “I cannot emphasize the importance of the local without providing some context for the very distinctive society in which I happened to find myself (with all the literal and metaphorical implications that this phrase allows). By historical accident, I learned to read, view, listen, and reflect in Newfoundland, in the first decade of the province’s Confederation with Canada” (27).

Our Own Rural Selves: Placing Ourselves The “our” in the title can be all-inclusive: how do we as a country relate to growing up rural? More than two decades ago, Neil Sutherland’s Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television drew attention to the significance of childhood as an entryway to a deeper understanding of Canada’s history. The book was based on interviews and other accounts with more than two hundred adults, and of course many of those interviews drew on rural childhoods. But the “our” can also refer to our rural selves as the editors. We would be remiss not to say something about our own rural selves, as editors of this collection. We are not claiming that only those with rural roots should be writing about rurality, of course, and indeed, a central consideration could be Margot Ely’s (1991) notion of making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. One of our colleagues from Sweden, who grew up in urban Stockholm and who carries out research in the area of rurality and girlhood, uses the metaphor of darkness when she remembers rurality and her own childhood, and wonders, of course, how this memory of and about the rural influences her work now.1

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Positioning is key, so we need to ponder the question of insider and outsider, as we do. Given how much research is about crossing into other people’s landscapes and experiences, it seems reasonable for us to fully exploit the places with which we are particularly in harmony. What can one write about as an insider? Are people who are no longer “living rural” considered insiders? At the same time, how do we avoid seeing insider status as all-compassing? Having grown up rural in Canada at different times (Claudia in the 1950s to early ’60s, April in the 1980s and ’90s), in different regions (Claudia on the Prairies, April in the Maritimes), and in different contexts (Claudia on a family farm that dated back several generations, April as part of her parents’ back-to-the-land experiment), we avoid, we think, some of the pitfalls of an approach based on homogeneity. At the same time, some of our experiences of rurality converge in relation to studying contemporary utopias as East Coast back-to-the-landers (Claudia and her then-husband and two of her children in the 1970s, April as a child of back-to-the-landers in the 1980s). But our experiences of studying and learning about growing up rural are also about the lives of other people’s children. For example, for seven years Claudia taught junior high students (thirteen- to fifteenyear-olds) in a small fishing village on the southwest coast of Nova Scotia. The aspirations of these young people then, and what she knows of their hopes now, offer significant pockets of knowledge that might otherwise go unnoticed or unacknowledged in one’s own life. April carried out her doctoral research on community art education in rural KwaZuluNatal, South Africa, in 2011–12. Despite obvious and not so obvious differences between April and the young South Africans with whom she worked, experiences of rurality provided a starting point for the building of artistic practices. Although individually we have been carrying around the idea of “our rural selves” for some time, the actual genesis of this book is much more recent. It dates back to our attending together an exhibition based on the photographs of George Thomas, Doing Our Own Thing: Back-toThe-Land in Eastern Canada in the 1970s (Wendt and Morrell 2015), and the panel discussion on East Coast back-to-the-landers held at the gallery in the Charlottetown Confederation Centre in 2014. Seeing how this exhibition and panel came together was inspiring in the sense that

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it validated the types of experiences we had each had of one aspect of rurality – the back-to-the-land movement. But we were also aware that childhood itself was largely overlooked by both the exhibition and the panelists – which was ironic, somehow, given that the exhibition was curated by two people who were themselves children of back-to-thelanders. It has been interesting to see the emergence of works such as Weaver’s article “First Encounters” (2010); Kate Daloz’s (2016) study of this movement in Vermont, through her eyes as a child of back-tothe-landers; and Alan MacEachern’s (2016) study of eighteen now-adult children of back-to-the-landers in pei. As MacEachern notes, the perspectives of children have more often than not been left out. So interviewing them offers a different point of view. But if the back-to-the-land movement was what brought our interests in rurality together in the first place, it was clear that a focus on childhood had even broader implications for studying rurality. We compared notes on living far from neighbours, being resourceful, longing to get away, and holding back sometimes from talking about growing up rural. Claudia, for example, recalls that as a university student, when people asked her where she was from and did she grow up on a farm, she would tell them, “It is a farm but it is very close to town” (which it was), and she would add, “On our farm we have oil” (meaning that we somehow did not just farm, we did something else as well). She also remembers having only a vague sense as a child of what the rural actually meant. Relatives who lived in urban centres would talk fondly about coming to “the farm,” but as someone who lived there, Claudia does not recall ever thinking of where she lived as “the farm.” Rural and the farm become places perhaps only when they are considered in relation to somewhere else. Also, there was nothing in the curriculum of the school about rurality and life as a rural person other than perhaps a type of hidden curriculum that involved being one of the “van-children” (bused to school) and staying for lunch, in contrast to the town children, who walked home for lunch. Claudia recalls that she and several of her van-children friends spent hours and hours (lunch time lasted ninety minutes) playing at school. These are perhaps not very compelling points to offer someone who grew up in the city in relation to what is rural, but the fact that she felt compelled to minimize her rurality, and to challenge certain

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myths or stereotypes about rurality, is noteworthy. April, for her part, recalls what a challenge it was to explain to people where she lived, and that her surroundings were not wild: Although there was an abundance of life, the absence of people was salient. We were the last house on the road. The homestead is only 20 minutes from the nearest town but in my head it seemed much further. The school bus would come only part way up our road, so the schoolboard paid my parents $5 a day to drive me in. People who came to visit for the first time were wide-eyed and said things like “I can’t believe you live out here!” They also often found the dark and quiet of night unsettling. Perhaps this intensity was frightening; they also thought that attacks from wild animals were imminent. In reality, I can count on one hand the number of moose or black bears I’ve come across, and they never ventured very close. (conversation with Claudia, 15 January 2017) For both of us the idea of childhood memory and awareness of land and space is one that is perhaps best described in Mackey’s “claiming” (2016, 341) (and declaiming) as a way to begin to rethink and re-remember in the context of settler identities. At the same time, this work offers a critical entry point to the study of erasure of Indigenous childhoods as highlighted in the work of scholars such as Sandrina de Finney (2015). In her autobiography, Life among the Qallunaat, Mini Aodla Freeman (2015) describes her girlhood experiences of living on the land. Born in 1936, she lived a traditional camp lifestyle until the age of sixteen, when she left her Inuit community to begin training as a nurse in Chisasibi, Quebec. As Mackey points out as a result of her own memory-work with settler literature, as well as tv shows in which cowboys always came out the victors: “Part of our education involves locating ourselves in space and time. For a culture of incomers, this project necessarily entails sorting out elements of the historical encounter with the peoples who inhabited the spaces before the settlers arrived” (341–2). For Claudia this has meant delving into and recognizing the location and history of the Dakota communities of southwestern Manitoba – Birdtail Sioux, Chanupawakpa, Dakota Tipi, Dakota Plains, and Sioux Valley. Although not

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party to the Numbered Treaties, they have alliances and arrangements with other First Nations in Manitoba and with the Crown. Though she recalls little consciousness of Aboriginal or First Nations presence or absence, it is worth pointing out that her ex-husband’s grandmother, who was born in the late 1800s (only thirty kilometres from where Claudia and her ex-husband grew up), is referred to in family oral history as “the first white baby born in the district.” In a local published history, The Virden Story, she is referred to more simply as “the first child born in Elkhorn” (Clingan 1957, 226). Similarly, the deep connection to the land and homestead that April and her conscientious objector family continues to experience is complicated by the erasure of the place’s Indigenous history. Like April’s parents, the vast majority of back-to-the-landers in North America were white and from upper- and middle-class backgrounds. As young urbanites, few had experience of agrarian life. Absent from most back-to-the-lander accounts are interrogations of why large amounts of rural land could be purchased at such low prices. Her family’s home was a refuge from political oppression and conflict, even while, for the original Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) inhabitants,2 it was a site of enduring loss and violence against self-determination and sovereignty.

On Memory-Work This book uses various tools of memory-work to question how imagined landscapes and inhabitants both inform and reflect the perceptions, identities, and socialization of rural children. At the same time, it interrogates the various meanings of rurality, focusing on, for example, the often overlooked rurality of Indigenous children and the omission of any consideration of sex and sexuality in rural studies. Materiality and symbolism, and such themes as intergenerationality, dislocations and relocations, and movement and mobility, characterize the entanglements of studying rurality and childhood. Research into experiences of growing up rural, be they personal or collective, through autobiography/ memory-work points to the ways in which the past and present are mutually informing. Much of the work in this collection owes its origins either implicitly or explicitly to the strategic work of remembering, including the

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method of memory-work developed by Haug and colleagues (1987) and various adaptations of it such as collective biography (Davies and Gannon 2006) and first draft/second draft memoir writing (Hampl 1996). While some of this research is based on group work (Crawford et al. 1992; Davies and Gannon 1996; Haug et al. 1987), there is also memorywork done with individual memories, as we see in research by Annette Kuhn (1994) and Janet Zandy (1995) in relation to gender and class, and Naomi Norquay (1993, 2008) regarding race and migration. Frigga Haug and her colleagues in Germany are credited with coining the term memory-work in the 1980s and with developing a set of tools for working with memory. Their work has inspired other memory collectives in Australia (see Crawford et al. 1992) based on a number of key principles: group selection of a topic or theme (e.g., recall an early memory of going to school), writing down memories (as opposed to simply orally recounting them), working in groups (typically of no more than twelve – and, in their case, only women), writing in the third person (as a type of distancing), sharing memories within the group, and group approaches to analysis that include questions. What do our memory pieces have in common? Are there certain themes? What memories are missing? This somewhat systematic and deliberate approach has been applied to a number of different areas of research such as the female body and sexualization (Haug et al. 1987), gender and emotion in relation to childhood holidays (Crawford et al. 1992), and memories of playing school (Mitchell and Weber 1999). This third-person memory writing has also been applied to individual memories, as Mitchell and ReidWalsh (1998) explored in their work with Canadian women in the context of mail-order catalogue memories. Patricia Hampl describes her approach to working with individual memories as a type of travel writing. It is, she notes, the writing of a traveller “who goes on foot, living the journey, taking on mountains, enduring deserts, marvelling at the lush green places. Moving through it all faithfully, not so much as a survivor with a harrowing tale to tell as a pilgrim seeking, wondering” (1996, 21). Methodologically, Hampl’s 1996 work is organized around remembering/writing (first draft) and then re-remembering/writing (second draft). Between the first and second drafts, questions may arise, as in her example of piano lessons and

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the red John Thompson music book. In her first draft, Hampl recalls the piano book in detail. However, in her second draft, she realizes that she never actually had that piano book; it was a book other children had. As she explains: “Now I can look at that music book and see it not only as ‘a detail’ but for what it is, how it acts. See it as the small red door leading straight into the dark room of my childhood longing and disappointment. The red book becomes the palpable evidence of that longing” (208). Cinematic and television texts offer another means of working with the visual to explore memory. In their work with a group of women viewing the television series Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, based on Jeanette Winterson’s novel of the same name, Hallam and Marchment (1995) explored the ways in which a systematic viewing and re-viewing can provide a method for studying remembering. They were interested in the ways in which women’s memories of viewing the television series several years earlier acted as a type of feminist intervention for studying what they term “the ordinary woman.” Various researchers have used cinematic texts in education, as can be seen in the work of Mitchell and Weber (1999) and Weber and Mitchell (1995) with teaching texts (as they thought of them) like To Sir with Love and Dangerous Minds, and in Mathabo Motalingoane-Khau’s use of Dirty Dancing with a group of teachers in Lesotho for the study of youth sexuality. Brian Benoit’s (2016) doctoral research adapted this work to individual memory and self-study through a popular Quebec series, Les Bolduns. As Strong-Wilson and colleagues (2013) have observed, this work can serve different purposes. Huyssen (2003) has written about productive remembering and the ways in which memory-work contributes to social action. Memory can also play a pedagogical role and can be used in teachers’ self-study (Mitchell and Weber 1999; Pithouse-Morgan, Pillay, and Mitchell 2012). This work might also be described as futureoriented memory, with the idea of looking back to inform the present and future. Through various visual traces and legacies, the present book portrays the realities of rural life but also touches on more intangible things such as identity struggles, the deep connections and tensions between the rural landscape and its inhabitants, and how the land shapes the childhood self in ways that are carried through to adulthood. In this

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way the interplay of memory and the visual cuts across the social sciences (through interviews and memory accounts) and the humanities (through textual analysis of films, photography, television, objects, paintings, and children’s literature).

Overview of the Book The contributors to Our Rural Selves write about childhood, memory, and the visual in a variety of ways, across many different settings, and through the lens of different disciplinary practices. As a consequence, the book as a whole emphasizes the heterogeneous meanings of Canadian rural childhoods and of what counts as rural. In Chapter 2, “George Agnew Reid’s Paintings in Relation to English Canadian Collective Memories of Rural Childhood in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Canada,” art historian Loren Lerner looks at late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century childhood in the context of increasing urbanization, through the lens of the paintings of George Agnew Reid. This chapter draws attention to the role that paintings and texts played in remembering rural childhood during a key time in Canada’s history, when a shift was under way from rural to urban living and Canada was developing its national identity. Then in Chapter 3, “Making Green Gables Anne’s Home: Rural Landscapes and Ordinary Homes of Canadian Fiction and Film,” Frederika Eilers as a student of architecture looks at Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Green Gables – both the house and its surroundings – offering her own memory accounts of the book and the films. She draws attention to particular features of Green Gables (the porch, the parlour, the east gables bedroom) but also to the different physical locations of the house in the films and in the book. Chapter 4, “Listening to the Rhythms of Rural Life, 1920–1940: Oral History and Childhood Agency,” by Michael Krohn, is based on oral history testimonials stored in the archives in Hemmingford, Quebec. The Roxham Road Interview Collection, created by Susan Heller, is a snapshot of what we might call a living archive, one that offers a rare window through which to view rural society in southwestern Quebec.

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In Chapter 5, “‘I Never Had a Childhood’: Narratives of Work, Play, and Loss in Postwar Rural Atlantic Canada,” Michael Corbett and Captain Fred Horner construct a narrative based on semi-structured interviews, photo elicitation, and arts-based inquiry with working-class men who grew up in coastal fishing villages in Atlantic Canada after the Second World War. As the authors point out, rural childhoods are not well understood in the academic literature, and furthermore, narratives of rural masculinity have tended to skip over childhood, seeing it primarily as a period of initiation into adult work. In the lives of working-class men, it is a missing stage. In Chapter 6, “Making Friends in the Middle of Nowhere: Handmade Dolls and a Back-to-the-Lander Childhood,” April Mandrona examines the connection between the study of dolls as it relates to the identity and agency of young girls, and doll-making as an aspect of growing up on a back-to-the-land homestead in rural New Brunswick. She identifies how the activity of diy doll-making might be useful for thinking about what it means to be a rural girl in relation to its offering a departure from the hypercommercialized, readymade dolls of the twenty-first century and how this work links to rural child agency and resourcefulness. In Chapter 7, “Exploring Memory and Place through Wet Plate Collodion Photography: How a Newfoundland Childhood Inspired the Work Trace,” artist Karen Stentaford explores her childhood memories in Topsail, Newfoundland. Trace explores her ongoing relationship with this landscape over the twenty-five years since she left it. Her childhood memories act as a framework within which to approach the idea of a sense of place and her relationship with the landscape of Newfoundland. The photographs themselves are shaped by this environment, and she describes the actual processing that she does on-site using a portable darkroom. Marni Stanley in Chapter 8, “How I Became Invisible: A Lesbian Childhood in the Woodsy North,” reflects on her upbringing on a northern Alberta farm. Drawing on autobiographical study, she talks about the psychological stress of being, as she saw herself, invisible. She tells, too, about the ways in which moving to the city offered her a way of becoming visible.

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In Chapter 9, “Documenting a Transgender Rural Childhood: Exploring My Prairie Home,” Barbara Pini, Beth Marshall, and Wendy Keys take a rural geographical look at the 2013 Canadian documentary film My Prairie Home, which details the troubled childhood of transgender singer/songwriter Rae Spoon. Maureen Kendrick, in Chapter 10, “Pumpjacks, Social Class, and the Struggle for Belonging,” draws on self-study and visual methods to examine growing up in a small town in rural Alberta. The pumpjack has long been a symbol of life in this part of Canada. Its ubiquitous presence on the landscape represents livelihoods, politics, families, and social lives. Kendrick reflects on a childhood in a rural oil town and on her complicated relationship with the iconic pumpjack. In Chapter 11, “An ‘Indian’ Doll: A Mohawk Child’s Identity in Crisis,” Sandra Owén:nakon Deer-Standup offers her perspective on growing up on a First Nations reserve in rural Canada. Building on the idea that objects talk, she organizes her chapter around the memory of a plastic Indian doll from the 1970s and relates it to a memory of not being asked back to dance as part of a tourist attraction. In Chapter 12, “Teaching Larry Loyie’s As Long as the Rivers Flow: Real and Imagined Childhood Memories and the Intransigence of the Cattle Truck,” Teresa Strong-Wilson and Amarou Yoder explore children’s responses to Indigenous literature. In their discussions, the grade five and six students wrestled with the legacies of colonialism in Canada even as Loyie’s page-by-page visual narration of life on the land could not help but elicit from them rural-like memories of food gathering, production, and family. Chapter 13, Kate Cairns’s “Mapping Futures, Making Selves: How Rural Young People Experience The Real Game,” explores the interplay between spatiality and temporality in the construction of rural selves. Drawing on ethnographic research with grade seven and eight students in a rural Ontario school, her analysis centres on focus groups and interviews that explore how rural young people envision their futures. We end this book with “Our Rural Futures,” in which we consider a series of interrelated themes that draw attention to new trends in Canadian rural and childhood studies. From interrogations of settler stories and a re-examination of what land means in the context of Indigenous

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land claims, to a re-examination of what rural means in the context of asylum seekers fleeing the United States and crossing the border in rural Manitoba and Quebec, and from reinventing back-to-the-land to a resurgence of the rural in Canadian television series, Canadian rural childhoods seem more present than ever in both the popular imagination and everyday life.

Cross-Cutting Themes: Memory, Setting, Visibilities, and Invisibilities Art and art history, sociology, architecture, education, oral history, film studies, and literary studies as disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas offer critical entry points for studying rural childhood. The various contributors to Our Rural Selves have taken different approaches to memory. Krohn, Corbett and Horner, and Cairns draw on interviews and oral history. For Lerner and for Pini, Marshall, and Keys the approach might be described as reading memory; for Strong-Wilson and Yoder, a combination of reading memory and interviewing. For Stanley, Stentaford, Mandrona, Owén:nakon Deer-Standup, Eilers, and Kendrick the work is either implicitly or explicitly attached to strategic memory-work. The visual tools used to engage with memory also vary and include paintings (Lerner), family photographs (Corbett and Horner, Mandrona, Owén:nakon Deer-Standup, Kendrick), artistic production (Stentaford), documentary film (Pini, Marshall, and Keys), objects (Owén:nakon Deer-Standup, Mandrona), picture books (StrongWilson and Yoder), and games (Cairns). As we have noted, there are many different contingency settings such as the view of an early-twentieth-century artist looking back to the rural; children and work in an East Coast fishery; back-to-the-land; and a boom-and-bust oil town. There are also material markers as features of the constructed landscape, such as the dominant pumpjacks on a prairie landscape (Kendrick); the design of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse verandah (Eilers); the “Indian village” (Owén:nakon DeerStandup); and Subway (Cairns). A setting can, of course, also be about the geographic markers of the rural and the ways in which the landscape is a feature of growing up: the sea (Corbett and Horner; Stentaford), a

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farming landscape (Krohn; Stanley; Kendrick; Cairns; Lerner; Pini, Marshall, and Keys), the bush (Strong-Wilson and Yoder); and the forest (Mandrona). Mobility is another cross-cutting theme. As Balfour, Mitchell, and Moletsane (2011) observe: “One of the most noticeable features of rural life is the time it takes to move from place to place in space” (30). The various chapters deal with memories of travelling to school (Krohn), the emancipatory potential of having access to a car in a rural setting (Corbett and Horner), travelling or travelling back to/revisiting a home setting (Mandrona; Kendrick; Stentaford), the sound/movement of a pumpjack (Kendrick), seeing home in the rear-view mirror of a bus (Pini, Marshall, and Keys), and the image of Larry Loyie’s truck (StrongWilson and Yoder). What is clear is that social and physical features of these settings may contain many invisibilities that need to be made visible, such as issues of class (Kendrick; Krohn; Corbett and Horner); race particularly in relation to indigeneity (Owén:nakon Deer-Standup); sexuality (Stanley; Pini, Marshall, and Keys); femininities and masculinities (Cairns; Corbett and Horner); and, as we explore further in the last chapter, “Our Rural Futures,” the idea of land and settler cultures. The chapters by Owén:nakon Deer-Standup and Strong-Wilson and Yoder explore what this means in the context of Indigenous culture, but it is also an area for further excavation with regard to non-Indigenous memories. This collection of work on the visual and memory in relation to Canadian childhoods is by no means complete, and we acknowledge the need for further work on Indigenous childhoods (see also Battiste 2000). We note also the number of Empire Children who were sent from Britain to Canada from the first half of the nineteenth century up to the 1950s, many of whom provided cheap farm labour. The stigma and abuse attached to these experiences promise yet another reading on rural childhoods, as do images and memory narratives of the children of the many migrant farm labourers from Ontario and British Columbia. The range of stories to be remembered and told will only deepen our understanding of what rural has meant to childhood and of what it could mean in the future.

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n ote s 1 A webinar, “Gender and Rurality,” involving researchers from Canada, Sweden, and South Africa, took place in February 2015. 2 Wolastoqiyik means “People of the Beautiful River.” referen ce s Balfour, Robert, Claudia Mitchell, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2011. “Understanding Rurality in a Troubling Context: Prospects and Challenges.” In SchoolUniversity Partnerships for Educational Change in Rural South Africa: Particular Challenges and Practical Cases, edited by Faisal Islam, 15–31. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press. Battiste, Marie, ed. 2000. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver: ubc Press. Benoit, Brian. 2016. “Understanding the Teacher Self: Learning through Critical AutoEthnography.” PhD diss., McGill University. Clingan, Ida. 1957. The Virden Story [1882–1957]: Virden’s 75th Anniversary Celebration, July 21 to 26, 1957. Virden: The Empire Publishing Co. Crawford, June, Susan Kippax, Jenny Onyx, Una Gault, and Pam Benton. 1992. Emotion and Gender: Constructing Meaning from Memory. London: Sage. Daloz, Kate. 2016. We Are as Gods: Back to Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America. New York: PublicAffairs. Davies, Bronwyn, and Susanne Gannon, eds. 2006. Doing Collective Biography: Investigating the Production of Subjectivity. Maidenhead: Open University Press. de Finney, S. 2015. “Playing Indian and Other Settler Stories: Disrupting Western Narratives of Indigenous Girlhood.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 29(2): 169–81. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022940. Ely, Margot. 1991. Doing Qualitative Research: Circles within Circles. London: Falmer Press. Freeman, Mini Aodla. 2015. Life among the Qallunaat. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Hallam, Julia, and Margaret Marchment. 1995. “Questioning the Ordinary Woman: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Text and Viewer.” In Feminist Cultural Theory: Process and Production, edited by Beverley Skeggs, 169–89. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hampl, Patricia. 1996. “Memory and Imagination.” In The Anatomy of Memory:

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An Anthology, edited by James McConkey, 201–11. New York: Oxford University Press. Haug, Frigga, Sünne Andresen, Anke Bünz-Elfferding, Kornelia Hauser, Ursel Lang, Marion Laudan, Magret Lüdemann, and Ute Meir. 1987. Female Sexualization: A Collective Work of Memory. Translated by Erica Carter. London: Verso. Higonnet, Anne. 1998. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson. Holland, Patricia. 2004. Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery. New York: I.B. Tauris. hooks, bell. 1996. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York: Henry Holt. Huyssen, Andreas. 2003. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Kuhn, Annette. 1994. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. London: Verso. Lederman, Marsha. 2016. “In Times of Crisis, Canada Truly Comes Together – Like One Big Small Town.” Globe and Mail, 6 May. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/in-times-of-crisis-canada-truly-comes-together-like-onebig-small-town/article29914686. Lerner, Loren, ed. 2009. Depicting Canada’s Children. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. MacEachern, Alan. 2016. “Children of the Hummus: Growing Up Back-to-theLand on Prince Edward Island.” In Canadian Countercultures and the Environment, edited by Colin Coates, 259–85. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Mackey, Margaret. 2016. One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Mandrona, April. 2014. “What Can We Make with This? Creating Relevant Art Education Practices in Rural South Africa.” PhD diss., Concordia University. Mandrona, April, and Claudia Mitchell. 2018. Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. 1998. “Mail-Order Memory Work: Towards a Methodology of Uncovering the Experiences of Covering Over.” Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies 20(1): 57–75. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/1071441980200106. – 2002. Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood. London: Routledge.

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Mitchell, Claudia, and Sandra Weber. 1999. Reinventing Ourselves as Teachers: Beyond Nostalgia. London: Falmer Press. Motalingoane-Khau, M. 2007. “Understanding Adolescent Sexuality in the Memories of Four Feiviale Basotho Teachers: An Auto/biographical Study.” PhD diss., University of KwaZulu-Natal. Norquay, Naomi. 1993. “The Other Side of Difference: Memory-Work in the Mainstream.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 6(3): 241–51. https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839930060306. – 2008. “Pedagogical Uses of Memory-Work through Family Immigration Stories.” In Dissecting the Mundane: International Perspectives on Memory-Work, edited by Adrienne Evans Hyle, Margaret Ewing, Diane Montgomery, and Judith Kaufman, 151–72. New York: University Press of America. Pithouse-Morgan, Kathleen, Daisy Pillay, and Claudia Mitchell. 2012. Editorial: “Memory and Pedagogy.” Journal of Education 54: 1–7. Statistics Canada. 2005. Rural and Small Town Analysis Bulletin 6(5): 1–25. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/21-006-x/21-006-x2005005-eng.pdf. Strong-Wilson, Teresa, Claudia Mitchell, Susann Allnutt, and Kathleen PithouseMorgan. 2013. Productive Remembering and Social Agency. Rotterdam: Sense. Sutherland, Neil. 1997. Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Walkerdine, Valerie. 1989. Schoolgirl Fictions. London: Verso. Weaver, Sharon. 2010. “First Encounters: 1970s Back-to-the-land Cape Breton, ns, and Denman, Hornby, and Lasqueti Islands, bc.” Oral History Forum d’histoire orale 30: 1–30. http://www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/viewFile/ 387/458. Weber, Sandra, and Claudia Mitchell. 1995. That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Like a Teacher: Interrogating Images and Identity in Popular Culture. London: Falmer Press. Wendt, Pan, and Amish Morrell. 2015. Doing Our Own Thing: Back-to-The-Land in Eastern Canada in the 1970s. Cape Breton: Cape Breton University Art Gallery and Confederation Centre Art Gallery. Zandy, Janet. 1995. Liberating Memory: Our Work and Our Working-Class Consciousness. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

2 George Agnew Reid’s Paintings in Relation to English Canadian Collective Memories of Rural Childhood in Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Canada Loren Lerner

Introduction Over the course of the nineteenth century, the lives of many Canadians changed radically with the widespread movement of young people to cities. As J. Castell Hopkins, the editor of Canada: An Encyclopaedia of the Country, wrote in 1900: “Up to within a decade or so Canadians have been emphatically an agricultural people, and it would seem that the vast unsettled lands of the country should maintain them in that condition … [However] restlessness and ambition amongst the young … have tended to drive the young men from the plough” (195). This chapter explores the social norms, attitudes, values, and beliefs associated with rural living at the time when these newly arrived city dwellers were nostalgic about country living. The paintings of George Agnew Reid (1860–1947), a well-known artist who grew up on a farm near Wingham, Ontario, will serve as the cornerstone of this analysis in conjunction with writings in Canadian magazines and books from that era. The objective is to demonstrate the role pictures and texts played in remembering rural childhood during this pivotal period of change from rural to urban living and the development of a Canadian national identity. Of central importance are the writings of sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877–1945), philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–

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1962), and historian Simon Schama (b. 1945), all of whom examined their own childhood memories in order to consider how objects and spaces, communication, and landscape contribute to the emergence of individual and collective memories.

Objects and Spaces We begin with The Visit of the Clockmaker (1892) (Figure 2.1) painted in memory of Joseph Shuter, a clock cleaner and distant cousin who had spent a winter at George Reid’s home when he was a young boy (Miller Miner 1946). The painting depicts Reid with three of his eight siblings at his side, gazing in rapt attention at the intricate work being done by the aged craftsman. His artisan skills had become rare in the new era of industrial production. By the late 1870s, American-made mechanical movements were flooding the market and the British longcase clock depicted in this picture was no longer being produced. A grandfatherly figure, Shuter was a holdover from the past and a reminder of the tenuous relationship between older people and the quickly changing community. Bernard McEvoy poignantly recalls the longcase clock in his sentimental essay “Moving House,” published in Canadian Magazine. “In the old times in England cottagers thought themselves tolerably well off if they could start married life with a ‘grandfather’s’ clock … of the articles of luxury the clock came first. Many a day of a housewife’s hard work has been soothed and alleviated by a rub at the polished panels of the tall lock case … They are things to be fought for and lived up to … to surround ordinary pieces of furniture with a reverential regard that does much to keep the world together as a compact sphere” (1893, 671). Reid’s painting, executed in the Victorian mode of realist representation, shares this sense of reverential memory. His close-knit spherical composition emphasizes the individual features of both Shuter and the children, paying close attention to the play of light from the window on their faces and clothing. The intricacies of the clock’s movement are rendered with the utmost precision, as are the delicate ivy plant and the nearby translucent curtain. The painting’s specificity suggests the artist’s memory of a meaningful event and the awe and admiration he felt at the time. The turn-of-the-century viewer enters the painting’s reality

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Figure 2.1 George Agnew Reid, The Clockmaker, oil on canvas, 1893.

and is aware that on some level a space has been created for him to sit down next to the clockmaker. In the process, he begins to decipher the painting and participate in a collective memory. Reid situates The Visit of the Clockmaker in his childhood home, which is decorated with the sparse furnishings typical of the dwellings of nineteenth-century British settlers. This type of space is a unifying force for viewers because it creates, as Halbwachs explains in The Collective Memory, a sense of permanence: the similar objects and decor offer Reid’s transplanted community “a comforting image of its own continuity” (1980, 130). The artist, however, who now lives in the city, has painted this picture from the vantage point of someone remembering his rural boyhood. For the many other Canadians recently arrived in Toronto for whom farm life is a not-so-distant memory, the craftsmanship in the grandfather clock recalls an older generation and things that were significant in a different kind of society. The Visit of the Clockmaker represents their attachment to a farming way of life that possessed wellknown customs, social values, and family histories.

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The household object of the grandfather clock is imbued with symbolic meaning. It expresses the ideal of the craftsman working with his hands and recalls the shared memory of a time and place far from the industrial environment of the city and modern living. This use of objects to summon up childhood memories occurs again and again in Reid’s family paintings of ordinary events and daily occurrences, as in the handmade cradle in Lullaby (1892), the pianoforte in Adagio (1893), and the spinning wheel in The Gossip (1888). In the nineteenth century, before the advent of textile mills, it was common for farmers to keep sheep and for their wives to use spinning wheels to make yarn for blankets and clothing. In Reid’s depiction of two women gossiping as they work, “spinning a yarn” encompasses the double meaning of spun thread and inappropriate talk about other people’s personal matters. It is not surprising that the collective memories evoked by Reid’s charming early paintings of country life unfold within the spatial framework of the house. In Victorian genre and landscape painting, as well as in poetry and fiction, the country cottage symbolizes devotion to country living. It also expresses pastoral virtues as opposed to the demoralizing effects of the city. In conjunction with the nineteenth-century invention of domesticity, the home came to be associated with childhood innocence, and indeed with truthfulness itself. This is the concept Bachelard explores in depth in The Poetics of Space (1969), in which he identifies the house as an inhabited space where the innocent consciousness of a child inspires sensations and memories. According to Bachelard, the childhood reveries remembered by the adult occur in solitude in hiding places within the home or nearby, away from the structure of household routines. For example, the solitary child daydreams in the vicinity of his home, but he is outside, sitting on a hill, absentmindedly looking at the beautiful scenery. These remembered secret places might be moulded from the natural landscape or from purpose-built adult spaces the child has taken over for his own use. In Forbidden Fruit (1889) (Figure 2.2), Reid depicts himself in repose in just such a space – the hayloft of the family barn, where he reads a book and daydreams. The hayloft was often a place where children played, as Ella Atkinson recounts in Canadian Magazine. She describes young children who “tumbled and slid over the sweet-smelling

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piles ... and, shaking with laughter, sat down on the barn floor” (1896a, 554). For Reid, however, from a struggling working-class farming family, the hayloft offered delicious solitude and a chance for private reverie. The forbidden fruit in the painting, Reid told Muriel Miller Miner, his biographer, is the book Arabian Nights, a collection of exotic folktales, which he read in secret to avoid his father’s disapproval. In fact, Adam Reid was instrumental in his son’s reading, going so far as to organize a travelling library that was housed in schools and farmhouses for a few months at a time. It is more than likely that Reid chose the title Forbidden Fruit to add an air of intrigue to the painting, since Arabian Nights was actually considered to be acceptable reading for a boy. In an article in Canadian Magazine about “books for boys,” the author “recommends as being best suitable for a boy’s reading, books of travel which have adventure in them” such as “Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Arabian Nights, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and a few others of the standard imaginative works” (Merton and Editor 1896, 284). Perhaps the term forbidden fruit also refers to the many illustrations Reid encountered in the books he read. These illustrations were essential to his formation, since it was through them that he learned about art. One day, when he was eleven, he declared that he wanted to become an artist. His father deplored the idea. While Adam was a staunch proponent of developing the mind through reading, he considered art a trivial activity with no practical use. The only life for a child, he believed, was to submit to divine will and work the farm as his ancestors had before him. Reid’s father had come to Ontario from Scotland at the age of twenty-four. After hiring himself out as a farmhand, he staked a claim near Wingham, cleared the land, and built a modest house he called The Homestead. Reid’s purpose in life, according to his father, and this also went for his brothers, was to build his own homestead, be a farmer, and help construct a stronger Canada. Reid found the strength to resist his father, and as we know, he did not become a farmer. Nonetheless, his early sketches and studies described every facet of farm work and country life, as indicated by the names he chose for them, such as The Apple-Paring Bee, Maple Sugar Making, Threshing with a Flail, Mowing, Carrying Sod, Sowing, Milking, Logging, Making Straw Hats, Going to Church, Spinning, Shingle-Making,

Figure 2.2 George Agnew Reid, Forbidden Fruit, 1889, oil on canvas.

and Sugar-Making. As a boy Reid had laboured on the newly cleared farms of his father and his maternal uncle, James Agnew, and was familiar with all aspects of rural living. Unfortunately, these explicit memory-works that captured life on the farm were of little interest to Ontario’s city dwellers, many of whom had grown up on a farm and were happy to leave it behind. But Reid persisted, and between 1897 and 1899 he painted, at no charge, two murals for the entrance hall of the Toronto Municipal Buildings (now the Old City Hall), The Arrival of the Pioneers and Staking a Pioneer Farm. He did this in the hope of attracting commissions dedicated to farming subjects. Given the public’s poor opinion of these subjects, commissions failed to materialize. The reality was that life on the farm was very difficult and had become untenable for many Canadians. Saturday Night editor Edmund E. Sheppard, who was raised on a farm, details in no uncertain terms his objections to that life in an issue of the magazine: “the work is hard … the hours hard, the beds hard, the board hard, the cows are hard to milk and the calves hard to feed, the wood hard to chip, the rails hard to split, and in fact everything is hard.” He asks, “[W]hat are the beauties of nature to the man who cannot rest long enough to put a poultice over

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the stone bruises in his heels[?],” and he writes: “[T]he boy who has a good common school education should leave for town as soon as he feels within him the possibility of living without working twenty-three hours a day” (1889, 1–2). Furthermore, by the early 1900s, the harvesting formerly done by hand was being accomplished by mechanical equipment that vastly increased the size of farms and greatly reduced the number of labourers. Over the course of a few generations so many family farms were purchased for industrial agriculture that the small farm became an oddity. Just as Reid’s viewers did not care to recall farm work, Canadian readers showed little interest in narratives about farm boys. As a result, Canadian Magazine published few stories that centred on the young farmer. The few that made it past the editorial chopping block did so because their focus was on human relationships. William Wilfred Campbell introduces his story of a boy whose emotions for a girl are ignited by poetry with a description of the monotony of ploughing a field: “All that short October afternoon he had slowly and silently wended back and forth at the tail of the rude plow, behind those thin, melancholy oxen, who mournfully chewed their cuds and whisked the flies with their tails, turning over the obstinate soil on that stony hill-side field.” When it was time for a rest, “he sat down on one of the large boulders” and found there “a soiled book of poetry that lay on the stone” and “he opened it and began to read. His face lit up as he turned over the leaves” while “the oxen rattled the chain on the rocky ground” (1894, 325–7). We are reminded of an adolescent George Reid stealing away to the barn in the late afternoon, escaping the drudgery of farm work to lie on a mound of hay and read to his heart’s content. Painting his recollection of those youthful moments of daydreaming and discovery was appreciated by fellow Canadians. During the 1890s, this type of genre painting was popular in Canada. In an essay published in 1894 in Canadian Magazine, the artist and art critic W.A. Sherwood tells us why, beginning with the title, “A National Spirit in Art.” “Genre pictures,” he writes, “awaken a love for the humbler walks of life, and a consequent respect for those therein depicted. We are touched by their sorrows and we are cheered by their joys, as we enter with unfeigned affection into the spirit of rural life” (1894, 499).

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This was the context in which Reid was painting. Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen describes Reid’s The Story in The Monthly Illustrator, writing that there was “nothing more enviable than the utterly self-oblivious enchantment of the listeners as they swallow greedily every preposterous detail of the gory plot” (1895, 6). He is referring to boys who have escaped “the actual routine of life, under the senseless compulsion of elders” and are enjoying a “secret rendezvous in the hay-loft” where they “harrow each other with gruesome tales of battle, murder, and sudden death” (6). Drawing Lots (1888) similarly depicts boys, but here they are relaxing on top of a brick wall, trying to determine who among them will attempt a daredevil act. The large trees at each end of the picture, almost like a decorative border, place the three youths firmly in a country landscape and confirm the spirit of their adventuresome play. In The Berry-Pickers (1890) (Figure 2.3), reproduced in colour in 1898 as the frontispiece of the Christmas issue of Canadian Magazine, the subject is three sisters who have paused on their way home from picking raspberries, their pails full to the brim with the bright red fruit. They are surrounded by a lush green meadow and, just ahead, a stand of delicate yellow flowers. These memory pictures of contented children in the countryside were what Canadians wanted to see. Other painters who captured this spirit in their work included William Brymner (1885–1925), who appealed to the public with sweet paintings of carefree young girls such as A Wreath of Flowers (1884) and Four Girls in a Meadow, Baie-Saint-Paul (1885). Frederick Sproston Challener (1869–1959) also chose children as his subjects in paintings like Boy Fishing (1890) and A Sewing Lesson (1896). Each artist conveyed a child-centric view of human experience by recounting the leisure events of country living. Imagining themselves in their youthful rural environment allowed Canadians to stay young in spirit. “The Real Fountain of Youth,” written by the editor of Canadian Magazine, sums up this collective sentiment: For in the quiet, nerveless, unaffected pace that is usually set in village and farm life, we find the most natural conditions and therefore the most capacity for enjoying natural blessings … All of this bears in a very direct way on the possibility of prolonging youthfulness, not so much that the quiet of country life tends to increase

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longevity as that the artificialities and unnatural conditions of city life tend to deprive us of the capacity for imbibing from the young that spirit of youthfulness that is a potent charm to stay the encroachments of age. How good a thing it is to see, at the setting in the evening, a group of villagers enjoying to the utmost the simple, homely pleasures that seem to be in very truth a part of their birthright. (Editor 1908, 205) The perspectives of Halbwachs and Bachelard, supported by recent studies that examine adult memories of childhood, confirm that for many individuals their strongest recollections revolve round places and objects associated with the home. In Reid’s paintings of farm life, including The Visit of the Clockmaker, Gossip, Lullaby, Adagio, Forbidden Fruit, The Story, Drawing Lots, and The Berry-Pickers, the artist shares his consciousness of his rural upbringing, the house in which he grew up, the objects and places of his youth, and his social relationships with family and friends. Halbwachs helps us understand that Reid’s pictures give broader meaning to the objects he remembers because of the associations they evoke that contribute both to the artist’s idea of himself and to his imagery of shared experiences. In addition, Halbwachs explains why Reid’s contemporaries were so eager to embrace these paintings. Since his fellow Canadians had grown up in similar rural environments, they remained united as a group. The city might offer little to recall farm life, but the memories of their childhood homes cemented their connection with one another. Bachelard, however, guides our inquiry into the private spaces of Reid’s childhood and reveals how reverie influenced the images he carried into adulthood. His insistence that these images are not factual renditions of the past but rather lyrically imaginative constructions explains the emotive power of Reid’s expressive genre paintings.

Communication Lacking in this analysis, thus far, is a critical discussion of the portrayal of difficult childhood memories, such as, for example, the event depicted in Reid’s Mortgaging the Homestead (1890) (Figure 2.4). Halbwachs’s

Figure 2.3 George Agnew Reid, The Berry Pickers, oil on canvas, 1890.

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(1980) research, which shows how the past is reconstructed through conversations that give meaning to memories, can help us analyze the recollections embedded in this work in which Reid contemplates an incident in his youth that represents the troubles faced by farmers and their families. Reid was barely thirteen in 1873 when the family farm was almost lost. Fortunately, his brother John was able to work on a neighbouring farm to help pay the mortgage. In Mortgaging the Homestead, the disillusioned farmer’s wife looks directly at the viewer while her husband stands behind her on the other side of the table, signing the document of a substantial mortgage that will more than likely result in the loss of their farm. The dejection of the boy who sits across from the banker, and of his grandparents seated on the bench, is palpable. The daughter of the family sits on the floor, looking to her mother for reassurance. But there will be no reassurance, only shame and sadness. During those years in Canada’s history, mortgaged farms and foreclosures were commonplace. Thousands of families experienced the humiliation of working a farm that had been taken over by the bank or the disgrace of being forced to leave it when the mortgage payments could no longer be made. Viewers of Mortgaging the Homestead would certainly have identified with the dire situation and directed their feelings of anger towards the indifferent banker, who appears not to notice the broken family around him. They would have responded emotionally to everything in the scene, knowing too well the difficulties caused by higher tariffs on agricultural goods destined for the United States even as American farmers were benefiting from selling their produce in Canada. Reid makes the pivotal figure in the painting his mother. In keeping with Halbwachs’s idea that communication forms the basis of human relationships and that remembering is dependent on it, she connects with the viewers, imploring us to respond to what is taking place. Her accusatory stare is an attempt to initiate a conversation that asks us to do more than look on silently. Reid uses her expression to tell us that the picture is not an objective rendition of an event, but part of a process wherein memories are formed through experiences made meaningful by talk. Through his mother, Reid beseeches his audience to embrace the values negated by the mortgage, to be moved by what happens when a

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Figure 2.4 George Agnew Reid, Mortgaging the Homestead, 1890.

nation stops caring for and protecting the family. The sympathetic response of viewers to Mortgaging the Homestead proves their participation in a society that shares memories and values, and speaks to a Canadian identity founded on the sanctity of rural family life. Whereas chronological facts provide an impersonal account of this unfortunate period in Canadian rural history, stories written mostly in the 1890s, at the same time Reid was painting Mortgaging the Homestead, transform this chronology into something far more meaningful. They have a consciousness derived from voices that articulate the attitudes, values, sensibilities, identities, and self-worth of people living during that era. In “For Her Dear Sake,” published in Canadian Magazine, a farm boy has “only a few weeks in winter at school” because he has to “hustle early and late to keep the interest paid on the mortgage” (Moore 1899, 359). In “Nondescript,” also from Canadian Magazine, Bobby McCrae, “a little old man at ten,” hires himself out as a farmhand to support his widowed mother, “a work-worn woman, with a Scotch burr on her tongue, and a

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world of sadness in her blue eyes” (Atkinson 1896b, 84). Many years later, when he is a successful bookkeeper at a big firm in the city, he learns that the couple who employed him as a boy can no longer make the payments on their mortgage: “The cattle didn’t sell, the apples were scaly, the cheese factory had shut down and there had to be a thousand dollars raised” (86). In gratitude, he pays their debt and saves the farm. In the novel The Brock Family, the mortgage on the farm was “not a cloud that would break … but a dark cloud of debt which kept the father careworn and ill at ease meeting the interest.” Nevertheless, the family’s values are shown to be intact as “the family sat down in the plain, but cosy dining-room” and “reverently bowed their heads while their father fervently asked God to bestow his blessing upon them” (A.L.O.M. 1890, 17–18). In “A Daughter of Witches: A Romance in Twelve Chapters” in Canadian Magazine Mary Shinar cries during a church service: “A shrill, trembling treble voice rose … and then died away in sobs expressive of mortal need.” The source of her anguish is her failed attempt to save the farm despite having “gone herself to plead with the lawyer in Brixton through whom the mortgage had been placed. Mary sat on the edge of a chair in an agony of nervousness whilst the perky clerk went in to state her business, and the lawyer came out of his comfortable office.” (Wood 1899, 230–1). These are not stories of isolated events. On the contrary, together in their telling and retelling, they constitute a far-reaching conversation that tries to make sense of the phenomenon of farm mortgages and foreclosures that led to the collapse of rural society. Their key elements include sons who save the family farm, the stoic dignity of families confronting failure, the steadfast belief in religious salvation, and the perception that people who make their living in other ways, such as bankers, are indifferent to country folk. They encapsulate, as does Mortgaging the Homestead, a shared communication about tradition, history, and culture. Another painting by Reid takes the conversation to the story’s worst possible outcome. In The Foreclosure of the Mortgage (1934, replica of the original canvas dated 1893, destroyed in a fire in 1919), the father lies near death while the heartless bailiff reads from the notice of repossession. The cradle in the foreground, the grandfather clock barely visible against

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the wall, and the family’s other precious possessions are inanimate witnesses to this cruel scene. But it is the hopelessness of the farmer’s several children that pulled on the heartstrings of early viewers. As reported in the Montreal Weekly Witness, which describes the painting as a “wondrous story of human endeavour, defeat, submission and love,” a viewer was heard to murmur, “What a pity to have these dear little children homeless,” while someone else in the crowd was moved to say, “It almost seems to me that I could put my hand on that child’s hand by the table” (Anon. 1893, 10). The children’s innocence and imminent ruination aroused sympathy and moral outrage in the audience, and also fed the cultural conversation about rural values and traditions, the love of family, and striving for a better future. Positive outcomes in these narratives – for example, the homestead being saved despite adversity – are also depicted in Reid’s paintings from this period. In Family Prayer (1890), the home remains intact, with the sun shining brightly through a large window. A hard-working farmer and his devoted family kneel in prayer before breakfast, grateful in front of God to be together. Although the farmer’s shirt is torn, he is able to put food on the table and ensure the future of his family, at least for the moment. Reid’s journey from the farm to the city to become a successful painter had not been easy. In the spring of 1875, having finished school and informed his parents of his intention to study art in Toronto, he found himself instead apprenticed for three years to an architect in Wingham, an arrangement made by his father. While Reid learned architecture, his brother Tom did the heavy work on the farm while his other brother, John, ran the adjoining farm to bring in much-needed cash for the mortgage payments. During these years tragedy struck the family twice; Tom crushed his hand in a straw cutter, and his mother fell gravely ill. Nonetheless, in 1878, Reid left for Toronto to study with Charlotte Schreiber (1834–1922) and Robert Harris (1849–1919) at the Central Ontario School of Art and Design (now ocad University). In 1890, the year he painted Mortgaging the Homestead, he began teaching at the school, and eleven years later became its principal, a position he held until 1929. He was a founding member of the Toronto Guild of Civic Art in 1897 and

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the Canadian Society of Applied Art in 1901. Between 1897 and 1902, he was president of the Ontario Society of Artists, and he was president of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts from 1906 to 1907. Despite Reid’s accomplishments as an artist, teacher, and organizer in the arts community, the people who had once admired his paintings were growing tired of his depictions of the everyday life of rural Canadians. The likely reason is that Reid had fallen out of touch. As time marched on, the people who resided in the country were different from how he and his fellow farmers-turned-city dwellers remembered themselves. Homesteaders who came from Britain around the turn of the century found it more difficult to acclimatize to rural Canada than earlier generations had, and soon left for the city. At the same time, other immigrants with very different traditions and customs such as Ukrainians, Hungarians, Hutterites, Mennonites, Doukhobors, and Icelanders made a go of it. Their arrival in large numbers transformed the rural landscape.

Landscapes Reid persevered, attempting to make his memories of the farm child fit into the new allegorical style he had discovered in Paris in 1892 in the mural decorations of Puvis de Chavannes (1824–1898). In 1904, he tried unsuccessfully to convince Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier to adopt a scheme of mural paintings for the entrance hall of the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. Not surprisingly, the name of the project was Canada Receiving the Homage of Her Children, wherein a group of families gathered in a rural setting would represent the Canadian people (Lerner 2008, 2009). When the proposal failed to win approval, Reid decided to paint one of the murals anyway. In Ave Canada (1907), the rural landscape, complete with a meadow, forest, hills, and a lake, represents a prosperous nation that nurtures its “family” of provinces, which take the form of princesses and infants. In the mural’s foreground, children proffer the country’s bounty of fruits and vegetables. The central symbolic image is a queen mother. On first viewing, Ave Canada appears to bear no resemblance to The Call to Dinner (1886–87) (Figure 2.5), painted twenty years earlier, one

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Figure 2.5 George Agnew Reid, The Call to Dinner, 1886–87, oil on canvas.

of the few genre paintings by Reid devoted almost exclusively to landscape, and the one that most accurately reproduces his family farm. We see Reid’s sister in the foreground calling the farm workers to dinner. Crucial to the picture is the meticulous attention the artist gives to the wide expanses of fields and meadows. The setting reaches into the distant horizon and is appreciated by the viewer as the pastoral ideal of an ordered and harmonious society. The modulated greens and browns of the different tracts of farmland are gently punctuated by shrubbery and a meandering path. The land is peaceful, devoid of people, yet connected to farm life through the cows and sheep grazing on the near side of the river, and through the bulbous tent-like structure in the middle distance. What is similar about Ave Canada is the tranquil and inviting landscape. As in The Call to Dinner, Reid presents an idyllic setting where virtuous people live close to nature. In Landscape and Memory, cultural historian Simon Schama provides an explanation that links these seemingly disparate vistas: “Landscapes are culture before they are nature;

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constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock … once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery” (1995, 61). With this in mind, we can understand how Reid’s imagination turned the farm landscape he realistically recalls in The Call to Dinner into the abstracted landscape of Ave Canada. His objective with the latter, which was designed to be viewed by many Canadians, was to promote an idea (or belief or myth) about rural Canada that corresponded with his own interpretations and youthful memories. Significantly, the most persistent of the visual elements Reid retained from his rural upbringing was the landscape. Of the 459 paintings he bequeathed to the government of Ontario’s Department of Education in 1946, most, with titles like Black Spruces, Trout Brook, The Dark Canyon, and Cloud Shadows (ca. 1915) (Figure 2.6), were works depicting nature. Reid returns to his childhood in these landscape paintings, remembering the sensations associated with natural settings, whether golden haystacks and nearby autumn trees or distant fields and hills. In Cloud Shadows, his interest is in the play of light and shadow, caused by the cloud formations, on the terrain of rolling hills. This is not to say that all of Reid’s landscape canvases replicate the topography of his youth. Returning to Halbwachs’s theory of collective memory, we learn that memory seeks similarities between the past and the present. For Reid and others of his generation, childhood images of country life were retrospectively adapted to fit new realities. In 1892, Reid and his wife Mary Hiester Reid, also an artist, built a house he designed using the skills he had learned as an architect’s apprentice. They built it at an artists’ colony in Onteora, in the Catskills region of New York State (Figure 2.7). For twenty-five years they spent every summer at this quiet retreat, which was soon home to other cottages Reid designed for fellow summer residents. These were large-scale picturesque homes with wood and stonework details reminiscent of the farm dwelling of his youth. Like the mid-nineteenth-century American landscape artists from the Hudson River School before him, he devoted his time to painting the area’s mountains, forests, rivers, and waterfalls.

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Figure 2.6 George Agnew Reid, Cloud Shadows, ca. 1915, oil on canvas.

Reid also built Uplands Cottage in Wychwood Park, on what was then the northern edge of Toronto, in 1907. In this private community established in the 1870s by the landscape painter Marmaduke Matthews (1837– 1913), he found further inspiration for his landscape works in the park’s forest, hills, and stream. In a present indivisible from the past, he created new pastoral works that include traces of the rural landscape of his childhood. In so doing, he continued to share an identity with like-minded Canadians for whom nature epitomized the collective memories of childhood and country life. This was the Arcadia the homesteaders wished to remember and helped to carry forward from one generation to the next. But as Simon Schama emphasizes, it was “a pretty lie” (1995, 12) because pastoral Arcadia encompasses the false notion that no one is doing any work.

Figure 2.7 George Agnew Reid, photograph: artist in his Onteora studio (1893).

Conclusion The associations of George Agnew Reid’s paintings with his rural youth take on new meanings through the approaches to memory offered by Maurice Halbwachs, Gaston Bachelard, and Simon Schama. Of relevance to memory studies, Reid’s paintings demonstrate the broad spectrum of visual imagery connected to childhood recollections. This includes the way a young person’s feelings and ideas meld into a single memory, how a child’s reveries nourish the older self, and the role communal reminiscences play in structuring the past. Whether Reid’s interpretations are seen today as a pretty lie, a partial truth, or a denial of basic facts about Canada’s history, it is evident that his work had an important role in a tumultuous period during which a lasting idea of nationhood was

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formed. His early paintings in which home and its objects and events are central and evocative, and later ones that contain vestiges of his fond memories of country landscapes, gave rise to a consciousness that remembered and idealized country life and shared rural childhoods. Implicit in this larger awareness were common values and aspirations that over time were woven into the national spirit and a collective Canadian identity that would inform Canadians for many generations.

referen ce s A.L.O.M. 1890. The Brock Family. Toronto: W. Briggs. Anon. 1893. “Canadian Art in the Art Palace of the White City (Special Correspondence of ‘Witness’).” Montreal Weekly Witness, August 30. Atkinson, Ella S. [Madge Merton]. 1896a. “Nurse Edith’s Easter.” Canadian Magazine 6(6): 552–6. – [Madge Merton]. 1896b. “Nondescript.” Canadian Magazine 7(1): 83–6. Bachelard, Gaston. 1969. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth. 1895. “Boyhood and Girlhood.” Monthly Illustrator 4(12): 3–8. Campbell, William Wilfred. 1894. “Love’s Tragedy at Scratch’s Point.” Canadian Magazine 3(4): 325–31. Editor. 1908. “The Real Fountain of Youth.” Canadian Magazine 31(3): 285–7. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory. New York: Harper and Row. Hopkins, J. Castell. 1900. “The Canadian People and Political Parties.” In Canada: An Encylopaedia of the Country: The Canadian Dominion Considered in Its Historic Relations, Its Natural Resources, Its Progress, and Its National Development, edited by J. Castell Hopkins, 187–96. Toronto: Linscott. https://doi.org/10.5962/ bhl.title.38803. Lerner, Loren. 2008. “Canada Receiving the Homage of Her Children: George Reid’s Ave Canada and Gustav Hahn’s Hail Dominion: A Proposal of Murals for the Entrance Hall of Canada’s Parliament Buildings.” Journal of Canadian Art History / Annales d’histoire de l’art canadien 29: 50–89. – 2009. “George Reid’s Paintings as Narratives of a Child Nation.” In Depicting Canada’s Children, edited by Loren Lerner, 325–46. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

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McEvoy, Bernard. 1893. “Moving House.” Canadian Magazine 8(1): 669–72. Merton, Madge, and Editor. 1896. “Our Children and Their Reading: Part 1: A Boy’s Reading.” Canadian Magazine 6(3): 282–4. Miller Miner, Muriel. 1946. G.A. Reid: Canadian Artist. Toronto: Ryerson Press. Moore, Eva Rice. 1899. “For Her Dear Sake.” Canadian Magazine 12(4): 359–61. Schama, Simon. 1995. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books. Sheppard, Edmund E. 1889. “Around Town.” Saturday Night 2(11): 1–2. Sherwood, W.A. 1894. “A National Spirit in Art.” Canadian Magazine 3(6): 498–518. Wood, Joanna E. 1899. “A Daughter of Witches: A Romance in Twelve Chapters.” Canadian Magazine 12(3): 223–33.

3 Making Green Gables Anne’s Home: Rural Landscapes and Ordinary Homes of Canadian Fiction and Film Frederika A. Eilers

Introduction Entranced with a girl who should have been a boy, but who nonetheless gained acceptance in a community, I repeatedly watched Anne of Green Gables (1985) when I was around three. Yet it was only in the sixth grade that I read the book, and as part of my book report, I dressed up as Anne Shirley, the protagonist in Anne of Green Gables (1908) by Lucy Maud Montgomery. I remember braiding my hair, drawing freckles on my face with eyeliner, wearing a frock, and being anxious that perhaps I would be confusing the novel with the film. Indeed, we should be careful and not conflate the novel with its adaptations, the historic site, or our memories as we untangle architecture, material culture, the concept of home, and rural spaces. In this chapter, I offer an architectural lens on the pastoral setting of Green Gables by discussing how novel, film, and historic site depict rural homes and rural landscapes through visual and textual details, especially in the spaces of porches, parlours, and bedrooms. With a title that emphasizes an architectural feature, gables, the book and film invite an architectural reading. This chapter is meant to contribute to the growing research aimed at deconstructing architectural history in fiction. As Angeliki Sioli and Yoonchun Jung ask: “How can we do architectural research that defies strict historical boundaries and

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allows us to understand life lived in the architecture of the past?” (2018, 2). For her part, Diana Fuss (2004) approaches the topic as a literary historian in her book, and analyzes the interiors of four authors with unusual sensory profiles. Similarly, I believe that fictional and cinematic narratives can be an entry point to understanding lived experience of natural and built spaces of our architectural histories. The reason I want to think about this topic has to do with my work as a student of architecture. While assisting Annmarie Adams and Sally Chivers (2015) in their research on cinematic home spaces in Sarah Polley’s Away from Her (2006), based on Alice Munro’s short story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (1999), I became intrigued by the way in which the protagonist Fiona’s new long-term care home, Meadowlake, filmed at the Freeport Health Centre in Kitchener, Ontario, depicts fears of aging. By contrasting an inherited rustic cottage and typical tract housing (the previous homes of residents) with Meadowlake, Away from Her critiques the homogeneous projections of home in long-term care. In this depersonalized setting, Fiona receives an institutional representation of personality through a folksy nameplate. She is literally losing her memories and identity as she struggles with dementia. Freeport Health Centre is a chronic-care facility, but portrays Meadowlake, a long-term care facility. Similarly, the Green Gables house used in the 1985 Anne of Green Gables film is actually Butternut Farm, a house in Scarborough, Ontario (a suburb of Toronto).1 Each narrative emphasizes a specific architectural typology, yet the films cast a slightly different one. In this chapter I compare houses that Montgomery was familiar with in Cavendish to descriptions in the novel and to examples of ordinary architecture, focusing on how they relate to the landscape. I examine three spaces: the porch, the parlour, and Anne’s bedroom. The porch, a central work and social space for women, is highlighted in the novel and further emphasized in the 1985 film. The parlour at Green Gables, as in other Victorian homes, was a place of culture. I then go on to consider how the east gable room, Anne’s bedroom, is transformed from a stark, bare room as arranged by Marilla into one bursting with nature as Anne personalizes the space. Finally, I consider how Anne engages elements of the rural landscape itself to enhance her identity.

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About Anne Whether or not Anne Shirley will stay at Green Gables constitutes the main conflict in the novel. Elizabeth Waterson (2007) reminds us that Anne’s adoptive family decides to keep her; however the novel’s conclusion reverses these roles. Anne’s decision about her future is complicated by the death of Matthew Cuthbert and the failing eyesight of his sister Marilla Cuthbert. Anne decides to forgo a scholarship, stay at Green Gables, and teach at the school in Avonlea. After her former classmate and antagonist Gilbert Blythe learns of her intentions, he turns down the Avonlea teaching post so that Anne might occupy it and takes one farther away at White Sands. Green Gables, the house, drives the plot, both at the beginning and at the end. Will Anne stay or will she leave? Anne was, and continues to be, immensely popular. Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery’s debut novel, sold more than 19,000 copies in its first five months, and today, more than 50 million copies in thirty-six languages have been sold (Gammel 2008; Gothie 2016). Montgomery endears Anne to readers by giving her a modern spirit in a pastoral environment. She has many qualities that appeal to contemporary readers: “intelligence, verbal diarrhea, ambition, and education” (Gammel 2008, 145). Since 1919, film adaptations have captured Anne in many different ways. Possibly the best-known adaptation, the 1985 production, premiered as a two-part miniseries presented by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), written, produced, and directed by Kevin Sullivan. The house that was Montgomery’s inspiration for the book attracts between 150,000 and 200,000 visitors each year – an excellent example of literary tourism (Gammel 2008; Gothie 2016). By the 1920s, Montgomery was lamenting how foreigners had overrun Cavendish, and community members noted the many tourists (Squire 1996). The house was reopened to the public in 1985, and Sullivan’s film helped renew interest in it (Gothie 2016; Sheckels 2003). It was designated a National Historic Site in 1988 and in 2004 was named the L.M. Montgomery National Historic Site (Parks Canada 2016a). Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and its adaptations continue to be popular, and its depictions of place have contributed to shaping perceptions of Canada for readers, viewers, and

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visitors, who simultaneously compare the narrative with their own childhood memories. Irene Gammel (2008) has described Montgomery as the Jane Austen of Canada. Wendy Roy (2014) compares Montgomery’s Canadian patriotism with adaptations that dampen down the politics of Marilla and other characters. Roy describes how film locations have ranged from New England to California, with Canadian maple boughs giving way to the US flag. Wherever the fictional village of Avonlea might be, Anne’s story is about building a sense of belonging in a new place. Gammel notes that Anne is the “universal immigrant” (2008, 148), connecting “girls and girlhoods across space and through time” (145). The novel and its adaptations devote differing amounts of time to the initial conflict. Waterson (2007) estimates that the first fifth of the book is devoted to Marilla and Matthew’s decision to keep Anne. Susan Drain (2009) notes that the structure of the 1985 film is different from that of the book: the first third of the film focuses on the decision as to whether or not Anne will stay (see also Brock-Servais and Prickett 2010). The ninety-minute reiteration of Anne of Green Gables (2016) on the Public Broadcasting Service (pbs) turns this decision into one that Marilla ponders throughout the movie and that is not made until near the end, at Christmas time, when Marilla goes to the train station to stop Anne from departing (Harrison 2016). The films prolong the initial conflict.

Extending Memories Montgomery based Avonlea on her memories of growing up near Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. She noted that a farmhouse that belonged to her Macneill cousins inspired Green Gables in the book (Montgomery 1974; Squire 1996). In 1911, Montgomery wrote that what inspired her was “not so much the house itself as the situation and scenery” (1985, 38). Montgomery’s maternal grandparents raised her about a kilometre away from her Macneill cousins in a house that no longer stands (Brouse 2014). She often visited her relatives in Park Corner, Prince Edward Island, about twelve miles west of Cavendish, where her paternal grandparents Donald and Ann Montgomery and her Campbell cousins, related to her mother’s sister, lived (Parks Canada

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Figure 3.1 “Park Corner.” In Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island, edited by C.R. Allen, 1880.

2016a). Montgomery was familiar with many farmhouses, and Green Gables represents the quintessential rural house in a tightly knit village of similar houses. The house of Donald and Ann, Park Corner (see Figure 3.1), is depicted in the Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island (1880). This home inspired Ingleside, the subject of Montgomery’s sixth book, Anne of Ingleside (McPhee 2016). These engravings show houses surrounded by orderly fields. English, German, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Norwegian immigrants neatly clustered farm buildings (Glassie 1995; Henning 1995). Henry Glassie describes these farms as “trimly arranged in a line on the valley slopes … attributable less to the retention of Old World ideas than to flexible, synthetic spirit of the frontier” (1995, 76). Granted, the process of engraving favours straight lines. In the novel, neighbour Rachel Lynde describes Marilla’s house garden as “neat and precise” (Montgomery 2007, 2). Both representations stress how the occupants controlled nature. The Macneill residence is now preserved as the L.M. Montgomery National Historic Site and thus mixes historical fiction with contemporary reality. The Campbells’ house, Silver Bush, is also a house museum. Ordinary farmhouses commonly used clapboard, sometimes shingles after 1800, and were often whitewashed by the 1840s (Smith 1990). The Macneill house is a white clapboard L-shaped structure with dark-green trim and roofs. H.M. Scott Smith describes vernacular Maritime houses

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from the 1810s to the 1880s as a combination of Georgian and Cape; they were one and a half storeys, with the upstairs dormer containing the bathroom, as is the case with the Macneill house. These austere conditions might be off-putting; however, Glassie provides a reason for this design: to “join their neighbors in uncluttered clarity, unifying the faces of their homes in pure white detail” (1995, 79). I imagine that Green Gables resembled many other houses in the tightly knit community of Avonlea. When the house became a tourist destination, the landscape was transformed to make the site stand out to potential visitors. Modifications were made in the 1930s, such as painting the gable green and adding green shutters (Brouse 2014; Gothie 2016; Squire 1996). Tourist services sprung up around the community, including restaurants, a golf course, and several hotels as well as a 1920s bungalow development called Green Gables Court. Parks Canada acquired the Macneill house in 1937. In the early 1980s the site was restored in an attempt to make it an “authentic heritage site” (Squire 1996, 124). The Parks Canada website explains that “the house has been restored to the period of the late 1800s to reflect not only the setting in the novel, but to reflect a typical farm house” (2016b, n.p.). However, the authenticity of the surrounding landscape is questionable. Today, the historic site follows the typical conventions of a tourist attraction, with a gracious exit from Route 6, generous bus and car parking, reception centre, gift shop, café, barn with auditorium, woodshed as washrooms, and two trails from the book – the Haunted Wood and Lover’s Lane. Green Gables is now hidden from the road by the reception centre and the barn in order to heighten visitors’ anticipation (Gothie 2016). Changes to the site’s circulation have disconnected visitors from the paths the characters in the novel take between neighbouring houses – paths shown often in Sullivan’s film. The book lacks any concrete description of the house except that it has two storeys and is, presumably, green. None of the handful of illustrations by W.A. and M.A.J. Claus in the first edition of Anne of Green Gables establish the exterior of the Green Gables house. Unlike other houses in the neighbourhood, which Annie identifies as “sociably situated” (Montgomery 2007, 9), Green Gables expresses the antisocial nature of its residents. Rosemary Ross Johnston (2007) argues that this description well suits Marilla and Matthew’s relationship with the community before

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Anne’s arrival. Montgomery introduces us to Green Gables by describing it as “far back from the road, dimly white with blossoming trees in the twilight of the surrounding woods. Over it, in the stainless southwest sky, a great crystal-white star was shining like a lamp of guidance and promise” (2007, 14). From Anne’s point of view, the house is not hidden, but marked by a constellation when she arrives with Matthew. Another house, Orchard Slope, belonging to the Barry Family, was “a little grey house peering around a white apple orchard” (2007, 14). The trees nearly hide the Barry house from the road; however, the house is actively peering out. Anne first sees Green Gables and Orchard Park in Avonlea just as the surrounding landscape nearly eclipses them. Readers first hear about Green Gables in the third paragraph of the first Anne novel; Sullivan’s movie viewers first see it much later. In the opening ten minutes of the three-and-a-quarter-hour cbc miniseries, Sullivan represents Anne’s life thus far, through a series of places: the Hammonds’ unpainted house; the industrial sawmill; and the concrete asylum. Her life so far has been full of work and devoid of imagination; her arrival at Green Gables – first at the Bright River train station and then at her new home – contrasts with these drab spaces. Her new life will be full of imagination (see Figure 3.2). Anne’s narrative spurs readers to consider their own memories. By contrast, museums are depositories for collective memories that persuade visitors to explore their own. Pierre Nora (1989) has profoundly influenced memory studies through his ideas about the interplay of memory and histories in museums. Building on his ideas, Andrea Terry (2015) analyzes the objects, spaces, and interpretations (especially Christmas tours) of Dundurn Castle in Hamilton, Cartier House in Montreal, and McKenzie House in Toronto. Providing the private, personal background of historical figures (whether factual or fictional) in these and other house museums encourages visitors to reflect on the past with regard to contemporary issues. There is little available evidence of how Christmas was celebrated in these homes, yet linking history to this tradition ensures links to visitors’ memories. Another sort of fiction is that the objects are placed without knowledge of how the spaces were actually arranged, although often the object “validates the interpretations of the rooms’ historical function” (2015, 8). At Green Gables, visitors find

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Figure 3.2 Aerial shot of Megan Follows and Richard Farnsworth approaching Green Gables, from the film Anne of Green Gables (1985).

in the rooms objects important to the narrative, such as the amethyst brooch (Brouse 2014; Gothie 2016), which was a token from an uncle in the novel, while Sullivan’s film suggests that it is a keepsake from a romance (Drain 2009). Tourists relate easily to nature, community, and home from their own memories, and – we can hope – can then better appreciate ordinary Victorian homes.

Porches, Parlours, and Bedrooms The porches of Green Gables and Lynde’s Hollow, the parlours of Green Gables and Beechwood, and the east gable bedroom each relay a different aspect of rural memory and experience. The porch, representing the interface between family and community, is associated with Rachel. The parlour, a showcase for the family’s cultural capital, is portrayed in relation to Anne’s friend Diana Barry, who disregards the principles of refinement, and to Anne who prefers imagination to opulence. The east gable bedroom changes as the narrative progresses, transforming itself from Marilla’s domain into Anne’s.

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Porches The L.M. Montgomery National Historic Site has only a tiny entry porch, not large enough for a chair. Yet in the narrative, porches play an important role. The novel begins with Rachel viewing “everything that passed” from her porch (Montgomery 2007, 7). She is the “voice of the community” (Sheckels 2003, 21). For women, the porch served as a bridge between public and private space, notes researcher Sue Bridewell Beckham (2007) in her analysis of women’s memories and interactions on the porch. Porches were a “workplace and salon” (Beckham 2007, 90); on them, women carried out household tasks while socializing. Straying from the historic site, but perhaps more attuned to the role the porch would play, Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables (1985) features an extensive porch. According to Larry Noonan, Butternut Farm “was chosen because it was ‘plain’ with little modern touches” (2015, n.p.). He explains that for each filming, the crew added a bargeboard (a type of scrollwork) to its gables as well as a white picket fence and porch railings.2 Suburban houses like this one, which were often located in cities and suburbs, encouraged outdoor living by emphasizing verandas and porches (Girouard 1977). Hence, the porch with its connotations of nature and its role as a place for interacting with and observing other members of the community was a significant feature in the decision regarding which house to cast for Green Gables, rather than adherence to the historic site.

Parlours As Katherine Grier has noted, parlours tended to be cultural spaces filled with a jumble of objects that conveyed family memories and the values families aimed for such as a “formal social life and cultured learning and domesticity” (1992, 59). Victorian British middle-class children occupied public spaces, especially the parlour, as part of their socialization process (Adams 1996). In Avonlea this is also the case. The parlour is associated with an incident in which Diana becomes ill from drinking alcohol at Green Gables and also with Diana and Anne’s introduction to city life through Beechwood, the home of Diana’s aunt. Both Montgomery’s book and Sullivan’s movie portray an afternoon in which Diana visits for tea while Marilla is away, and Anne, playing host, accidently offers

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her currant wine instead of the raspberry cordial that Marilla had suggested. Diana drinks too much, and her mother is chagrined when Rachel, who belongs to a temperance group, discovers the faux pas. Mrs Barry blames Anne for offering the drink to her daughter Diana, while Marilla blames Diana for overindulgence. Diana’s mother forbids Diana from associating with Anne, until the latter, later on, rescues Diana’s younger sister. Still later, Diana and Anne visit Diana’s aunt Josephine. Montgomery highlights their expedition to the city, writing that “[t]he two little country girls were rather abashed by the splendor of the parlor” (2007, 187). Although her family appears to be better off, Diana’s parents do not afford her the same educational opportunities as Anne, who attends Queen’s University. Both parlour scenes foreground cultural expectations. Additionally, it is in this room that Anne realizes that she would rather be poor with an imagination than rich and bored like Josephine.

East Gable: Anne’s Bedroom The east gable changes during the narrative as Anne fills the space with decorations. As Ann Alston (2005) has observed, children’s bedrooms act as prisons or sanctuaries in twentieth-century children’s literature. Adults control and surveil children’s bedrooms, including Anne’s room. Anne’s evolving bedroom also displays her identity. Imaginative Anne and practical Marilla are foils for each other. As the novel progresses, Marilla lessens her control over the tidiness of the room. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh (2002) trace the significance of the tidiness of bedrooms from eighteenth-century conduct books to contemporary magazines in relation to personality and morality. Alston (2005) links tidiness to morality as well as adult order. Elsewhere, I explore how women’s magazines advised women to control and monitor nature in the nursery while also recommending that they leave room for the child’s natural instincts in room decorations (Eilers 2016). The east gable before Anne arrives is an extension of Marilla’s personality at the beginning of the book. When Anne arrives in the evening, Marilla determines that she must at least stay the night and is unsure where to place her. Marilla “had prepared a couch in the kitchen chamber for the desired and expected boy.

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But, although it was neat and clean, it did not seem quite the thing to put a girl there somehow” (Montgomery 2007, 29). Kitchen couches populated Canadian Maritime working landscapes, such as that of Tilting, Newfoundland. Occupants used these couches for naps; they were easy to clean and had minimal cushioning (Mellin 2003). As Anne first walks upstairs she finds that “[t]he hall was fearsomely clean; the little gable chamber in which she presently found herself seemed still cleaner” (Montgomery 2007, 29), with table, bed, washstand, and muslin curtains. One of Marilla’s first reprimands of Anne is that she hastily removes her clothes instead of folding them neatly. Anne quickly begins to modify the east gable room. At the end of her first day, she brings in a jug of apple blossoms to decorate the dinner table. When dismissed, Anne asks if she can take the blossoms upstairs to keep her company. One morning, she brings home maple boughs and announces to Marilla that she plans to decorate her room with them; however, Marilla complains that they are messy. On the one-year anniversary of her moving to Green Gables, Anne discounts the effect of her books and hair ribbons. “In all essential respects the little gable chamber was unchanged … Yet the whole character of the room was altered. It was full of a new vital, pulsing personality that seemed to pervade it … It was as if all the dreams, sleeping and waking, of its vivid occupant had taken a visible although unmaterial form and had tapestried the bare room with splendid filmy tissues of rainbow and moonshine” (Montgomery 2007, 133). Anne has transformed the east gable room into her sanctuary, and escapes from the drab reality of Marilla’s overbearance. Marilla interrupts Anne’s reverie by entering without knocking to give Anne fresh clothes and asks Anne to fetch Mrs Barry’s apron pattern. It is still Marilla’s room despite the new occupant. Towards the end of the story, Marilla “resignedly” (Montgomery 2007, 212) accepts Anne’s additions. Anne is in her room, preparing to present at the White Sands Hotel. Montgomery writes: The velvet carpet with the pink roses and the pink silk curtains of Anne’s early visions had certainly never materialized; but her dreams had kept pace with her growth, and it is not probable she lamented them. The floor was covered with a pretty matting, and

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the curtains that softened the high window and fluttered in the vagrant breezes were of pale-green art muslin. The walls, hung not with gold and silver brocade tapestry, but with a dainty apple-blossom paper, were adorned with a few good pictures given Anne by Mrs. Allan. Miss Stacy’s photograph occupied the place of honor, and Anne made a sentimental point of keeping fresh flowers on the bracket under it … There was no “mahogany furniture,” but there was a white-painted bookcase filled with books, a cushioned wicker rocker, a toilet table befrilled with white muslin, a quaint, giltframed mirror with chubby pink Cupids and purple grapes painted over its arched top, that used to hang in the spare room, and a low white bed. (2007, 212) In this passage, Anne is reflecting upon how she imagines her room has changed. The initial description described the muslin curtains and whitewash, and we can presume that the matting flooring and wallpaper are new. Curiously, Montgomery also evokes velvet carpet and silk curtains at Josephine’s, the point where Anne realizes that fancy furnishings are not a replacement for an active imagination. Anne has a number of objects that define her: the pictures from the minister’s wife reinforce morality and charity, the portrait from her teacher Miss Stacey and the bookcase reflect Anne’s studious personality, and the fresh flowers illustrate her delight in nature. The objects in the room speak to the significance of religion, academics, and nature for Anne’s identity. Mitchell and Reid-Walsh call the posters and magazines that decorate girls’ bedrooms “identity markers” (2008, 116). Anne underscores the decorative aspects of paint, frills, and gilding although it is unclear if she was the person who modified these objects. Also, she has moved objects into the east gable room from other rooms in the house. Note that when she and Diana build Idlewild she requests the broken plates stored in the Cuthberts’ woodshed. In Sullivan’s film, it is also clear that Anne has augmented her room; in addition to a gas lamp and a cross-stitched wall hanging at the first appearance of the east gable room, Anne has added an alarm clock, many more pictures, and a screen. Nineteenth-century farm children used furniture that was not purposebuilt, but pieces that families planned to discard soon (Calvert 1992).

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Sally McMurry (1988) observes that children valued commercial products in their rooms because they were rare. Anne’s reuse of an old piece of furniture accurately depicts these conditions; so does her valuing of bought books. The idea that adopted children are valuable farm labour is replaced at Green Gables by the belief that children are emotionally valuable (Gammel 2008). McMurry (1988) found that after 1830 there was an increase in children’s leisure time, which fostered independent pursuits that led many farm children to choose urban lives. In much the same way, Anne pursues education that encourages her relocation. Anne is transformed into a confident woman in the community by first taking control of her own room. Diana, drawn to the parlour (the cultural centre of the house), shows that she is better suited to head a home rather than a school. Rachel uses her porch to survey and control her neighbours. Each of these spaces portrays a character’s mode of engaging with culture and the larger community.

Nature, Community, and Green Gables The book and films arouse nostalgia for rural landscape through literary connections to nature and through their being set in a small village. As the sequential titles in the trilogy expand her domain – Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915) – Anne’s role in the community expands (Sheckels 2003). Avonlea is comprised of ordinary Victorian homes depicted in a landscape that suggests work. However, when Green Gables was transformed into a museum, its relationship to the landscape changed. Montgomery’s work is a seemingly romantic portrayal of a pastoral Prince Edward Island, even though she was a pioneer of realism (Reimer 1992). Ostensibly, her writing style moves from romantic to realist, and from playful to restrained (Reimer 1992; Sheckels 2003). Elizabeth Epperly (2007) notes that Montgomery engages the brook in the opening paragraph to characterize Rachel Lynde’s influence as transformative – from unruly to quiet and conforming, when the brook travels through the Lynde’s Hollow. The thoughts of characters shape the environment, especially those of Anne, who names plants and places because for her they have personality (Epperly 2007). Epperly builds on Elizabeth Waterston and Mary Rubio’s (1987)

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discussion of how Montgomery uses sunsets as signifiers for the changes that occur in Anne. For example, a sunset marks her heading the pass list at Queen’s and the swelling of her confidence. Gammel (2010) surmises that the long scenic views in the film indicate that the characters are reflecting. The novel emphasizes the rural landscape, as does Sullivan’s movie. Montgomery evokes rural landscapes through Anne’s connection to nature. We readers might view the abundant descriptions of nature, including rivers, sunsets, and trees, as romantic imagery; however, Gammel (2008) argues that Montgomery challenged both nature and modernity by putting a modern girl in a small country village. Previous authors had grappled with the collision between early industrialization and rural landscapes; in this vein, for example, Leo Marx interpreted Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1844 “Sleepy Hollow” as challenging pastoral imagery by combining nature and technology (the sound of trains), the point being that society is part of nature (Rowe 1991, 220; Marx 1964). Geographers Laura Shillington and Ann Marie Murnaghan argue for a more nuanced understanding of relationships between children and nature, especially in suburban and urban domestic landscapes (2016). They ask researchers to question binary relationships, including the one between nature and culture. We should consider how Anne engages with natural elements, such as blossoms and boughs, and how Marilla and Rachel view these tendencies in Anne as a lack of culture and control. Early in the novel, Anne tends to rename places in her environment rather than accepting the names already given (Gothie 2016). For instance, she reinscribes Matthew’s meaning when she renames the Avenue the Way of Delight. Towards the end of the novel Montgomery employs nature metaphors in chapter titles where Anne makes decisions, including “Where the Brook and River Meet” (when she rejects a luxurious life like that modelled by ladies at the White Sand Hotel) and “A Bend in the Road” (when Anne decides to stay at Green Gables). Montgomery highlights paths and choices. At times, Anne’s relationship with nature also stresses stability. Nature reassures Anne, when she doubts people. One of the first things Anne reveals to Matthew is her imagination and appreciation for nature. She declares:

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I had made up my mind that if you didn’t come for me to-night I’d go down the track to that big wild cherry-tree at the bend, and climb up into it to stay all night. I wouldn’t be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don’t you think? (Montgomery 2007, 12) Asides such as this one show us that Anne relies on nature when she cannot rely on individuals, such as the unknown person, to meet her at the station. Anne brings nature with her, but at the same time, nature carries Anne. When Anne attends Sunday school without Marilla, the Cuthberts’ hired boy, Jerry Buote, tells the other students that he caught her talking to trees. Later, Rachel criticizes Anne for rigging out her hat because Anne chose to wear a crown of buttercups and wild roses. Plants are part of Anne’s identity as a rural girl, and she proudly wears them. Anne is often “roving orchards” and walking with Diana to school. We can view Anne and Diana’s use of informal spaces as a means for them to colonize and remember it. Architect Colin Ward (1990) delineates in The Child in the Country that children colonize, carve out, or make space in natural, unbuilt places (Philo 1992). Montgomery treats us to scenes where Anne and her friends claim space, such as the playhouse, Idlewild, that Anne and Diana build in Mr. William Bell’s birch groove, or the stream below Orchard Park when Anne drifts away from her companions. This shows us that Anne begins to learn to depend on people, even Gilbert.

Conclusion Anne’s story is substantially about belonging in a new place and gaining control over her physical environment. At the beginning, Marilla makes the decision for Anne to stay. At the end, Anne decides to stay at Green Gables for Marilla. Montgomery’s novel, set in a rural Canadian village, has appealed to many readers, viewers, and visitors through its depictions of Avonlea and Green Gables as a quintessential community and house. While other scholars have focused on pastoral nostalgia and literary devices employing nature, I have focused more on features

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of a rural farmhouse and the landscape around the home. The house, the porch, the parlour, and the bedroom each have a role. Rachel uses her porch functionally as many women did – as a connection to the community. Diana’s behaviour highlights the absurdity of expecting children to behave as adults in the cultural parlour. Marilla, at first the sole owner of the east gable bedroom, slowly yields and allows Anne to decorate the room and express her identity through it. While I have noted some of the ways in which memory plays out in relation to Montgomery herself in the ways in which she constructed the fictional Green Gables, I have also drawn attention to the fact that subsequent interpretations of Green Gables in film similarly evoke a type of collective memory of and imagination for rurality. Perhaps in comparing ourselves to Anne, we also compare our homes to Green Gables and explore the relationships of architecture to nature, rurality, and community in our childhood memories.

Acknowledgement I would like to express my gratitude to Fatima Khan, April Renée Mandrona, Claudia Mitchell, Ann Smith, and the other editors who aided the clarity of this chapter.

note s 1 Anne grew from eleven to sixteen, but the Cuthberts and Lyndes were also aging. In the sequel, Anne of Avonlea (Montgomery 1909), Marilla’s neighbour Rachel Lynde moves in with Marilla after her husband Thomas dies. In her 2003 analysis of author Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel (1964), Chivers builds on Hilde Lindeman Nelson’s “living live seriatim,” stating that women’s lives are traditionally based on relationships and do not follow a career model as men’s lives do; however, in late life they must form new relationships. Marilla and Rachel’s relationship strengthens as the men in their lives disappear and they learn to rely on each other. Anne and Diana’s relationship instead grows apart as Anne temporarily moves away to attend Queen’s College. 2 Since the mid-nineteenth century, scroll saws and lathes have produced affordable

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ornament, including bargeboards and railing pickets (Massey and Maxwell 1996). According to landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, whose pattern books inspired houses in Prince Edward Island (Smith 1990), suburban houses displayed more ornament, whereas farmhouses he believed needed to be truthful (Downing 2007, 197). referen ce s Adams, Annmarie. 1996. Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870–1900. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Adams, Annmarie, and Sally Chivers. 2015. “Architecture and Aging: The Depiction of Home in Sarah Polley’s Away From Her.” Age Culture Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2). http://ageculturehumanities.org/WP/architectureand-aging-the-depiction-of-home-in-sarah-polleys-away-from-her (accessed 20 August 2015). Alston, Ann. 2005. “Your Room or Mine? Spatial Politics in Children’s Literature.” New Review of Children’s Literature and Librarianship 11(1): 15–31. https://doi. org/10.1080/13614540500105412. Beckham, Sue Bridewell. 2007. “The American Front Porch: Women’s Liminal Space.” In Housing and Dwelling: Perspectives on Modern Domestic Architecture, edited by Barbara Miller Lane, 86–94. New York: Routledge. Brock-Servais, Rhonda, and Matthew Prickett. 2010. “From Bildungsroman to Romance to Saturday Morning: Anne of Green Gables and Sullivan Entertainment’s Adaptations.” The Lion and the Unicorn 34(2): 214–27. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/uni.0.0496. Brouse, Cynthia. 2014. “The Maud Squad (2002).” In The L.M. Montgomery Reader: Volume Two: A Critical Heritage, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, 291–304. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Calvert, Karin. 1992. “Children in the House, 1890 to 1930.” In American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, edited by Jessica Foy and Thomas Schlereth, 75–93. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Chivers, Sally. 2003. From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Downing, A.J.. 2007. “What a Farm-House Should Be.” In Housing and Dwelling: Perspectives on Modern Domestic Architecture, edited by Barbara Miller Lane, 196–9. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

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Drain, Susan. 2009. “‘Too Much Love-Making’: Anne of Green Gables on Television.” The Lion and the Unicorn 11(2): 63–72. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.0.0259. Eilers, Frederika. 2016. “Nature in the Nursery: The Homemaker and Craftsman, 1890–1915.” In City, Nature, Children, edited by Ann Marie Murnaghan and Laura Shillington, 21–37. Oxford: Routledge. Epperly, Elizabeth. 2007. “Romancing the Voice: Anne of Green Gables.” In Anne of Green Gables: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, 343–59. New York: W.W. Norton. Fuss, Diana. 2004. The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them. New York: Routledge. Gammel, Irene. 2008. “Anne of Green Gables.” In Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia, edited by Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, 145–8. Westport: Greenwood Press. – 2010. “Embodied Landscape Aesthetics in Anne of Green Gables.” The Lion and the Unicorn 34(2): 228–47. https://doi.org/10.1353/uni.0.0494 Girouard, Mark. 1977. Sweetness and Light: The Queen Anne Movement, 1860–1900. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Glassie, Henry. 1995. “Irish.” In America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America, edited by Dell Upton, 74–9. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Gothie, Sarah Conrad. 2016. “Playing ‘Anne’: Red Braids, Green Gables, and Literary Tourists on Prince Edward Island.” Tourist Studies 16(4): 405–21. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1468797615618092. Grier, Katherine. 1992. “The Decline of the Memory Palace: The Parlor after 1890.” In American Home Life, 1880–1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services, edited by Jessica Foy and Thomas Schlereth, 49–74. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Henning, Darell. 1995. “Norwegian.” In America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America, edited by Dell Upton, 148–53. Building Watchers Series. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Johnston, Rosemary Ross. 2007. “L.M. Montgomery’s Interior–Exterior Landscapes.” In Anne of Green Gables: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, 409–13. New York: W.W. Norton. Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Massey, James C., and Shirley Maxwell. 1996. House Styles in America: The Old-

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House Journal Guide to the Architecture of American Homes. New York: Penguin Studio. McMurry, Sally Ann. 1988. Families and Farmhouses in Nineteenth-Century America: Vernacular Design and Social Change. New York: Oxford University Press. McPhee, Nancy. 2016. “Montgomery Descendant Restoring House That Inspired Anne’s Ingleside.” Journal Pioneer, 14 April. http://www.journalpioneer.com/ news/local/2016/4/14/montgomery-descendant-restoring-house-th-4497935. html (accessed 5 January 2017). Mellin, Robert. 2003. Tilting: House Launching, Slide Hauling, Potato Trenching, and Other Tales from a Newfoundland Fishing Village. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. 2002. Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood. London: Routledge. – 2008. Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press. Munro, Alice. 1999. “The Bear Came over the Mountain.” The New Yorker, 27 December. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/12/27/the-bear-cameover-the-mountain Montgomery, Lucy Maud. 1908. Anne of Green Gables. Boston: L.C. Page. – 1909. Anne of Avonlea. Boston: L.C. Page. – 1915. Anne of the Island. Boston: L.C. Page. – 1974. The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career. Markham: Fitzhenry and Whiteside. – 1985. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: 1910–1921. Toronto: Oxford University Press. – 2007. “Anne of Green Gables.” In Anne of Green Gables: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, 1–245. New York: W.W. Norton. Noonan, Larry. 2015. “Stories from Rouge Park: Anne of Green Gables House Was Located on Butternut Farm on Steeles Avenue in Scarborough.” Inside Toronto, 18 August. http://www.insidetoronto.com/news-story/5802556-stories-fromrouge-park-anne-of-green-gables-house-was-located-on-butternut-farmon-steeles-avenue (accessed 20 August 2016). Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26: 7–24. www.jstor.org/stable/2928520. Parks Canada. 2016a. “Parks Canada – Green Gables Heritage Place – Did You

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Know That …” Parks Canada. http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/pe/greengables/ natcul/natcul1.aspx (accessed 28 September 2016) – 2016b. “Parks Canada – Green Gables Heritage Place – Natural Wonders and Cultural Treasures.” Parks Canada. http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/lhn-nhs/pe/ greengables/natcul.aspx (accessed 28 September 2016). Philo, Chris. 1992. “Neglected Rural Geographies: A Review.” Journal of Rural Studies 8(2): 193–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/0743-0167(92)90077-J. Reimer, Mavis. 1992. Such a Simple Little Tale: Critical Responses to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press. Rowe, Peter. 1991. Making a Middle Landscape. Cambridge, ma: mit Press. Roy, Wendy. 2014. “Home as Middle Ground in Adaptations of Anne of Green Gables and Jalna.” International Journal of Canadian Studies 48(1): 9–31. https://doi.org/10.3138/ijcs.48.9. Sheckels, Theodore. 2003. The Island Motif in the Fiction of L.M. Montgomery, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Other Canadian Women Novelists. New York: Peter Lang. Shillington, Laura J., and Ann Marie F. Murnaghan. 2016. “Urban Political Ecologies and Children’s Geographies: Queering Urban Ecologies of Childhood.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40(5): 1017–35. https://doi. org/10.1111/1468-2427.12339. Sioli, Angeliki, and Yoonchun Jung. 2018. “Introduction: Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience.” In Reading Architecture: Literary Imagination and Architectural Experience, edited by Soili and Jung, 1–5. New York: Routledge. Smith, H.M. Scott. 1990. The Historic Houses of Prince Edward Island. Erin: Boston Mills Press. Squire, Shelagh. 1996. “Literary Tourism and Sustainable Tourism: Promoting ‘Anne of Green Gables’ in Prince Edward Island.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism 4(3): 119–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669589608667263. Terry, Andrea. 2015. Family Ties: Living History in Canadian House Museums. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Ward, Colin. 1990. The Child in the Country. London: Bedford Square Press. Waterson, Elizabeth. 2007. “To the World of Story.” In Anne of Green Gables: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Criticism, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, 414–21. New York: W.W. Norton.

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Waterston, Elizabeth, and Mary Rubio. 1987. “Afterword.” In L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 307–14. New York: A Signet Classic. f il m o g r aphy Harrison, John Kent. 2016. Anne of Green Gables. Canada: Breakthrough Entertainment. Polley, Sarah. 2006. Away From Her. Canada: Lionsgate Films. Sullivan, Kevin. 1985. Anne of Green Gables. Canada: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

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4 Listening to the Rhythms of Rural Life, 1920–1940: Oral History and Childhood Agency Michael Krohn

Introduction In the fall of 1983, Susan Daly Heller embarked on a project to record the lives of senior citizens living on farms along Roxham Road, around sixty kilometres south of Montreal in St-Bernard-de-Lacolle. Heller put a tape recorder in her backpack and used a bicycle to call on her neighbours along the three-kilometre stretch of road that now ends at the Canadian–American border but was once connected to its namesake in Perry Mills, New York, which has recently become a gateway for refugees seeking asylum in Canada.1 Much to the bemusement of her informants, Heller set up her recorder on their kitchen tables and proceeded to record their conversations. Initially, her informants did not understand why Heller wanted to record their life stories since they felt they were not famous and did not warrant any special attention. After some coaxing, Heller got the conversation going by saying: “I just want to interview you because I’m very interested in how you live out here and what happens when everything is frozen” (Heller interview, rric 2014).2 The stories recounted by the men and women of Roxham Road speak to a rural way of life that many Canadians experienced until the end of the Second World War. Their place-based memories allow for the “deconstruction of conventional economic activity definitions” (Jensen

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2009, 32) by inviting us to walk around the family farm, where we can visualize the inner economic, familial, and social workings of farming families, guided by the narrators’ memories. These rhythms of rural life were tightly woven together, for only by working as a family unit could the residents of Roxham Road make an economically viable living. Yet each of these rhythms also had a distinctive quality, a sound, as it were, of its own. The types of work that men performed on the farm were shaped and constrained by notions of what counted as rural masculinity in contrast to the quiet fluidity of women’s work. Although essential to the success of the family farm, and remarkable for its varied and multitasking character that included hard physical labour, women’s work remained undervalued. All the narrators recall vividly both the independence they enjoyed as children and the responsibilities they had to shoulder from an early age. This chapter focuses on adult memories of childhood as a framework within which to listen closely to the daily rhythms of children living along Roxham Road between the 1920s and the late 1940s. Informed by the growing scholarship in oral history and by other researchers’ use of interviews, I offer both a contextualization and a close reading of a set of interviews that were conducted by Susan Heller with senior citizens over three summers between 1983 and 1985. Recognizing, as West and Petrik (1992) and West (1991) highlight, that memory is both constructed and subject to myriad factors, including nostalgia and the problematic use of second-hand primary sources, I acknowledge three standards for bias correction, namely, specificity, repetition, and congruence. Besides Heller’s recordings and partial transcripts, we have her detailed notes, drawings, and personal research on the people and places spoken about in the interviews, which provide visual and textual components to the collection (see Figure 4.1). Elaine Tyler May writes: “Memories, like historical documents, need to be situated and interpreted in their proper moment. We cannot escape hindsight when writing about the past – in fact, hindsight is essential. But we need to do our best to move our imagination into the timeframe of our subjects” (2008, 90). As in any oral history project, Susan Heller’s role as interviewer-participant is a key factor informing the conclusions that can be drawn from the material generated by her interviews. The

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Figure 4.1 Susan Heller prepared several mock-up pages with drawings and sections of interviews she transcribed.

effect of a participant in research is addressed by Hourig Attarian; Heller’s presence in the creation of the “double narrative” (2011, 156) mirrors Attarian’s charting of the experiences of her narrators as well as her own autobiographical inquiry. The notion of the rural idyll permeates the conversations Heller had with the residents of Roxham Road. Recalling with great fondness her own genteel childhood memories of the British countryside and voicing her concern over vanishing rural customs, Heller says she intended her oral histories to be a tribute to the olden days. Among the challenges presented by the material she gathered are the multiple layers of memory contributing to the construction of the various selves within the material, as well as the Rashomon Effect popularized by Heider (1988) as a useful shorthand for the phenomenon of unreliable experiential memory. Yet even though the materials from Heller’s project are highly mediated, there emerge clear patterns of behaviour and shared experiences,

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each of which strongly points to the presence of such things as childhood responsibility, autonomy, and agency as well as competence – central themes in the gendered nature of emotions discussed in the work of Crawford and colleagues (1992). In his keynote address to the Digital Testimonies Conference at Erasmus University, Steven High suggested that “oral history archives need to be sites of data circulation and digital curation as well as living repositories dedicated to long-term preservation” (2014, 3). Historical societies house difficult-to-locate collections, and the volunteers are themselves what could be called living archives of an area’s history. These centres can offer researchers the opportunity to enhance their understanding of local history where “[l]earning with communities … represents a fundamentally different way of doing research than what is normally practiced in our universities” (4). Accessing these untapped recorded and living resources “puts a face, a name, and a voice to what is often understood in the aggregate or the abstract” (5). Analyzing the contents and story behind the Roxham Road Interview Collection (rric) sheds light on rural life in southwestern Quebec. Heller was well versed in the area’s history and expertly guided the flow of the conversations she recorded from the point of a view of a local farming enthusiast. In keeping with High’s concept of learning with communities, I have endeavoured to add a layer of critical analysis and interpretation to Heller’s chronicle of the inhabitants of Roxham Road.

About Susan Heller Susan Heller3 was born in Plymouth, England, in 1930 and was eighteen months old when her family moved to a small farm nearly 500 kilometres away, near Woodbridge in Suffolk County. Her rural upper-middleclass upbringing shaped her notions of the rural environment and cannot be ignored when we are exploring the context in which the rric was created. Her love of the countryside would eventually bring Heller, the adult, to her own farm on Roxham Road, where she set out to re-establish her rural roots. Heller spent her childhood on what was more of a hobby farm than a working one. Her reminiscences of her time on this farm in England

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are certainly nostalgic, but her understanding of the realities of rural life was enhanced by her adult farming experience in Canada, and she was not under any illusions that her own childhood experience was typical. Her intimate knowledge of farm life and her experience of living among her interviewees allowed her to engage deeply with the details of the lives of her informants. As she recalled: “I was really fascinated by how they lived, what they ate, the clothes they wore and what they did [and] realized all these people here had totally different lifestyles and you know, it really intrigued me. I was interested in old skills like quilting, spinning, dyeing wool and knitting” (Heller interview, rric 2014). Heller was fascinated by how ordinary people led their lives, and she continued to take an active interest in showcasing rural ways by hosting wool-gathering events and organizing farm equipment exhibitions. From her materials as well as her interview responses, it is clear that she approached these events as a promoter of local history, informed by her rural childhood in England. Her status as an amateur accentuated her role as participant in that she conceived of neither the project nor the exhibitions from the perspective of a disinterested outside researcher. In the Book Project Binder, assembled by Heller while she was working on the rric, are her detailed handwritten notes on Edward Ives’s The Tape-Recorded Interview (Ives 1980). Inspired by this 1980 manual, Heller initially intended to inquire about her subject’s interests, then about “big events of the region,” and finally about the economy – “the basic [reason] why people are there” (Heller interview, rric 1985), but she did not adhere to this approach when conducting her interviews. She employed different tactics to start her explorations such as asking about when and where people were born, inquiring about when a barn was built, or by saying: “Today is September 12, 1985, washing day. Did you start early in the morning? What day did you do your washing?” (Cookman interview, rric 1985). Heller was able to start and maintain a collaborative conversation with her informants by keeping her interview approach informal. While she often cut her narrators off during their conversations, this was done in order to probe more deeply into the topic under discussion rather than to change it. While Heller’s work took the rural idyll as its starting point, her narrators redirected the conversation to the gendered rhythms of rural life. Heller’s interview format

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was flexible enough to solicit stories of the darker side of rural living; this ran directly counter to her initial idyllic starting point. Recent British, Australian, and American oral history scholarship on rural life in the early twentieth century serves as an example for Canadian historians wishing to expand the field by “joining the international movement to democratize the field” (Llewellyn, Freund, and Reilly 2015, 4; see also Burton 2002; Jones et al. 2010; Landorf 2000; Liepins 2000; Riley 2004; Riley and Harvey 2007). The title of Riley’s article, “Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay” (2004), points to the creation of historical sources via oral history. If you want to know about hay-making, ask these people. Preservation and presentation of the collective past is dependent upon first capturing the stories of people since they are the “carriers of culture” or, as the founder of British oral history, George Ewart Evans, named his informants, “flesh and blood archives” (Howkins 1994, 30). Once captured, the information must be stored, and then should be used to further expand our comprehension of the world around us. Scholars such as Campbell and Bell (2000), who advocate raising awareness of members of society who, for whatever reason, find themselves on the margins, have also leveraged oral history practice. Oral history interviews “tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did” (Portelli 1997, 99). The childhood memories of the narrators of the rric bring to light the multi-faceted elements of the life of a child growing up in a rural environment and highlight the complexity of this life stage in human development. Activities such as work and play do not define childhood; rather, they are part of the maturation process. This study adds to work on rural childhoods conducted not only in Canada but also in Britain and the United States (Sutherland 1976, 1991, 1997; West 1991). Chores, school, and play were all part of the rhythms of farming life. Neil Sutherland’s groundbreaking foray into the study of children built on the already well-established idea that childhood is a “life stage” (1997, xi) composed of experiences both biological and experiential. He used oral history interviews of adult informants to revive memories of childhood in his study, Growing Up (Sutherland 1997). The act of reviving these childhood memories serves as a way to “animate” (Comacchio

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1998, 578) children of the past and to bring to the fore children’s places and spaces. Heller’s recordings of her narrators’ early childhood experiences did not deliberately focus on children. However, the children of Roxham Road were reanimated at the beginning of each interview, revealing important aspects of rural childhood. While childhood history has often been “written in a way that casts youngsters in passive roles” (Sutherland 1991, 264) – children who were acted upon – Heller’s informants reveal that the children of Roxham Road, from a very young age, did have a certain amount of freedom and autonomy in shaping elements of their own lives.

The Children of Roxham Road All sixteen narrators, the nine men and seven women of the rric, born in the early twentieth century, recounted stories from their own lives as well as their family pasts from the late nineteenth century up until the eve of the Second World War. Seven of the interviews were conducted with married couples, who offered richly detailed stories about gendered life on the farm from the perspectives of a husband and wife sitting at the same table. While the stories recounted by the interviewees included aspects of their adult lives, Heller was particularly interested in their childhood memories. Here I look at stories from seven narrators, chosen to illustrate how children worked, played, and carved out their own spaces in the rural environment.

Children’s Work Mae Alice Hadley was born in Champlain, New York, in 1914 (Hadley interview, rric 1985). Hadley could not recollect when the family returned to Canada, only that she was very young at the time. Mae was the only daughter and, at nine years of age, was already helping an ailing mother around the house and participating in other farming activities. She recalled: “I had a lot of housework to do when I was very young … I can [also] remember … milking, raking, and I loved that” (Hadley interview, rric 1985). As the only daughter in the house, supporting her mother who was not very strong, she washed clothes on the washboard and used the tub with the wringer. Ironing was done

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with the “old black country [an iron] on the grill [a stove],” making sure that “you rubbed them off because you might get something off the grill” (Hadley interview, rric 1985). Ironing was an arduous task since “it always used to be dampened. And you just ironed and ironed and ironed – all the bedding and everything” (Hadley interview, rric 1985). The girls had domestic chores but also responsibilities in the farmyard and barn. Doris McClelland, born in 1910, recalled: “We always had chickens, we would take the eggs and hatch them … That was a lot of work though, to water and keep them all fed and everything” (McClelland interview, rric 1984). The formation of good, responsible work habits by caring for animals was instilled and reinforced by regular repetition. Once children were taught what to do and how to do it, they could complete their tasks with little adult supervision. As they perfected their skills, they in turn became the trainers of younger family members, further engraining the positive characteristics of creativity, responsibility, and a strong work ethic. The boys also worked in the farmyard but often helped their fathers in the bush. Norman Akester, born in 1917, remembered how he used to hunt skunk with his father as a child. Hunting fur-bearing animals could be an important supplemental source of revenue for Roxham Road farmers: In the fall of the year when it freezes, then the skunks would den up and you’d find anywhere from nine to thirteen skunks … We used to have an old dog, a big old hunter ... and he’d just put his nose on the ground and smell them and start digging … My dad would reach in and grab them by the tail and throw them out to me and I had the .22 and I’d shoot them. (Norman Akester interview, rric 1985) It is surprising that Norman was tasked with shooting the skunks rather than tossing them to his father. Children were often used as helpers, handing tools and materials to their parents, who then completed the task at hand. In this case, it seems that Norman had already been taught how to use a rifle and how to shoot a skunk without damaging the pelt.

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The farmers along the road also engaged in trapping. Norman Akester recalled: “When I was a kid and I started going hunting, my dad said, ‘If you kill a skunk near a hole, near the den, you’ll never trap no more because the rest will disappear’ and I remember the first time I set traps, and I could take you right to the spot” (Norman Akester interview, rric 1985). Akester’s recollection of where to set traps is illustrative of the genealogical knowledge passed down from father to son (Riley and Harvey 2007). Once this type of knowledge was internalized and mastered, it contributed to the boy’s ability to conduct tasks and act independently from his father and thereby begin to establish his own masculine identity. Akester described in detail the economics of the fur trade during the late 1920s and 1930s. Pelt prices varied by type of animal and, for skunks, by the width of their white stripes. A red fox pelt was worth thirty dollars and a “mink was very dear in them days, you’d get twenty-five dollars for them … If [a skunk] had just a little stripe on his back he’d be probably worth four dollars, if he had a half stripe, he’d go down to about three and if he had a great big white stripe you’d get about two dollars for it” (Norman Akester interview, rric 1985). By Christmas time, if the pelts were not sold, Norman would go with his father to Old Montreal when the train was “running an excursion for seventy cents to go to Montreal and back” (Norman Akester interview, rric 1985). Note the precision with which Akester recalled the particulars of fur prices but without mentioning whether he received any of the proceeds from his hunting and trapping efforts. The money made by selling furs went into the communal family coffer and was spent on Christmas presents for the family.

Schooling Memories of going to school are common in the rric. The memories most often raised concerned getting to school. Since few people had cars, the children set off to school each morning on foot, on horseback, or in a buggy or cart (Wallace interview, rric 1985). Many of the narrators speak of how long it took to get to and from school. Doris McClelland lived at the corner of Pleasant Valley and Roxham Road. “Whatever the

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weather we went to school – three miles we walked … and come home at night. We’d be so cold after that walk” (McClelland interview, rric 1984). Both Doris McClelland and Harvey Smith remembered walking through the fields as a shortcut: “[we] walked through the fields, come out at Duncan’s house” (Smith interview, rric 1985). Crossing a field involved a certain amount of responsibility, since fences had to be negotiated without ripping one’s clothes and gates had to be opened and closed properly in order to keep livestock either in or out. Occasionally, when the weather was very bad, Doris’s father would pick her up after school. “I remember one time, my father struck out, it was in the afternoon and it was awful stormy, I had crossed the field to get to the house quicker and he went around the road and he went right through to Roxham and he couldn’t find me” (McClelland interview, rric 1984). Some children drove horse-drawn buggies to school. “Lillian and Ralph, they drove to school, had a horse and cutter or buggy, put the horse in at Hiram Wallace’s and then they’d walk from there to the school” (McClelland interview, rric 1984). Even though McClelland always set out on foot she “used to get rides lots of times from the mailman or anyone going along on a wagon or sleigh” (McClelland interview, rric 1984). These episodes speak to children’s daily activities; they also uncover important characteristics, such as good judgment, responsibility, and independent decision-making, that the children of Roxham Road employed in order to get to and from school. That some children used a horse and buggy to get to school is especially interesting since it highlights their ability to act independently. While a parent or older sibling might have helped harness the horse and hitch it to the buggy before the children started off each morning, the children were on their own driving the buggy to school. Once at their destination, the horse had to be unhitched from the buggy and unharnessed so that it could be put away in the barn for several hours until the children returned. After school, the children then had to prepare for the drive home. Hitching a horse to a buggy can be a challenge, even for older teenagers, and driving a buggy is a complicated skill to master, not to mention that horses are flight animals, very unpredictable and prone to bolt or shy away if startled. Considering the potential danger of having

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children handle a thousand-pound horse on their own and the possible damage to or loss of horse, harness, or buggy to accident, this independence clearly demonstrates the confidence parents had in their children’s ability to handle one of the farm’s most important and expensive assets almost every school day.

Play Tales of work on the farm and going to school dominate the stories. There was opportunity for play, although not all play resulted in a good time. Muriel Akester recalled a time when her brother and sister found a box of railway detonators, or “torpedoes” as she called them, when she was five years old: So, we were down playing at my uncle’s up in the loft and they found this little box … Anyway, we brought it home and … brought it up to the shed door at the back of the house and they got the hammer and told me to hit it because they couldn’t get the lid off it. I hit it and the top of the hammer came and hit my head. (Muriel Akester interview, rric 1985) Muriel got up off of the floor, holding her head. Her father was way down in the fields making hay when he thought he heard a gunshot: My Uncle worked on the track and they brought it [a box with detonators] home which was foolish of them. My face was all pasted with gunpowder. You couldn’t see my face … maybe a half dozen went off at the same time. I lost so much blood that my aunt from the next house came up and washed the kitchen floor. (Muriel Akester interview, rric 1985) Haylofts, as mentioned by Muriel, were a great place for kids to play because they could run and jump and almost always be assured of a soft landing (see also Lerner, this volume). One could build forts, tunnels, and dugouts in the loose hay (mechanical baling technology would not be widely available until after the Second World War). The loft was also a place where a child could hide from the watchful eye of parents or

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siblings. It also served as an indoor space where the child could daydream, or just chew on a stem of timothy grass while staring at the arched roof of the mow. Explosive devices were not typically found on farms. But there were other hazards besides, which had to be negotiated when the children were seeking suitable places to play or things with which to play. The simple act of running in the orchard could turn up hidden hazards like boards with nails in them, which easily penetrated footwear. Farm implements were everywhere, as were wagons and other farming equipment. Bruce Wallace’s uncle “fell off a wagon and got run over by a wheel around the side and the back wheel went over him” (Wallace interview, rric 1985). Tools were easily accessible; woodpiles, logs, and stones could be found all over the farm. Although potentially dangerous if handled by youngsters, they were often used to construct play spaces. While creatively using materials found around the farm, the children learned toolhandling skills. When small children wandered off unnoticed for a prolonged time, anxiety was inevitable. Bruce Wallace recalled: I had disappeared one afternoon and they found me after looking all over and the big fear was that “he fell down the well” – this was a big fear. Yes, it was one of the fears. “Where’s he gone now? Go check the well.” (Wallace interview, rric 1985) This rule of thumb applies to this day: there are still ponds, unused surface wells, and, of course, swimming pools on farms. The importance of place surfaces in these interviews; instances of childhood development and agency are found in various environments and spaces of Roxham Road. Linda Shopes’s key insight that “local history was defined almost entirely by specific places” is borne out in Heller’s recordings, which themselves are “replete with references to streams, hills, [and] homes” (2002, 593). Oral history testimonials like those found in the rric offer historians the opportunity to engage with details about children and their spaces. The hidden places they occupied affected them as much as those in which they worked, to which they travelled, and in which they played. The children of Roxham Road were

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only a subset of a local community; that said, “[t]he advantage of reading single cases lies in the contextual and relational details that can be included … Although great differences occur between the cases it is possible to recognize that key meanings, practices, and spaces/structures contribute to the shape and articulation of each community” (Liepins 2000, 329). Information gleaned from their experiences in their particular locality can act as a bridge to studying other groups of children. Many of these interactions with potentially dangerous places and objects provided daily experiences for children, which arguably contributed to building character, besides offering insights today into childhood agency. The daily actions of performing chores, going to school, and playing demonstrate how children perfected skills and improved their judgment by living in a rural environment. Children’s importance as part of the family farming unit increased with each passing day, and often did so quite independently of parental supervision or the “adult gaze” (Philo 1992, 198) for a good part of the day. These children demonstrated they were not mere automatons who lacked the ability to control and influence their own lives within a rural “lifescape” (Woods 2010, 838).

Reflecting on the Stories What can we learn from these stories? Often unsupervised, farm children would play with what was available on the farm, navigating hazards and learning about life in varying places and spaces. As individual actors, they learned essential life skills from a young age by performing their regular chores and, often, by replacing their parents in times of need in adult work-related activities. While children in school were supervised, the time they spent going to school in the morning and coming home at night often found them alone, expanding their horizons without outside intervention. These experiences, when combined with the onset of puberty, are likely to have matured these children beyond their years. As Sutherland observed in his work with rural young people, by the time they reached their twelfth to fifteenth birthdays, they had “crossed a number of watersheds, which taken together, marked the end of their childhood” (1997, xi) and prepared them for the next stages of their lives.

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At the same time, Heller’s own autobiography becomes inserted into the process. We know that she was particularly interested in the childhood farming memories of her narrators, inspired in part by her own upbringing in the British countryside. The childhood memories of her family’s four-and-a-half-acre farm were recalled with nostalgia: “[W]e had two big fields, the barns were absolutely lovely – brick barns with patterns … [and] we did have a cook, and a housemaid and a gardener and a nanny; when I look back, it was a life of total luxury for us kids” (Heller interview, rric 2014). Her rural idyll did not include the mandatory chores or the financial burdens associated with living on a working farm. The families on Roxham Road worked farms that averaged 150 acres and that generated barely enough income to maintain a minimum standard of living, whereas Heller remembered fondly that she “used to dress up the goats and put them in the pram and walk with them around the garden. It was a fantastic life for [me]” (Heller interview, rric 2014). Feeding chickens, riding her pony, and picking berries or fruit in a small orchard instilled in Heller a love of rural life. She created an idyllic part-time rural existence on Roxham Road for her own children over a twenty-year period by spending weekends, holidays, and summers on the farm re-creating the rural existence she enjoyed as a child in the countryside. Clearly, her life in the British countryside did not offer identical rural experiences to those found in Canada, and there are issues of class that can be further explored. Her informants’ reminiscences tell a story of unending domestic and farm-related work. There was time for play for these children, but chores always came first, usually at specific times of day, interrupting periods of play. The different perspective provided by her narrators complicates Heller’s constructed view of idyllic rural living, on the one hand suggesting a type of childhood agency, and on the other highlighting the ways in which the childhood memories of the interviewer/interpreter become embedded in the memories of the participants, as discussed in the works of Attarian, Portelli, and Riley, referenced earlier. Moreover, Heller’s approach exemplified the “friendship as method” format for interviews (Tillmann-Healy 2003), which allowed her to leverage friendship or communal ties and to ultimately “shar[e] authority” (Zembrzycki 2009) with her informants.

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Conclusion This study has turned to the Roxham Road Interview Collection to examine the extent of rural children’s agency by paying attention to the rhythms of their lives. As noted above, this type of work is not without its tensions. In this case, attention to the biography of the interviewer raises important questions about how perspectives on rurality are constructed and maintained. Class, for example, is a concern here, but we also know that the rich body of work on gender and memory (Crawford et al. 1992), and on rural masculinities (Bell 2000; Campbell and Bell 2000) and rural femininities (see Driscoll 2016), invites deeper exploration. At the same time, it is clear that there are many insights to be gained by analyzing the rric. We learn that the children of Roxham Road were not merely functioning in an adult-regulated world. On their own, they created their own spaces and increased their knowledge and proficiency regarding how to accomplish things independently without the need for constant adult supervision. The daily actions of performing chores, going to school, and playing in a rural environment allowed them to produce their own daily rhythms within the larger rhythms of the farming community. In this way the inclusion of childhood as a category of analysis provides nuance to existing studies about how rural children were socialized into appropriate gender roles, enjoyed independence, developed competencies, and had spaces of their own that set their experience apart from that of their urban counterparts.

n otes 1 Thousands of refugees seeking asylum in Canada through irregular processes have crossed the ditch demarking the Canada–US border at Roxham Road since the fall of 2017. See the Doc Project, “As Asylum Seekers Show Up on Their Doorstep, Two Quebec Women Struggle with How to Help,” cbc Radio, 2 April 2018, http://www.cbc.ca/radio/docproject/the-border-next-door-1.4595074/asasylum-seekers-show-up-on-their-doorstep-two-quebec-women-struggle-withhow-to-help-1.4595233; Camille Garnier, “Les migrants font jaser près du rang Roxham,” Journal de Montréal, 1 May 2018, http://www.journaldemontreal.com/ 2018/05/01/les-migrants-font-jaser-pres-du-rang-roxham; Jason Markusoff,

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Nancy Macdonald, Aaron Hutchins, and Meagan Campbell, “Down on the Border,” Maclean’s, 11 July 2017, https://www.macleans.ca/down-on-the-border for interviews with Susan Heller describing her interactions with refugees crossing at Roxham Road. 2 I interviewed Susan Daly Heller on 8 April 2014, in the kitchen of the family farm on Roxham Road. All interviews referred to in this chapter can be found in the Roxham Road Interview Collection located at Archives Hemmingford. For reference purposes the name of the interviewee followed by the designation rric is used to refer to interviews of the collection. 3 Like Susan Heller, I grew up on a farm and found much in common with Heller and her interviewees’ rural experiences. Although decades separate my own experiences, activities like playing in haylofts and doing daily chores such as feeding livestock, cleaning stalls, or searching for lost children are essentially the same as those of Heller and the Roxham Road narrators, and inferences derived from them can be mutually informing. referen ce s Attarian, Hourig. 2011. “Narrating Displacement: The Pedagogy of Exile.” In Memory and Pedagogy, edited by Claudia Mitchell, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Kathleen Pithouse, and Susann Allnutt, 145–60. New York: Routledge. Bell, David. 2000. “Farm Boys and Wild Men: Rurality, Masculinity, and Homosexuality.” Rural Sociology 6(4): 547–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.2000. tb00043.x. Burton, Orville Vernon. 2002. “Reaping What We Sow: Community and Rural History.” Agricultural History 76(4): 631–58. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3744956 Campbell, Hugh, and Michael Mayerfeld Bell. 2000. “The Question of Rural Masculinities.” Rural Sociology 65(4): 532–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1549-0831.2000. tb00042.x. Comacchio, Cynthia. 1998. “Review of Growing up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television, by Neil Sutherland.” Canadian Historical Review 79(3): 577–83. doi: 10.3138/CHR.79.3.577 Crawford, June, Susan Kippax, Jenny Onyx, Una Gault, and Pam Benton. 1992. Emotion and Gender: Constructing Meaning from Memory. London: Sage. Driscoll, Catherine. 2016. “Nowhere to Go, Nothing to Do.” In Girlhood and the Politics of Place, edited by Claudia Mitchell and Carrie Rentschler, 51–67. New York: Berghahn.

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Heider, Karl. 1988. “The Rashomon Effect: When Ethnographers Disagree.” American Anthropologist 90(1): 73–81. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1988.90.1.02a00050. High, Steven. 2013. “Going Beyond the Juicy Quotes Syndrome: Living Archives and Reciprocal Research in Oral History.” Keynote to the Digital Testimonies Conference at Erasmus University. http://www.academia.edu/4347016. (accessed 16 February 2014) Howkins, Alun. 1994. “Inventing Everyman: George Ewart Evans, Oral History, and National Identity.” Oral History 22(2): 26–32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/ 40179362. Ives, Edward. 1980. The Tape-Recorded Interview: A Manual for Field Workers in Folklore and Oral History, rev. ed. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Jensen, Joan. 2009. “Telling Stories: Keeping Secrets.” Agricultural History 83(4): 437–45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40607528. Jones, Lu Ann, Adrienne Petty, Mark Schultz, Rebecca Sharpless, and Melisa Walker. 2010. “‘Agricultural History’ Roundtable: Complicating the Story: Oral History and the Study of the Rural South.” Agricultural History 84(3): 281–326. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27868995. Landorf, Christine. 2000. “A Sense of Identity and a Sense of Place: Oral History and Preserving the Past in the Mining Community of Broken Hill.” Oral History 28(1): 92–102. www.jstor.org/stable/40179664. Liepins, Ruth. 2000. “Exploring Rurality through ‘Community’ Discourses, Practices, and Spaces Shaping Australian and New Zealand Rural ‘Communities.’” Journal of Rural Studies 16(3): 325–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(99) 00067-4. Llewellyn, Kristina, Alexander Freund, and Nolan Reilly, eds. 2015. The Canadian Oral History Reader. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Philo, Chris. 1992. “Neglected Rural Geographies: A Review.” Journal of Rural Studies 8(2): 193–207. https://doi.org/10.1016/0743-0167(92)90077-J. Portelli, Alessandro. 1997. The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: suny Press. Riley, Mark. 2004. “Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay: Farm Practices, Oral History, and Nature Conservation.” Oral History 32(2): 45–53. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/40179798. Riley, Mark, and David Harvey. 2007. “Oral Histories, Farm Practice, and Uncovering Meaning in the Countryside.” Social and Cultural Geography 8(3): 391–415. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360701488823.

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Shopes, Linda. 2002. “Oral History and the Study of Communities: Problems, Paradoxes, and Possibilities.” Journal of American History 89(2): 588–98. https:// doi.org/10.2307/3092177. Sutherland, Neil. 1976. Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth Century Consensus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. – 1991. “I Can’t Recall When I Didn’t Help: The Working Lives of Pioneering Children in Twentieth-Century British Columbia.” Histoire sociale / Social History 24(48): 263–88. – 1997. Growing up: Childhood in English Canada from the Great War to the Age of Television. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tillmann-Healy, Lisa. 2003. “Friendship as Method.” Qualitative Inquiry 9(5): 729–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800403254894. Tyler May, Elaine. 2008. “Confessions of a Memoir Thief.” In Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life, edited by Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May, 83–96. St Paul: Borealis Books. West, Elliott. 1991. Growing Up with the Country: Childhood on the Western Frontier. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. West, Elliott, and Paula Petrik, eds. 1992. Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Woods, Michael. 2010. “Performing Rurality and Practising Geography.” Progress in Human Geography 34(6): 835–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509357356. Zembrzycki, Stacey. 2009. “Sharing Authority with Baba.” Journal of Canadian Studies 43(1): 219–38. https://doi.org/10.3138/jcs.43.1.219.

5 “I Never Had a Childhood”: Narratives of Work, Play, and Loss in Postwar Rural Atlantic Canada Michael Corbett and Fred Horner

That’s the problem with history, we like to think it’s a book – that we can turn the page and move the fuck on. But history isn’t the paper its printed on. It’s memory, and memory is time, emotions and song. History is the things that stay with you. (Beatty 2016, 115)

Introduction Most identity stories include a mix of time, migration, and living between worlds. Arjun Appadurai’s (1996) conceptions of modern subjects living across multiple scapes and flows and Zygmunt Bauman’s (2000) notions of ever-emergent liquidity in social relations seem to capture this imaginary. This mobile flexible construction of modern subjectivity is counterpoised against the spatial imaginaries of Pierre Bourdieu (2000) and Manuel Castells (2009), who illustrate a divided world in which mobile elites dominate a world also populated by large underclasses who either are mired in degraded and marginal locales or are fleeing from one precarious place to another in search of housing and sustenance and employment in growing global cities (Desmond 2016; Sassen 1991; Tacoli, McGranahan, and Satterthwaite 2015).

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Yet in 2016, with Brexit in the United Kingdom in June and the election of Donald Trump in the United States in November, the revenge of place and the convergence of voices from both rural and marginal urban space have found traction, a consequence of the failure of the liberal/neoliberal political elites to deliver to the working classes, as Bageant (2007) and Frank (2005) observed earlier in this decade, and as Frank (2016) has recently noted. In “The Australian Dream,” Australian writer and braodcaster Stan Grant (2016), drawing on his Aboriginal roots, which are inflected not only by other layers of identity, but also by his own mobile trajectory, addresses the complexity of identity. His path winds through the world’s great cities and militarized trouble spots, beginning with the migration and mobility of his ancestors, leading to his own journey into higher education and a career as an international journalist, writer, and war correspondent. Grant sees himself as a beneficiary of what he calls Australia’s mobile and education-focused “open” society, while remaining fully aware of what he calls the “embedded” society that is communal and welcoming but at the same time fraught with multiple challenges and the legacies of racism. We are all born somewhere, and generally, it is a place we experience initally through a period that has come to be called childhood. Jeff Malpas (2016) illustrates how, as the locus of experience, place effectively shapes identity and agency. For some of us, to be a child is to be embedded in a family and in a familiar local geography in which the world opens up and out to the tension between our home places on the one hand, and on the other, places we can imagine. The emotional geographies of home, childhood, play, work, and schooling become memoryscapes in which we live, locate ourselves, tell identity stories, make judgments, and take decisions (Strong-Wilson et al. 2013). This chapter laces together remembered stories of masculinity and rurality beginning with (first author) Mike’s memory of Marc, built upon a remembered conversation from 1968 and a photograph taken in the mid-1940s. The story then moves on to (second author) Fred’s personal reflections about his childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s in a coastal community in Nova Scotia. These stories are reflections on midtwentieth-century rural childhoods in Atlantic Canada. Mike concludes

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with a refection that focuses on his small-town upbringing, urbanization, mobilities, and the expansion of educational opportunity in the 1970s. Together, these stories track structural industrial transformation in Atlantic Canada: they begin with a story of rural outmigration in the 1930s, followed by a story of the rise and fall of the small boat fishery in a coastal community between the 1950s and 1990s, and end with an education-focused small town migration story in the 1970s and 1980s. Methodologically, this analysis draws on memory, photographs, and a recorded conversation/interview in which the authors explore their own perceptions of rural childhood in relation to work identities. Our approach is narratological. Following Connelly and Clandinin (1990) and Clandinin (2006), we present stories that relate our own perspectives on personal history through time and space. In this account we explore the intimate places and spaces in which we grew up, those material and emotional locations (Bachelard 1994) that resonate with us and that shape our present way of looking at the world. These are, in some ways, unashamedly nostalgic retrospections in which we try to remember those emotionally laden “species of space” (Perac 1997) in which our ordinary understandings of our rural and regional home communities are invoked and represented. What we are attempting to do here is reflect on our sense of what constitutes childhood and how the way we construct this chronotopic convergence of time and place in our memories, is, in itself, one way of thinking about childhood. In this work we are roaming around in memory, visiting places, celebrating or mourning their passage. Perac noted that in his memory-writing he was opening up internal vaults containing “[his] birthplace, the cradle of [his] family, the house where [he] may have been born, the tree [he] may have seen grow (that [his] father may have planted the day [he] was born), the attic of [his] childhood filled with intact memories” (1997, 91). We are attempting to do this, too.

Mike’s Uncle Marc: A Conversation from 1968 It was a hot, sunny afternoon in 1968.1 Uncle Marc must have been looking after my cousin and me that day. We were driving somewhere in town in the Oldsmobile Super 88 he’d just purchased.

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Marc always seemed to have a nice car. He and my aunt Edna had only one child, my cousin Gary. They lived in a very large house in the centre of town. Gary seemed to have all the latest toys. To me they seemed rich. Marc worked in the local steel rolling mill that was still manufacturing parts to supply the Vietnam war effort. Times were still good, there were lots of jobs, and boys not much older than Gary and me left school early to go to work in the plants. Gary was not on that path. He was bookish, and in my extended family, the first to go to university. Uncle Marc and Aunt Edna encouraged his difference. He didn’t rough-house or play sports. He didn’t roam the town with us on bicycles. He liked school and was a top student. I would begin frequenting the local pool halls, working part-time, and skipping off school. But then the industrial economy collapsed and the normal working-class trajectory shifted from local plants to “out west” and the oil-rich cities of Edmonton and Calgary Alberta. Let me step out here to interrupt the story. What am I doing? This is a memory. I was ten years old. Why should you trust me to remember this micro-event clearly? I am not exactly sure you should; I am telling a story built on memory of a particular event that stays with me. There is an object that is also a place that itself is moving through space. I am in a car. The memory is strong. My family did not have a car at the time and so this is clear. The car (see Figure 5.1) was different; it was modern, with an instrument panel, a push-button gear shift rather than a simple gear shift like the other cars I’d been in. That was fascinating to me. That day Marc explained to me the push-button shifter and the advantages of the hydromatic transmission. I don’t know why I remember this. It may be because I was intrigued by the name of his car, the Super 88. The Super 88 seems to me now to represent that time of industrial prosperity. I asked him what the cars were like when he was a child. He replied that when he was a kid nobody had a car where he grew up. And besides, he never had a childhood anyhow. I remember that remark. I had no idea what this might mean. How could he not have had a childhood? Surely he was small once? Surely he grew up? Surely he played as I did? So I asked him. I remember his long face, the sober look, his

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Figure 5.1 1964 Oldsmobile Super 88.

large nose, and a brown mole. Was it on his cheek? He said, in his gentle voice, still inflected with an Acadian French accent, that he had been taken out of school when he was old enough to be of use on the farm, in the woods, or on the factory floor. Uncle Marc’s family left the francophone village of Cap Pélé in New Brunswick in 1939 so that his father, my grandfather, could work in an armaments factory in the small industrial centre of Amherst, Nova Scotia. My mother remembers sitting in a truck among the family’s possessions the day they left Cap Péle. No doubt Marc was in that truck too, a young teenager. After Uncle Marc’s son died in 2013, my mother found a photograph (see Figure 5.2). It depicted Marc as a young man posed outside the factory, probably in the mid-1940s. That would put him in his late teens, and this evidence suggests he was already working full-time. Amherst, Nova Scotia, was booming. He didn’t turn eighteen until 1945, so he wasn’t quite old enough to join the army; but he could work at Canada Car, an armaments plant. The photograph was mounted on heavy paper and looks professional. Marc is wearing heavy workman’s gloves, a wellworn labourer’s coat, a vest covering his shirt. Sporting an incongrous fedora, he balances nonchalantly against his bicycle. He looks strong.

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Figure 5.2 Marc in Amherst, Nova Scotia, mid-1940s.

In my memory from the seat of the Super 88 he is already an old man, but of course, my perspective is that of a ten-year-old boy. This is my uncle who claimed that he had no childhood: The Oldsmobile Super 88 pulled into the Barrel restaurant, the town’s first fried chicken fast-food outlet. I left my ball glove on the seat and went in for a soft ice cream. Gary didn’t have a glove and never played ball with us. Somehow it is unimaginable that he would. I relished the soft ice cream treat. To my cousin, this was nothing special. Uncle Marc reached into his pocket for change to give us what he never had. I remember he had the same ponderous look that peers out at me from the photograph.

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Back Then Anybody Could Do Anything: Fred and Mike in Conversation on the Digby Wharf, August 2016 We move from Mike’s remembered story of his uncle Marc to Fred’s narrative reconstruction2 of his childhood in a southwestern Nova Scotia fishing community in Digby County. This section begins with an extract from Fred’s written account of his own childhood, a story he has told many times about his own life. More importantly for him, though, it is a story of the simultaneous transformation of the community itself as the small boat fishery declined, the industrial fishery rose, and subsequently the industry “restructured” from the 1990s. Fred writes: I was born in 1953 and watched the fishery go from thriving communities to what it is today. I would like to tell the story of my life and my memories. My most memorable is waking up late in the morning, seeing the boats from my bedroom window going and coming around Boars Head empty and loaded with fish and being mad at myself for oversleeping and not getting to the shore earlier. I would go from my bedroom straight to the porch door. Mom, if she were home and not working herself at the plant, would say to me, “Aren’t you going to have breakfast?” “Ain’t got time mom,” I would say and I was out the door and heading for the shore hill. The shore hill was the only way to the beach. It was very steep and not all vehicles could get up the hill. That was one of our first jobs as kids, loading small trucks with frozen boxes of fish that were driven up the shore hill to a waiting tractor trailer at the top and that couldn’t get down to the freezer and back. (excerpt from Fred’s autobiographical writing) What follows is a transcript of part of a conversation between us on the government wharf in Digby, Nova Scotia, in August of 2016. It was a warm summer’s day. People were fishing mackerel from the cement wharf, which harboured a few representative vessels from the world’s largest inshore scallop fishing fleet, along with a few fish draggers, a large herring seiner, and a number of lobster boats back from a day’s fishing.

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Figure 5.3 Fred aboard his boat the Jeannie, 2005.

The gulls flew overhead. The wind blew in from the Annapolis Basin. Vehicles and people passed by chatting. We were seated behind a small building to break the wind, but the recording is difficult to hear in places through the rumble of the incessant breeze. It is a place Fred knows well. Mike: Did you have a childhood, Fred? Fred: We had a childhood like no child has today. We had lots to eat. We were poor. Dad didn’t make a lot of money. Dad had a problem too. He drank a lot of alcohol and his addictions came first. But we always had a lot to eat, but from the time I was a child, anything we got we had to work for. And that’s all we’d known, we didn’t know any better. We just didn’t ask for something … when I was seven, eight, nine years old, I’m going to say ten years old, we were doing things for the fishermen. You know, we were cutting bait or we were pitchin’

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fish, or we were building boxes, collecting pop bottles around the beach to make a little bit of money. And I would say probably at ten, eleven years old, my first job was … they used to … at the fish plant there was a big trough that they used to pitch full of fish and I had to keep the cutters going. It was my job to make sure there was fish in that bin. I remember that as a kid that was one of my first jobs. Dad was the foreman of the plant. He didn’t have to give me that shitty job; he could have given me any job. I had to work hard. I couldn’t stop to sit down. I’d try to sit down to get a break and they’d open it up and you’d have to keep pitchin’. Mike: When I asked you about your childhood, Fred, you jumped immediately to talking about work. Did you play? Fred: Yes, we played. Before we were old enough to work in the plants, we played. We collected pop bottles. We played; we had a ball team. Paul Morehouse used to coach us. We had hockey, we’d come to the rink sometimes. We played hockey on the ponds. We’d come home from school at 3 o’clock and we’d have to take a shovel and go up and shovel it. Time we got the ice cleared off, it was time to go home. We played and we worked. I mean everybody in our family had to work, we was all workin’. And we like I say … in the village, until the fish draggers … the guys who were on the fish draggers were making money and especially the boys whose fathers ran them. They made a lot of money working on the draggers and they had the big cars. Mike: So they played. Fred: We all played, we just had different toys. Mike: Tell me about the toys you remember, Fred. Fred: Peter Morehouse and I played. We had dirt. He had his dirt and I had my dirt. He had better toys than me, but I remember we used to haul dirt and build roads, you know smash up trucks and say we had an accident … we still talk about it when we meet one another. We say, “are we going to play in my dirt today or in your dirt.” But we most generally played in his dirt because he had better toys than I did. His parents made more money … or maybe it just seems that way. I talk about this but today I have as much as any of them, maybe not in money.

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Mike: Money? Fred: Ya, money. Money don’t necessarily make you happy. We was out there one morning and I was right up to my chest pitching fish. And he [the boat captain] come out, he had done the settlement when we was home and he handed me a check. Five thousand dollars, and I shoved that in my pocket. And I was pitching fish and after a while I said to myself, “I got five thousand dollars in my pocket, I should be happy …,” I said, “goddam it, I ain’t.” But that’s the way it was. He was a workaholic and he fished hard. Real hard. Mike: Are you a workaholic, Fred? Fred: Well, I’m not as bad as they [his elders] were. My father was an alcoholic and a workaholic. I mean when we were kids if I was walking up the roads on any summer day I would hear a set of brakes [makes a braking sound]. And it would be dad or somebody else and they would say “You not doing anything today boy? Get in the truck, I got a job for ya.” There was always … the men were doin’ the important things, but there was always jobs for kids. Every kid in the village could work ten to twelve hours a day. Mike: How did you feel about that when you were a little fella? Were you pissed off about it? Fred: Well, what having to work? I don’t ever remember being pissed off about it, Mike. I used to try to do a good job. I’m still that way. I always try to do a good job. As a boy, pitchin’ them fish, I was good at it. I knew how to load a truck with ice. And the older men they would say, “That Freddy he’s good, he’s some fast.” I didn’t stop so they give me the tough job. I was too good at it. I was told I had to do it and I did it. And I was praised for it by the men. That’s the way we were brought up. It was a close-knit village. There was a lot of competition though. Even as kids we competed to see who could do the most work, who could make the most money. Everything was work. It was work, work, work. Everybody was workin’. Mike: What did you do with the money you made? Fred: Every summer you bought a new bike. And we bought our clothes for school. Pop and chips. And we had a little bank account

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but you knew you had to work for it. We was always, always down the shore, workin’. We’d ride our bikes too. We used to take a week off. The last week of the summer we quit work and we said this is our summer we’re not working. I remember one time Barry and I went Christmas shopping. We had fifteen dollars each and we were going to spend it all. And we did. When we got to be twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old we went to work in the fish plants cuttin’ fish. We worked hard and we was there all day long cutting fish, splittin’ fish. But we raised hell. You’d be cutting and before you sent ’em to the skinners, if there was any fins you’d take your knife and cut ’em off, you know. Then you’d put the fin on the end of your knife and fling it at somebody, but you’d do it without lifting up your head. Whoever you hit, he’d turn around and say, “Who did that?” Then at the end of the day the fella who got the fin would be cleaning up and he’d put the hose on you and soak you. One of the most enjoyable things that we did was have water fights. That was our play. You got me thinking about how we used to play. Underneath the fish plant we would go fishing. We’d play and climb around on the poles, and fall in half the time. There was fish swimming around in there, fish that long and that long [gesturing with his hands]. We’d catch them and we’d sell our fish. Gordon was the only one that would buy from us. We’d catch ’em and he’d give us a cent a half a pound. Used an old bicycle rim to make a net and haul it back right full of fish. And when the fishermen weren’t around we’d get in their dories and row around the passage. Well, you know the tide runs like a bat out of hell there but what we’d do is wait for slack tide and row for Tiverton and get back before the tide turned. We did it quite a lot. That was our play too. They used to get mad at us for taking their boats and sometimes they’d hide the oars, but we’d find them. That was our play. We played some baseball and hockey around the ponds. In the winter we’d play hockey two or three times in Digby. We played around the water. Mike: How about your own kids, Fred. What about their childhoods? Fred: I learnt my kids to work. I tried to make them earn their

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money. I didn’t give it to ’em. We all try to do better for our kids than we did ourselves. I would say that my kids had it a little bit better than I did. My father, like I said, he never gave me anything. He fed me. When I was a boy he … I had to work for everything I had. First car I had I was sixteen years old and we went to the bank for that. Mike: What about school? Fred: I quit school when I was fourteen to go fishing. Now I wasn’t any academic student in school. I wasn’t stupid either, but I didn’t have any interest in it ’cause I’d always worked. At fourteen years old, or maybe I was only thirteen, or maybe even twelve I used to take a week off school to help dad go set traps. It was cold back them days. We never had insulated boots and rubber gloves and stuff like that. When I was thirteen or fourteen the guy that was supposed to go fishing with dad never showed up and I fished with him. And I quit school then and I’ve been fishing ever since, workin’ in the fish plants and fishin’. Mike: What do you remember about school? Fred: [Laughing] I remember the hell raising and the funny things that happened. I remember the old principal. I tell you, she used to get wild. Strapping the kids, she’d swing so fast the first one wouldn’t even have time to start stinging and the second one was coming. I remember going to school on the school bus. I remember my cousin and different ones. They’re men in the village now. Some of them are dead. That school was full of kids. I remember playing out there on the playground. It took two buses to haul what we called the lower part and it might have taken two from Centreville. The playground, there was the boys side and the girls side, we didn’t play together. I don’t know why it was that way, but that’s where it was. High school … I only went there for a couple years. They had As, Bs, and Cs. The first year I come I was in 7D. Now that would have been pretty low I guess. It wasn’t the academic class. They segregated us. But, my interest wasn’t in learning. Not that I couldn’t learn, but I had no interest in that stuff. I’ve been learning and I’m still learning.

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Mike: Like you say, it’s different today. Fred: The kids today don’t have the opportunity to do the things that we did. The work is not there, the fish is not there. There’s no industry. Kids today … well I mean sort of … they just expect everything. Mike: I think I had more childhood than you did, Fred. Fred: You were in a railroad town. Mike: Yes, I was working from about fourteen, little jobs in grocery stores and different places. I worked in a poolroom for a while. Then I worked on the railway to put myself through university. But as a little kid I was just running around on my bicycle, playing ball, playing road hockey. Fred: As a little kid we had lots of work too. ’Cause there was kids’ jobs. There was never enough people to do the work and there was pitching fish, or building boxes or shovelling ice, or cleaning up or sweeping floors and stuff like that. They would always find you something to do. The whole community except for the spoiled kids; and their parents give them everything you know.

When School Becomes Work: Mike’s Story

Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it. (Perac 1997, 91)

Space is doubt, as Georges Perac claims above; it is something I must manufacture. What do I have in common with Fred and Marc in the attic of my memory? Work is central to the way Fred understands himself. For Marc, though, work represented a theft of the childhood he might have had. And because of this perhaps he ensured that his only child would be granted what he missed. Part of what Marc offered his son was the expectation of staying in school and not following him into the steel plant. What he offered was a vision of masculinity that did not impose such a radical separation of work and schooling. As I think about

Figure 5.4 Mike’s Academic Persona.

my own path, I realize that I was granted an adolescent psychosocial moratorium that was a chance to integrate school and work. My own story catches up at the end of the manufacturing boom in the mid-1970s when the steel plants were closing and young men like me were more or less forced into migration or into education. My educational path was laid out amidst the collapse of industrial work in the mid-1970s, so staying in school was as natural and convenient as were Marc’s and Fred’s exits from school. To think of all of this in terms of either ability or choice is far too simple. I inhabited a time and place shaped by the collapse of the very conditions that forced/allowed Marc and Fred to enter the workforce as children. Because the work had dried up, I began the journey that would dominate my work and identity formation through a university career that was as long as my schooling. The photo in Figure 5.4 was taken in the mid-1980s when I returned to university to finish a master’s degree. While Marc and Fred were working full-time by their early teens, I was granted, by virtue of the relatively generous student loan programs of the 1970s and 1980s, the resources to forgo engagement in a full-time career into my mid-twenties. What I think these three stories show is that each of us was aspirational, but in very different conditions and across different spatial

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terrains. Marc aspired to give his son a tertiary education. The state intervened with financial support programs that made it possible for working-class youth of our generation to attend university. I managed to follow some years later. Both of us are beneficiaries of Grant’s (2016) open society that unlocks multiple mobile pathways. At the same time, Grant’s embedded society, the small communities that contain knowledge practices, traditions, and solidarities, persists, albeit under stressed and diminished conditions. Fred has watched his industry and community diminish and struggle. He has attempted to understand why this has happened and to fight against the forces he believes have created these conditions unnecessarily. While Fred’s son carries on the family business running the lobster boat, two of his four children have followed the path my cousin blazed in the early 1970s when he set out for university. While Marc was part of a rural exodus, Fred’s story represents a defence of spaces and places that have been threatened throughout his life by industrial fishing practices and government policies that have transformed the nature of work, human relations, and ecologies. The material landscape of Fred’s youth with its fish plants, busy wharves, family, fishermen, trucks, boats, bicycle, general stores, roads paved during his early childhood, school, and houses represent a lost world that has receded even while it remains alive in his memory. As the Paul Beatty extract that opens this chapter claims: history is the place that “stay[s] with you” (2016, 115). In these narratives the interplay of work, play, and schooling represents remembered assemblages of place, labour, culture, and Marx’s everchanging relations of production. Early memory for Fred relates not to a missing childhood but rather to an idealized childhood that his grandchildren will never experience. Ironically, perhaps, he remembers a childhood that is now impossible, and he feels sympathy for those who will never experience the richness, material engagement, and beauty that he did. Fred’s childhood integrated seamlessly with the busy work world of a coastal community. My family’s trek from the country created the conditions for the extended adolescence that my cousin and I experienced (Corbett 2013). In each of the three narratives here, stretching across time and rural social space, the demarcations between education, work, and play, as well as

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between childhood and adulthood, are problematic and fuzzy. Our three stories represent choice and decision set against the backdrop of the particular chronotopes of industrial transformation.

Conclusion The ambivalence represented in the contrast between Marc’s and Fred’s perspectives shows the complexity of the emotional geographies of schooling and social change in rural communities. What is also evident is how each of us has difficulty separating work from play as well as childhood from adulthood. Do we mark these distinctions as important in the sense that they serve as a way of separating men (who work physically) from boys (who play and go to school)? These are also moral distinctions that associate appropriate masculinities with particular kinds of work and activity more generally and that may actually reinforce conventional masculine identities rather than contest them. Unlike Fred, Marc sought to disrupt established patterns of masculinity, supporting his son to imagine a path different from his own. Perhaps here Marc used his own sense of loss productively through parenting. Indeed, in the literature on rural youth aspirations, it is a sensibility like that of Marc that is requested – even demanded – of rural parents today as the industrial infrastructure in primary and secondary industries renders much place-based manual work redundant (Corbett 2016). The idea of cultural change in rural communities typically promotes a pro-education sensibility and the need for a new kind of worker who treats seriously not only technical but also intellectual and symbolic knowledge work. This often means rejecting traditional masculinities that separate work and schooling in a radical way. This new vision of a learning culture situates the modern rural subject as a deployable yet stable, educable, and change-ready member of a flexible contemporary labour force (Corbett and Bœck 2016). These stories can be read as representing how the sharp distinction between work and play has supported narrow ways of thinking about both education and masculinity. When work considered appropriate to men is defined as heavy physical labour (to be either embraced or escaped), and when education is simultantously positioned as a child-like

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escape from the demands of that labour, it becomes possible to see the deep challenge posed by cultural change as well as by modernizing sensibilities and mobilities promoted for contemporary rural development.

n otes 1 The idea of a remembered conversation can only be related as a story. The data here consist of images reconstructed in a highly personal way. Rather than claiming any sense of objectivity, validity, or reliability, Mike offers this fiction, stimulated by the discovery of a photograph after the death of his uncle Marc in 2011. 2 Fred and Mike have been discussing life and work in coastal and rural communities for more than two decades. We have worked together on Fred’s lobster boat and in Mike’s classroom. reference s Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Translated by Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Bageant, Joe. 2007. Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War. New York: Three Rivers Press. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beatty, Paul. 2016. The Sellout: A Novel. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Translated by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Castells, Manuel. 2009. The Power of Identity: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, vol. 2 (2nd ed. with new preface). Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Clandinin, D. Jean. 2006. “Narrative Inquiry: A Methodology for Studying Lived Experience.” Research Studies in Music Education 27(1): 44–54. https://doi.org/ 10.1177%2F1321103X060270010301. Connelly, Michael, and D. Jean Clandinin. 1990. “Stories of Experience and Narrative Inquiry.” Educational Researcher 19(5): 2–14. https://doi.org/10.3102%2F00 13189X019005002. Corbett, Michael. 2013. “Remembering French in English.” In Productive Remem-

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bering and Social Agency, edited by Teresa Strong-Wilson, Claudia Mitchell, Susann Allnutt, and Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, 89–103. Rotterdam: Sense. – 2016. “Rural Futures: Development, Aspirations, Mobilities, Place, and Education.” Peabody Journal of Education: Issues of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations 91(2): 270–82. https://doi.org/10.1080/0161956X.2016.1151750 Corbett, Michael, and Unn-Doris Bœck. 2016. “Emerging Educational Subjectivities in the Global Periphery: New Worker Identities for New Times.” In Routledge International Handbook of Rural Studies, edited by Mark Shucksmith and David L. Brown, 544–55. New York: Routledge. Desmond, Matthew. 2016. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York: Crown. Frank, Thomas. 2005. What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (reprint ed.). New York: Henry Holt. – 2016. Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? New York: Metropolitan Books. Grant, Stan. 2016. “The Australian Dream: Blood, History, and Becoming.” Quarterly Essay 64: 1–80. Malpas, Jeff. 2016. “Placing Understanding / Understanding Place.” Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions 56(3): 379–91. https://doi.org/10. 1007/s11841-016-0546-9. Perac, Georges. 1997. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Edited and translated by John Sturrock. New York: Penguin Classics. Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Strong-Wilson, Theresa, Claudia Mitchell, Susann Allnutt, and Kathleen PithouseMorgan, eds. 2013. Productive Remembering and Social Agency. Rotterdam: Sense. Tacoli, Cecilia, Gordon McGranahan, and David Satterthwaite. 2015. Urbanisation, Rural-Urban Migration, and Urban Poverty. London: International Institute for Environment and Development’s Human Settlement Group. https://www. researchgate.net/profile/Cecilia_Tacoli/publication/273888747_Urbanisation_ Rural-Urban_Migration_and_Urban_Poverty/links/550fe8860cf21287416c6b45. pdf (accessed 29 January 2016).

6 Making Friends in the Middle of Nowhere: Handmade Dolls and a Back-to-theLander Childhood April Mandrona

Introduction As children, our playthings are an integral part of our real world as sensory objects, and of our imaginative world. Dolls and toys become intimates: we invite them to tea, tell them our secrets and explain our worries, and embrace them while we fall asleep. For us as children they are not merely surrogate beings; they take on distinct personalities with their own likes and dislikes, friendships, and struggles. In this chapter I consider aspects of rural girlhood through an examination of popular commercial dolls of my childhood such as Barbie, and those that I created growing up in rural New Brunswick as a daughter of back-to-the-landers. I begin with a look at the back-to-the-land movement and associated creative production, then consider textuality – the study of the relationship between material culture and social meaning – and follow this with a brief history of commercial and handmade dolls in the context of significant craft movements. As a counterpoint to the profit-driven world of the doll industry, I argue that back-to-the-lander counterculture do-it-yourself (diy) ethics/aesthetics, with its grounding in feminist perspectives, presents a space within which the relationship between childhood identities and objects is expanded. The movement involved mostly the migration to rural areas of young baby-boomer urbanites,

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most of whom were white and middle-class. Some estimate that at the peak of the urban-to-rural exodus in the late 1970s, there were more than one million back-to-the-landers in rural North America, many of whom settled on small individual plots of land rather than on large farms or communes (Jacob 1997). “The back-to-the-land imperative was to reject the old and to start anew, to discover and create a new society based in values of love, freedom, and respect for the natural world, and the rejection of modern materialism” (Spicer 2012, 20). Positioned within this framework, the handmade doll becomes a possible starting point not only for the subversion of the readymade identities offered by storebought dolls but also for the creation of new representations of rural girlhood. By engaging with an autoethnographic examination of my back-to-the-lander memories of childhood doll-making, I explore how this creative outlet opened up possibilities for movement across and within the various planes of rural girlhood identity.

The Back-to-the-Land Movement Back-to-the-land refers to a migration from urban to rural combined with an alternative cultural ethos that differed from that of mainstream society as well as a desire to (re)connect with the natural world (Halfacree 2007). Tracing the emergence of the term, Halfacree (2001) describes its roots in the social unrest of the 1840s and in romantic representations of the rural as idyllic, safe, and healthy. Between 1880 and 1914, this latter sentiment, which resurfaced in the utopian and “simple life” philosophies of William Morris and Edward Carpenter, spurred the bourgeois trend of going back to the English countryside. Nature was equated with purity and goodness. The importance of manual labour and the making of items by hand was emphasized through small-scale agriculture and handicraft revival (for example, the Chipping Campden Guild of Handicraft1). With ideological roots in previous movements, the back-to-thelanders of the 1960s and ’70s were driven primarily by a distrust and rejection of the so-called establishment or the prescribed life trajectory that involved activities such as acquiring a mortgage to buy a house and working a nine-to-five job. Wilbur (2013) notes the scholarly categorization of back-to-the-landers as anti-urbanites who, because of

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concerns about the negative characteristics of urban life, including distrust of politicians and the government’s involvement in foreign conflict (expanded on below), crime, pollution, overcrowding, and taxes, reject the city in favour of country life. However, rather than representing a purely antithetical positioning, the motivations of these urban-to-rural migrants can be described as pro-rural. The rural offered more perceived control over one’s life, along with opportunities to develop practices of self-sufficiency and alternative modes of being, and of interacting with people and the environment. Often, it was possible to live comparatively cheaply and thus be able to work fewer hours so as to leave more time for creative pursuits. My father, for example, recalls his time in British Columbia in the early 1970s when it was possible to stake a small mineral claim to gain access to land on which to live, which many people did while circumventing the legal requirement to develop that land. This phenomenon illuminates “the gradual opening of imagined and realized possibilities and spontaneous action that chips away (however incrementally) at the structures that support coercive and hierarchal relationships” (Wilbur 2013, 157). In my life this opening included women asserting their self-reliance by exploring conventionally male pursuits such as carpentry and farming and learning the requisite skills. Indeed, it was primarily my mother who built our first home (see Figure 6.1). Doll-making was part of this broader spectrum of skills that could bend conventional gender roles, knowledge structures, or aesthetic sensibilities, through the active searching for alternative creative forms and disengagement from restrictive social structures. For my family and other back-to-the-landers, embedding oneself in the wilderness also represented an alternative to the religious norms of cities and suburbs. Homesteading and associated experiments with self-sufficiency and equality helped redefine spirituality in ecological terms (Gould 2005).

Textuality and the Study of Objects How, then, may remnants and objects of these rural pasts be understood? Recently, notions of textuality have developed in social science research as part of a methodological approach for the analysis of various sociocultural phenomena. Textuality is not limited to traditional notions of

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Figure 6.1 Our first home, the “Comfrey Cottage,” built mostly by my mother, Elaine Mandrona.

text as it relates to written language in that it encompasses other carriers of meaning such as objects, clothing, and artwork. Therefore, rather than conceptualizing objects as operating within a system of fixed, inherent meanings, I will attempt to provide a more fluid account, or, as suggested by Judy Attfield, move “beyond the static interpretation derived from linguistic theory which transforms material objects into images and ‘reads’ them according to a self-referential sign system” (1996, 81). To examine the various and layered meanings of dolls in the context of rural girlhood identity, I look towards alternative ways of conceptualizing the meaning of things as dynamic so as to replace the static meanings that are implied in an application of the simple decoding process. As physical things, dolls “are used to mediate the interior mental world of the individual, the body and the exterior objective world beyond the self through which a sense of identity is constructed and transacted within social relations” (Attfield 2000, 123). The relationship between objects and people

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is reciprocal, with both possessing a certain degree of agency: the object does not exert total control over the behaviour, emotions, and identity of the individual, nor is the object simply an empty shell or blank surface onto which the individual projects various mental constructions. As Attfield describes it, an artifact – [t]he thing fabricated by means of human technology – at the same time also refers to the object in the material-culture sense which defies the duality of Cartesian thought that separates nature from culture and form from content, and therefore the physical thing from the idea that gave it form in the first place, or the meaning that it accrues in the course of its existence. The material culture object, rather than splitting, conflates subject and object as a social relation. (125) I argue that when I made dolls by hand and thus engaged in the artistic process, the potential space of exchange between this object, my rural self, and the social world in which the two existed was increased.

A Brief History of Dolls as Seen through Major Craft Movements While contemporary technology is celebrated as a sign of progress, it exists always in relation to what Susan Stewart refers to as the “antithetical mode of production: production by hand, a production that is unique and authentic.” For entwined with our marvel at what is massproduced is a “nostalgia for preindustrial labour, a nostalgia for craft” (1984, 68). This nostalgia is rooted in constructed versions of childhood and history. But “[t]his childhood is not a childhood as lived; it is a childhood voluntarily remembered, a childhood manufactured from its material survival. Thus it is a collage made of presents rather than a reawakening of a past” (145). In a consideration of this idea more broadly, it is possible to examine how the major craft movements of the past two centuries – most notably the Arts and Craft Movement and the diy ethos of 1960s and 1970s back-to-the-land activism – developed in response to a society that was becoming increasingly industrialized

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and driven by capitalist agendas. A return to hand-making is characterized by a cyclical pattern spurred by a disillusionment with social circumstances and patterns of consumption. This experience is concretized in the handmade doll and its commercial counterpart, illuminating a longing for a present that approximates an idyllic version of the past. Different and competing notions of what it means to be a rural girl emerge, as it were, between the two strata of dolls along with the versions of gendered identity that are considered desirable. The rural handmade doll fashioned from materials that just happened to be available in a particular environment can embody the maker’s connection to that place. It makes visible the practical and emotional links between the rural lives of girls and their creative work. The Industrial Revolution marked a significant turning point in relation to the convergence of technological advancement and individual enterprise. This led to a notable movement away from dolls being made by hand and ushered in the mass-produced and commercially available ones. No longer were fashion dolls an artisanal item available only to the financially elite; the continued rise of the middle class meant there was a burgeoning consumer market for manufactured goods. Also, the didactic purpose of dolls began to shift away from its focus on the desirability of wealth and the development of a good and devoted citizen (Peers 2004) towards the socialization of young girls via prescribed play that involved the teaching of general decorum, for example, with regard to entertaining and attending funerals (Forman-Brunell 1993). But the saturation of the market with European bisque dolls and their descendants, the American composition dolls, was not without its critics. In an interesting parallel with the back-to-the-land movement in its opposition to the urban, the international Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a reaction against the rise of technology and its resulting social ramifications, such as the devaluing of skilled labour and poor working conditions. Questions were also raised about the “organization of production and ethical consumption, and indeed about how daily life itself was constructed” (Rowbotham 2008, 44). In order to mend the disintegrating social structures, a return to handicraft was encouraged, and the importance of people reconnecting through hands-on creative activities was emphasized. Here,

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again, we can see a useful comparison with the move of the back-to-thelanders away from the urban towards the rural. The influence of the movement spread to the domestic sphere, eliciting concern over social welfare among mothers as well as sparking a renewed interest in more traditional playthings such as rag dolls. For example, German doll-maker Kathe Kruse stressed the arts and crafts ethos in her anti–mass production cloth dolls with their simplicity of features and bodies that were responsive to embrace. This fed a pre-existing preference held by young girls for dolls made of basic materials (Forman-Brunell 1993) and directed the pedagogical function of the dolls towards mothering and nurturing behaviours (Peers 2004) and away from the essentially urban protocols of conducting tea parties and related social protocols. The Arts and Craft Movement had lost momentum by the First World War; however, its foundational philosophies resurfaced decades later. After the austerity and frugality of the Second World War era, the West began to see increased prosperity brought on by a restructuring of the economy towards big business and free market enterprise. As the American governmental role in private enterprise increased, so too did a preoccupation with overseas military conquests such as the Bay of Pigs invasion and the war in Vietnam. This led to a growing discontent with big structures, both private and bureaucratic, among the younger population. For the first time, there was a substantial generation of youth that had grown up without material deprivation; this allowed them to look beyond day-to-day struggles and to challenge the status quo through political activism and social criticism. A major part of this paradigm shift was the search for alternative lifestyles that emphasized social freedoms, community, and a return to simpler modes of existence such as the hippie and back-to-the-land movements (Smith 2010). In the latter, especially, there was a valorization of pre-industrial ways of life that contributed to the revival of the handmade. A number of manuals were published that provided basic instructions on how to do things for oneself, including making dolls. One hugely popular publication was Alicia Bay Laurel’s Living on the Earth (1970), a handwritten and illustrated book that contained a section on the making of handmade dolls and toys from inexpensive and/or natural materials such as fabric scraps, nuts, foam, and string, thus providing a contrast to the

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commercialism of Barbie and her plastic contemporaries. Indicative of an open and experimental approach to learning, instructions for stuffed dolls and beanbag creatures appear along with short segments concerned with childbirth at home and making wooden barrel furniture. For rural women and girls, this meant a form of self-determination that could be achieved through physical labour of all sorts, as well as a newly discovered malleability of the corresponding feminine identities of various domestic items. As Mitchell and Reid-Walsh contend, “the act of handling the commodified emblems of conventional, Western femininity in a leisure activity has provided, and continues to provide, girls with a way to literally and conceptually manipulate the concept of commodified homogenous womanhood” (2002, 202). In taking this a step further – beyond handling to creating – I suggest that it was possible for rural girls themselves to deconstruct and construct girlhood identities beyond those performed through commercially available dolls. The dolls that I created as a child were also representations of counter-urbanism, one that sought to tap into the spiritual connection to nature. To me the dolls were physical manifestations of nature’s mystical powers. Many of them modelled a diversity that was lacking in my rural upbringing, or they anthropomorphized the rural environment itself in the form of fairies and elves.

Looking Back: Memory Work and Children’s Material Culture Memory-work, an emergent method in the field of childhood studies, uses adult remembering as a means of investigating the relationship between children and their material world. I remember enjoying the freedom of growing up rural to explore and wander around. There was loneliness but I was not afraid to be by myself; I was content in the quiet. Mitchell and Reid-Walsh suggest that “far from regarding memory work as a corrective strategy (‘after all what can children know’), we see it as giving researchers access to components of the ‘afterlife’ of childhood that are not otherwise available, either ethically or conceptually” (2002, 56). This approach is based on the premise that “memory is a process, an activity, a construct; and that memory has social and cultural as well

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as personal resonance” (Kuhn 2010, 298). It is fairly obvious that memory is far from infallible. However, the use of adult memory-work becomes important since, although certain historical objects, such as my handmade dolls, may still exist to be looked at, touched, and smelled, as keepsakes I, as an adult, no longer play with or talk to them, so a retrospective interrogation of my secret life as a rural child seems to me to be potentially illuminating. Objects of material culture from my childhood past become a portal through which I can access a time when I shared a different form of connection to the sensory world around me. Remembering back to my childhood includes remembering how the divisions between living and inanimate objects, such as dolls, were blurred, and this is to remember how closely these objects were connected to my rural life and to my child psyche but also how they help shape my childhood self in relation to those around me. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Annette Kuhn (1995, 2010) and Mitchell and Reid-Walsh (2002), I create a form of memory-text around my handmade dolls and how they relate to the formation of my sense of being a rural girl. Revisiting my childhood home where artifacts of my earlier life remain on shelves and in boxes, I begin with the physical objects themselves and engage in acts of “deliberate remembering” (Mitchell 2010, 98), using the sensory properties of the dolls as triggers for their purpose, method of creation, and use in a specific context. The dolls I made reflected my desires and observations of the world around me. In making handmade dolls, I was present for the entire life course of each doll, from conception to use, from initial states as blobs of stuffing and bits of string, to more substantial forms that then gave rise to unique characteristics and personalities. Creating a doll from scratch generates a complexity of memories because there is an engagement with multiple aspects of the self – creative, physical, emotional. This process offers something different from getting a store-bought doll: one you make yourself also becomes associated with memories of accomplishment and mastery over materials. The materials for my doll-making and the skills needed to create them, such as sewing and assemblage, were related to the activities needed to navigate rural life as well as to our straitened circumstances.

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My Childhood Handmade Doll and Its Counterpart To retell snippets of my past and my connection to dolls as material objects, I must begin with an account of a time when I did not yet exist. My parents had immigrated to Canada from the United States in the 1970s during the Vietnam War, creating a substantial physical as well as psychological distance between their respective families. My mother came from Connecticut with her first husband, a conscientious objector. My California-born father went awol after receiving his army medic training when he was about to be shipped to Vietnam. Following my mother’s divorce, my parents met and settled in southeastern New Brunswick, having borrowed money to purchase a five-hundred-acre plot of farmland. They, along with a small number of Canadians and other expat Americans in the area, formed a back-to-the-land community, with the aim of providing for themselves and living off what the land offered. This included growing their own food, building their own homes (some of which, like mine, were off-grid), and supporting themselves financially by developing trades and hands-on skills. This so-called return to nature and a less complicated existence fed their longing for the pre-industrial and their rejection of national opulence and mobility. My parents’ new lifestyle choice represented for them an escape from what they saw as the materialism of their childhood, an escape from the social pressures of the 1950s, a time when, in the words of my father, as I remember them, “wealth outweighed imagination.” Indeed, during the postwar years short-sighted optimism abounded as pundits claimed instantaneous economic prosperity and energy costs too cheap to meter (Brown 2011). Although my parents had decided to distance themselves from certain aspects of the commercialized world – they avoided hallmarks of popular culture such as television – born, as I was, in 1984, I was exposed to many contemporary store-bought dolls. Most of these dolls that I owned as a child came from female relatives on my mother’s side of the family. They were picked out for me by my aunt and grandmother and came in the mail as gifts for Christmas and birthdays. They were of two popular

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varieties – the porcelain and the Barbie doll (see Figures 6.2 and 6.3). They signified important life and social events, celebrations that typically involve a family presence, but these miniature bodies offered only a tenuous connection to relatives I rarely saw and knew little about. I did, however, play readily with them. The porcelain dolls were designed as collectables rather than playthings, and the distance created by keeping them shelved was unsettling to me. One of the first porcelain dolls I received was dressed in a replica turn-of-the-century dress and bonnet in a pink floral print, and upon her arrival at Christmas, my wooden doll cradle was designated as hers despite her older appearance. I proceeded to instruct my mother to write out the name that I had made up for her in large block letters on a piece of note paper – kabatica – which I taped to the inside of the crib so that, in my words, I would “always remember.” This placed her in the position of a child and made me the adult, who, upon what I thought of as her birth or arrival at Christmas, I named and proceeded to take care of, rocking her to sleep in her cradle. After I toted her around for some time and performed a few alterations such as cutting a slit down the back of her dress and sewing on a strip of Velcro so that I could change her clothes because she would often accompany me outdoors, eventually Kabatica’s inflexibility led to her deterioration and her placement back on the shelf with the other porcelain dolls. In order that she retain some of her original tidy appearance, I first cut the large mat that her pipe curls had become, thus creating a much shorter bob. Kabatica and the other porcelain dolls represented the lack of a deep or prolonged emotional connection – a space of incompleteness – for they were not designed with the needs and desires of a young rural user in mind. Also, they were not picked out by my relatives (who all resided in large cities) to fit in with my rural lifestyle and tendencies towards outdoor play. The porcelain dolls of my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s were a throwback to many of the earlier versions with period dress and infantilized physical features that still carried with them socially prescribed meanings and specific patterns of use such as the promotion of mothering behaviours. Despite my attempts at disrupting the quiet compliance of these dolls with outdoor use and clothing alterations, it was a confined space to operate within and ultimately they remained tethered to an identity of pretty, precious things to be looked at.

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Figure 6.2 Left Barbie dolls, 1987 to 1998. Figure 6.3 Right Porcelain dolls.

As noted by Lynn Spigel, in the doll’s world “there is room enough for almost anyone’s fantasy” (2001, 311). Because Barbie can be conceptualized as a sort of blank slate (she can be anything, her identity is changeable – doctor, figure skater, hairdresser) childhood play and imaginings allows for the projection of different meanings onto her. But prepackaged fantasy has its limitations – in this case it was largely selfcontained and as a result came up short. Instead, my own inadequacy in attempting to influence how others saw me was underscored, despite repeating the Barbie mantra “I can be anything.” Barbie moves through her multiple identities with apparent ease, becoming anything at will. She is unencumbered by the realities of growing up rural, unencumbered by the effects of poverty and isolation. But for young rural girls like myself then, reality was often less flexible and possession of the identities that I yearned to embody was far more difficult because in order to be viable these selves had to be recognized and accepted by others in

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Figure 6.4 Young April using miniature sewing machine, c. 1989.

the social world around me. For childhood me in her rural environment, this recognition seemed unlikely. My mother and my father had been well-provided for as children, but a lack of communication and understanding between them and their parents created rifts early on. The absence of meaningful connection and perhaps a yearning for a past that they themselves had not experienced led my parents to stress the importance of the parent–child relationship during my upbringing. Home-schooled until the age of ten, I spent a great deal of time engaged in creative activities with my parents. Being the only child of two self-employed people and living in rural seclusion also offered ample time for guided and independent creative exploration. During this time, I made dolls and other related materializations such as anthropomorphic creatures more than any other object. My mother was my primary source of knowledge regarding the so-called feminine pursuits such as sewing, crocheting, and knitting, and it was by using these skills that I created my first doll forms. I learned to sew by hand and follow small patterns we cut out of typing paper. The first attempts

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Figure 6.5 Left Cloth doll, made by eight-year-old April. Cloth, beads. Figure 6.6 Right Flower fairy doll, made by twelve-year-old April. Clay, silk flowers, cloth.

were somewhat clumsy; the patterns were cut in a way that resembled bloated stick people, making the dolls appear as if they were frozen in various callisthenic positions. Then my mother introduced me to the Singer sewing machine and we used patterns photocopied from library books or picked out of the Simplicity catalogue (see Figure 6.4). These provided basic blueprints and methods of construction that could be adapted to suit a specific vision. This was a form of learning based on shared active and prolonged engagement between my mother and me, but it also taught me the basics of self-teaching that I might never have acquired had I not been a rural child. I began to expand into other media, working my way through books on papier maché and clay. I made mixed media dolls from fabric, string, wood (see Figures 6.5, 6.7, and 6.9), and the occasional dried apple

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Figure 6.7 Teddy with knit sweater, made by fourteen-year-old April. Faux fur, yarn, ribbon.

or corn husk. It was through this intimate act of making and skill-sharing that I developed independence and resourcefulness but also participated in a network of social relationships in my rural environment. This in turn contributed to the conscious and unconscious messages the homemade dolls conveyed, for they became surfaces of possibility that could evolve and expand in various directions depending on the medium, the construction technique, and the imagery employed. It was not that the dolls did not make reference to indicators of normative gender identities such as particular styles of dress or body features like made-up faces but that they were closer to projections of my inner world. They held the magic that I was sure existed in my surroundings. The rural was a space that engaged the visual and mystical imagination. Some of the dolls I made I kept to play with or to use as decorative pieces, such as the fairies (see Figures 6.6 and 6.8), but a significant portion of them I gave away as gifts, mostly to the women in my family. Being able to make these dolls as gifts and having the time and materials

Figure 6.8 Fairy queen, made by thirteen-year-old April. Clay, fabric, wool, acrylic, jewellery findings.

was a function of my life as a rural child. In addition to giving away homemade dolls, I sold them in my mother’s craft store, where I had set up a miniature version of the sales counter with some plinths and black velvet.

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Figure 6.9 Toothpick dolls, made by ten-year-old April. Toothpicks, embroidery floss.

This, I think, was an experience to which few urban children can lay claim. I attached pins to small dolls (see Figure 6.9) so that they could be worn, but I also had stand-alone pieces, some made from repurposed items like old 35mm film canisters. Here, again, the make-do thinking of back-to-the-landers is evident. The activities of giving away and selling the handmade situated me as an active participant in the regulation of cross-generational relationships as well as within the larger social spheres of production and exchange, providing me with a new-found sense of agency, one I would have been highly unlikely to have had as a city child. This situation recalls Lynn Spigel’s (2001) comments about the socially constructed meaning of objects and the relation of traditionally disempowered groups to them. She suggests that artisan labour, as an activity performed by women, plays a central role in the assignment of new value to objects previously devalued in the larger systems of power. It is through the gendered and relational practice of craft that

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women influence the cultural and economic currency of objects in contemporary capitalist society. Where better to have done this as a child than in rural New Brunswick? This anachronistic approach to changing not only the identity of craft objects but also that of their makers stands in contrast to the popular affirmation of female culture – girl power – that was surfacing during my childhood. This was a call to arms for girls to embrace the power of their femininity and assert themselves as capable and independent individuals. However, for all its exuberance the girl power discourse said very little about what it actually took to become a strong, self-made woman of the times (Charles 2010), much less in a rural context. This is reminiscent of the proclamations of Barbie, who, by the time I was a teenybopper, had become a poster doll for the girl power movement, with her unlimited wealth generated by a series of glamorous careers. For although Barbie was a surgeon, a pilot, and a world leader before real women had the opportunity to fill these roles, the struggles that women endured to gain rights and recognition had largely failed to make it into her popular narrative. The easy jump between wanting something, trying it out, and enjoying huge success suggests prefabricated rather than self-generated empowerment. This is ultimately an empty gesture and overlooks the ways in which girls can achieve actualization through practices that are often subtle even while creative and innovative. The narrative also underplays the physical and emotional labour that rural girls and women must exert to attain money, material goods, and success – success that is presented in a specifically urban life.

Conclusion This chapter highlights the possibilities of meaning that can be uncovered by an exploration of the social and personal significance of children’s dolls, particularly those made as part of growing up rural on a backto-the-land homestead. Deliberate remembering of these experiences enables the strand of connection between my adult world and that of my childhood to be maintained. In the absence of this tether, an engaged understanding of current childhood creative production becomes less likely. The handmade doll presents the potential for girls to participate in the

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construction of rural girlhood identities. Such creative acts do not eradicate the vulnerability that comes with being rural, but they do offer a way of navigating the confines of such a life. The handmade doll can operate both as a conduit to external realities of young girls and as a catalyst for change in their sense of self. In the face of tumultuous circumstances, making a doll can mean literally and figuratively taking something into one’s own hands regardless of how small those hands are or how small the act of affirmation. Productive engagement with rural spaces in this way demonstrates the innovative, resilient, and generative capacities enacted with and through the land. The alternative modes of making and creative play enabled by my doll creation reflect the broader role of rural spaces in supporting children’s agency and expression.

n ote 1 In the early 1900s, Chipping Campden was a centre for the Cotswold Arts and Crafts Movement. Charles Robert Ashbee set up the Guild of Handicraft, which specialized in metalworking, jewellery, copper and wrought-iron work, and furniture. reference s Attfield, Judy. 1996. “Barbie and Action Man: Adult Toys for Girls and Boys, 1959–1993.” In The Gendered Object, edited by Pat Kirkham, 80–9. New York: Manchester University Press. – 2000. Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life. New York: Berg. Brown, Dona. 2011. Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Charles, Claire. 2010. “Competing Hetero-Femininities: Young Women, Sexualities, and ‘Girl Power’ at School.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23(1): 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518390903447135. Forman-Brunell, Miriam. 1993. Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830–1930. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gould, Rebecca Kneale. 2005. “Back to the Land Movements.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, edited by Bron Taylor, 148–51. New York: Continuum. Halfacree, Keith. 2001. “Going ‘Back-to-the-Land’ Again: Extending the Scope of

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Counterurbanization.” Espace, Populations, Sociétés 1–2: 161–70. https://doi.org/ 10.3406/espos.2001.1984. – 2007. “Back-to-the-Land in the Twenty-First Century: Making Connections with Rurality.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie / Journal of Economic and Social Geography 98(1): 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663. 2007.00371.x. Jacob, Jeffrey. 1997. New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Kuhn, Annette. 1995. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. New York: Verso. – 2010. “Memory Texts and Memory Work: Performances of Memory in and with Visual Media.” Memory Studies 3(4): 298–313. https://doi.org/10.1177%2 F1750698010370034. Laurel, Alicia Bay. 1970. Living on the Earth. Berkeley: Book Works. Mitchell, Claudia. 2010. “Researching Things, Objects, and Gendered Consumption in Childhood Studies.” In Childhood and Consumer Culture, edited by David Buckingham and Vebjørg Tinstad, 94–109. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. 2002. Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood. New York: Routledge. Peers, Juliet. 2004. The Fashion Doll: From Bébé Jumeau to Barbie. New York: Berg. Rowbotham, Sheila. 2008. “Arts, Crafts, and Socialism.” History Today 59(2): 44–50. Smith, Rochelle. 2010. “Antislick to Postslick: diy Books and Youth Culture Then and Now.” Journal of American Culture 33(3): 207–16. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1542-734X.2010.00744.x. Spicer, Lisa Gruwell. 2012. “Finding Common Ground: When a Hippie Counterculture Immigrated to a Rural Redwood Community.” ma thesis, Western Washington University. Spigel, Lynn. 2001. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham: Duke University Press. Stewart, Susan. 1984. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilbur, Andrew. 2013. “Growing a Radical Ruralism: Back-to-the-land as Practice and Ideal.” Geography Compass 7(2): 149–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12023.

7 Exploring Memory and Place through Wet Plate Collodion Photography: How a Newfoundland Childhood Inspired the Work Trace Karen Stentaford

Photographs are about memory – or perhaps about the absence of memory, providing pictures to fill voids, illustrating and sometimes falsifying our collective memory. (Lippard 1998, 60)

Topsail I set out in my station wagon, which also served as my darkroom, to drive across Newfoundland using only my childhood memories as a framework to make photographs. Travelling alone and with no set schedule, I had the luxury of time. Detours, backtracking, and exploring became my way of working. This pace and workflow echoed the freedom one experiences as a child playing and exploring the landscape, the very source of inspiration for this work. The same type of discovery I remembered having as a child came flooding back as I made my way east. I had a rough plan in place for where I wanted to stop – locations that were tied to very specific memories – though I also embraced the chance connections that grew from coming across new locations I had never visited but that nevertheless triggered memories or emotions tied to my childhood experiences. After extending what is normally a day of driving

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into just under a week, I arrived on the east coast of Newfoundland to continue my work in Topsail. Topsail no longer feels like the rural setting in which I grew up and where I had explored the rugged coastline, the roads and footpaths of my community. Like many communities that lie just outside of city centres, Topsail is transitioning into a distant suburb, in this case, of St John’s. It is gradually being developed into streets filled with repetitively designed houses that neatly line the streets. The terrain of the coastline is challenging to develop, so thankfully it is one of the places that remains close to how I remember it. But where we would once walk fifteen minutes down the road from our house to see the train race by on its tracks, now leads to a maintained walking trail instead. Many other features have changed beyond recognition. Having visited Topsail every year since moving away, I have seen and documented the gradual shift from barren land to developed community. For me, returning to work on Trace specifically, what intrigues me is my own awareness of what remains mixed with an anticipation of what’s to come. I move through – search for – a landscape that no longer exists. But I also allow new places that trigger my memories to become, themselves, visual representations of those memories. And so I find myself approaching this landscape with a sense of both discovery and return. Even though it has been over twenty-five years since I lived in Newfoundland, I have always identified it as home. Yet somehow it took me years to realize and understand that my childhood explorations of the landscape and natural environment in which I grew up have undeniably shaped my creative work. Trace is the result of how my connection to place has been shaped by my childhood memories of growing up in Newfoundland and my interest in the relationship between photography and memory. I first recognized this connection between my current work and my childhood experiences during an artist residency in Iceland in 2013. My attraction to the vast barren landscape and rugged coast of Iceland felt comfortable, even familiar. Everything seemed to come clear in terms of why I make the work that I do and my connection to place, my attraction to landscapes devoid of people, and my interest in exploring memory through photography. Ironically, it was while travelling through Iceland that I realized that rather than just use my childhood memories

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as a means of connecting to new places, I needed to focus directly on the source of my inspiration – my connection to the landscape as a child.

Remembering Cameras are clocks for seeing –Barthes (1981, 15)

There is a theory that memories are not static and that they are most definitely not safe from being altered, influenced, and falsified when recalled. If you want to keep a memory pure, then it is best not to recall it since each time the memory is raised the accuracy of the experience becomes further and further away from the actuality. The memory is altered with slight changes each time it is recalled, referencing more the last time it was remembered over the original impression left from the experience. It grows less precise with each retrieval; our brain distorts information that we believe to be safe (Kandel 2006). Scrutinizing how I remember, and its effect on my sense of self, was also a factor leading me back to Newfoundland to look at my personal history. Photographs have the ability to trigger our senses, to tell stories. They are also widely viewed as tools to remember. In theory, if unaltered, photographs do re-present information that is accurate. However, they can also replace the original memory or even create a new one. Eric R. Kandel speaks of his interest and excitement surrounding memory in his book, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind (2006). Memory has always fascinated me. Think of it. You can recall at will your first day in high school, your first date, your first love. In doing so you are not only recalling the event, you are also experiencing the atmosphere in which it occurred – the sights, sounds, and smells, the social setting, the time of day, the conversations, the emotional tone. Remembering the past is a form of mental time travel; it frees us from the constraints of time and space and allows us to move freely along completely different dimensions (Kandel 2006). The perspective that memory frees us from the constraints of time and space is an exciting one. However, when coupled with the way in which memories are altered by the act of

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recollection, this excitement shifts to a curiosity, more specifically, a curiosity regarding the accuracy of my own most important memories. I have a fear of not remembering, of losing my ability to time-travel back to the majestic landscapes of Topsail. My photographic process quite literally helps me return: these images are the memories of the place that informs my work and my greater connection to place. They do not necessarily depict a landmark to reference specificity; rather, they represent accessing my memories from a spiritual place. It is the recognition of the influence of my childhood memories, and the very specific fragility of so-called true memory, that are the sources of inspiration for Trace. In making the work, I have also referenced existing photographs and snapshots from my youth. One image from my childhood has always stood out, and I continue to look at it often. It depicts my father with his arms around me and my brother at the edge of the cliff at Cape Spear. I remember my excited mood that day and all our laughter as we made our way around the barren, wind-whipped landscape. After directing us where to stand, my mother took the photograph; my father, a generous distance from the cliff ’s edge, pretended to throw us over. This was his kind of humour, and I loved it. I smile and have a feeling of nostalgia whenever I look at the image, and it has a profound impact on my emotional state. It represents a special time in my life, a memory that I never want to lose. I am not sure if my memory of this day, which feels so engrained in my mind, is based more on my actual experience or on something that has built up and evolved each time I look at the snapshot. “Most of us recognize that many of our childhood memories are more likely the result of seeing photographs of ourselves as children than they are actual recollections recovered from the memory centers in our brains” (Hostetler 2016, 10). While working on Trace, with this image in mind, I revisited Cape Spear repeatedly. In an effort to recall and fully understand a past event, I would retrace what I thought were our steps on that day, paying close attention to my mood and connection to the location, the light, and even to the weather. It was close to the end of my trip to St John’s, after repeating and retracing the echoes of that day many times, that all of the elements came together and I made the photograph Sunday walks at a time when I had a pink coat (see Figure 7.1).

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Some of the memories are not tied to photographs or to any presentday objects in my possession. A memory that stands out when I reflect on my time as a child in Topsail was the smell each June as the capelin would roll in onto the shore during spawning season. It was, and still is, a common sight to see people on the shore catching the capelin with hand nets. I remember feeling conflicted about the lines of dead capelin stretching out along the beach. I felt both saddened at the sight and also amazed that a species could survive with so much death. I would walk up the beach looking for the fish that still had life and place them back in the water, though I am sure they just returned to the beach in the end. The smell of the rotting corpses was strong, not just at the beach, but in the whole community. I often think of this scene, or the memory of it, when I return to the coast in Newfoundland. It seems as though it is a vivid memory, perhaps enhanced by the memory of touch and smell that accompanies the visual reference. During my work on Trace the capelin did roll in and I spent many hours repeating the same routine as when I was a child – watching, smelling, and returning fish to the water. it always smelled like that in June (see Figure 7.2) was made during the capelin season of 2014. My long-standing connection to place is best described by Lucy Lippard in The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. She says: “Places have influenced my life as much as, perhaps more than, people. I fall for (or into) places faster and less conditionally than I do for people” (1997, 4). The landscape and built environment of Newfoundland was the foundation of many childhood discoveries that provided the foundation for my notion of place. Returning to Topsail every year since I moved away, I have witnessed and documented the changes. However, Trace goes beyond some sort of visual archive or accurate record of a place-in-time. And it is not simply a tool for my personal mythology that I can use to trigger a collection of emotions or

Figure 7.1 Opposite top Sunday walks at a time when I had a pink coat, 2014, from the series Trace. Figure 7.2 Opposite bottom it always smelled like that in June, 2014, from the series Trace.

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senses linked to fond, curious, mundane, imagined, or even upsetting moments in my life. Instead, I seek to make photographic work that is based on the framework of my childhood memories but encountered through new experiences. As an artist, the process I use to do this also carries meaning: for this project in particular, I chose the wet plate collodion process.

Making Photographs The photograph is … a point of view. It shows things as they appear, not as they “are.” –Thompson (2003, 7)

The wet plate collodion process for me is a balance of control and chance. This early photographic method, invented in the early 1850s, is now rarely practised because of the hands-on requirements and the relatively high level of variability and inconsistency that can occur during the process. But these are also the reasons I am drawn to this approach. When I use the wet plate collodion process I am making photographs. The process requires an on-site darkroom, which for this body of work was a darkroom I custom-made to fit the hatchback trunk of my station wagon. A negative is made by pouring the collodion, a binding agent, onto a piece of polished glass. That plate is then brought into a darkroom and placed in a bath of silver nitrate and water. Here, the organic salts in the collodion react with the silver, becoming light-sensitive. The plate, still wet, is loaded into a light-tight plate holder that can be brought out into daylight. The holder is placed in a view camera that has already been set up with the image composed and focused. Once in place, the dark slide is removed and upon the opening of the shutter, the light travels through the empty dark space of the camera until it reaches the plate, where it reacts with the coated surface. After the exposure, the dark slide is replaced and the plate needs to be developed before drying. Depending on temperature and humidity, I have approximately ten to fifteen minutes between the time the plate is removed from the silver bath to when

Figure 7.3 jump rocks or leap rocks, 2014, from the series Trace.

it needs to be developed before drying. If the plate dries, the image area changes to a flat grey, as seen in the lightning bolt shape on the righthand side of jump rocks or leap rocks (see Figure 7.3). This image was made on Topsail Beach. Once back in the darkroom, I hold the plate in one hand and pour an iron-based developer out of a shot glass along the edge of the plate, shifting the angle to encourage it to flow efficiently across the surface plate, yet careful not to let it drip off. The unexposed silver is released into the developer to aid in the development process. Each plate is like magic for me. I watch, with anticipation, as the information appears in yellowgreen tones. Water is poured over the plate to stop the development process, making it no longer sensitive to light. This portion of the process takes less than two minutes. The plate is then placed in a fixing bath to clear the image, producing a glass negative that is, when wet, an extremely delicate surface.

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After the plate is washed in water, it is dried over an alcohol lamp. The fragile surface of the negative is protected with a varnish made from oil of lavender, gum sandarac (tree sap), and alcohol. This varnish is heated, floated onto the plate, much like the collodion, and then dried over the alcohol lamp. This final step creates a strong, archival seal for the negative. Traditionally images made like this would have been contact-printed so that the finished print was the same size as the negative. But I am not interested in making photographs that imitate the historic photographs of the nineteenth century. I am interested in the viewing of these images as objects, but not ones you hold in your hands or keep in a drawer or album. Instead, much of the printing for this series has been done by scanning the negative to make large-scale archival pigment prints on smooth rag paper. It is the combination of one of the first photographic processes with current technology that allows me to work this way. As with many chemical-based processes, there are ideal conditions to be met if predictable results are desired, and it is best to keep all variables consistent. I am capable of making predictable images with this process, but that was not what drew me to use it for this body of work. Rather, I was interested in how the photographs depict – and are also shaped by – the environment specific to each location. By using the wet plate collodion method, I am introducing elements such as local water (rather than distilled), changes in temperature and humidity, and other environmental effects into the depiction of that precise moment and place. forts behind my house (see Figure 7.4) is filled with small black cometlike voids that were created by allowing the rain to fall on the coated plate. Where each raindrop fell, it made that particular location lose its sensitivity to light. All these variables affect the chemical reactions that are integral to the process, resulting in physical imprints on an image such as cracking, crystallization, and voids. These unpredictable elements that interrupt the landscape’s image are just as important as the place itself: like memory and emotion, they shape how a place is seen or known. The visual scars from the environment are a physical memory of each location. In a digital age, in which much of our culture demands fast results, I am intrigued by the relationship between photography and memory

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with regard to pace, awareness, authorship, and intent. According to psychologist Linda Henkel, who is cited in “Photography and memory” npr (2014), a photograph acts as an external memory aid. People often now rely on a camera to remember for them. In situations where memory is outsourced, the mental cognitive processing changes, with a negative impact on memory of the situation. We become disconnected from the actual experience. By contrast, making mindful photographs can actually enhance memory and the mental cognitive process. Paying more attention to what you are photographing can actually assist your memory of the experience. The wet plate process is labour-intensive; I am forced to work at a slow pace. I am methodical; I work with intention while also remaining open to chance. A consciousness of my environment informs my work and my somatic knowledge of each location – an imprint in my memory. From setting up my large format view camera, to mixing and handpouring chemistry onto the plate to be exposed, the time involved and the aesthetic are quite different from the spontaneous snapshots that many of us create and share on a daily basis. Each image represents anywhere from one to five hours on location. The exposure times range from five seconds to over three minutes. I embrace the pace. The images in Trace, although a series of static photographs, represent time passing in a still image. As a result of the long exposures or passing of time in the still image, information with motion is recorded in a very different way than that of the more common exposure consisting of a fraction of a second. An example of this is how the moving water is smoothed to a glass-like surface in they sang from the hill (see Figure 7.5) because of an exposure time of almost two minutes. Unlike a memory, which changes imperceptibly each time it is recalled, a photograph is static in the sense that every time you view it, it is the same as the last time. Although attention may be directed to different details each time it is viewed, the image itself remains the same. I am creating a visual record or narrative inspired by the past while implanting new memories in the present. Following Keenan (1998), the idea that there is a possibility that viewing a photograph – associated with a strong sense of time, intent, and experience – has the ability to retrieve a faded or near-forgotten memory is one that I think about often with

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regard to Trace. I hope that in the future I will be able to view these images and, because they are made with intent and consciousness, I will recall the experience, details, and emotions of the moment I made them. In actuality, I am using snippets of the past to influence my work in the present to, in turn, imagine a future. The aesthetics of the way in which I use the wet plate collodion process – blurring of edges, narrow depth of field, visual interruptions – evoke a tension between reality (represented in the image) and my memories or the dreamlike references created by the surface quality. These visual interruptions and idiosyncrasies undermine the authority of the image as a record-of-place and also require it to become something more, something evocative, lateral, or emotive. These photographs are intended not to replace my memories but to visually depict my experiences; they are a kind of evidence of events, emotions, and selected moments in time. Although these personal images are not universal, they are meant to be accessible to the viewer, regardless of life experiences. When one is viewing the physical prints in a gallery setting, the prints are large enough to fill one’s peripheral vision, allowing them to be within the constructed environment; these expansive scenes echo my memories associated with the rural landscape itself. Nearly all the images are devoid of people: this is an invitation for the viewer to enter into the image without the obstruction of the narrative associated with an individual.

Return After packing up what would be my last wet plate collodion image of my time in Newfoundland, I knew that this was the beginning of a body of work, different from any other I had made to date. The landscapes depicted in the work are real yet imagined scenes that echo how memory

Figure 7.4 Opposite top forts behind my house, 2014, from the series Trace. Figure 7.5 Opposite bottom they sang from the hill, 2014, from the series Trace.

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Figure 7.6 sometimes I wished I could go too, 2014, from the series Trace.

both creates and distorts experiences. I hope I never forget the feeling of working at the Gambo River – the crisp fresh air, standing in the river among the rounded boulders with water rushing around my ankles and the legs of my tripod. It is not just the experience of making the work that is special, but my time to reflect on this place. Being here at the Gambo River was intimate; it brought with it strong memories from my childhood. But the truth is that I had never been there before, only driven by. Making sometimes I wished I could go too (see Figure 7.6), I balanced on the unstable ground, hoping my camera would not shift during the seventy-second exposure. Time stood still.

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referen ce s Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Henkel, Linda. 2014. “Take Photos to Remember Your Experiences? Think Again.” By Audie Cornish. npr, 21 May. http://www.npr.org/2014/05/21/314607031/takephotos-to-remember-your-experiences-think-again (accessed 16 August 2016). Hostetler, Lisa, ed. 2016. A Matter of Memory: Photography as Object in the Digital Age. Rochester: George Eastman Museum. Kandel, Eric Richard. 2006. In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind. New York: W.W. Norton. Keenan, Catherine. 1998. “On the Relationship between Personal Photograph and Individual Memory.” History of Photography 22(1): 60–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03087298.1998.10443918. Lippard, Lucy. 1997. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: New Press. – 1998. “Outside (but Not Necessarily Beyond) the Landscape.” Aperture 150: 60–73. Thompson, Jerry. 2003. Truth and Photography: Notes on Looking and Photographing. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

8 How I Became Invisible: A Lesbian Childhood in the Woodsy North Marni Stanley

Introduction In Figure 8.1 there are three children in the yard. I think I am the one by the swing set. When I look at this overview snapshot of our lives I see my parents’ hard work everywhere, both in what was done and in what needed doing, and I can feel the drudgery that always threatened to overwhelm my depressive mother. I do not particularly like to look at this photo because it makes me see her loneliness, and my own, and the generational inequities between us that gave me options she did not have. At the same time, I recognize that luck played a huge factor in my particular journey; the progression of generations is not a guarantee of change or opportunity.

Adolescence and (In)visibility I became temporarily invisible in my teenage years. I was an apparently unexceptional visible child until I was fourteen. Rural life in northern Alberta had suited me well enough in childhood. But as I aged into adolescence I was both unable to find connections to that world and afraid that if I misstepped I would be trapped within it. While it was obvious to me that I and my environment were not a good match, no obvious

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Figure 8.1 Our home quarter circa 1964.

solution presented itself. Because I neither knew enough nor knew myself well enough to understand what I was struggling with, let alone express it, I cannot fault anyone else for failing to do so. The capacity to express our self is the basis for our visibility. Every truth about our self that we cannot express contributes to our dis-appearance. Self-disclosure is one of the ways in which we invite friendship and intimacy and establish trustworthiness with others. As Paul John Eakin argues: “Social accountability conditions us from early childhood onward to believe that our recognition as persons is to be transacted through the exchange of identity narratives. The verdict of those for whom we perform is virtually axiomatic: no satisfactory narrative, no self ” (2001, 120). What happens when, just as you are beginning to understand who you are, you no longer feel safe telling your story? Ken Plummer, author of Telling Sexual Stories, acknowledges that “successful” coming-out stories require “social worlds embodying a strong community of support waiting to receive them” (1995, 16) because, as he claims,

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people’s stories are “social actions embedded in social worlds” (17). When the social world is very small, and lacking in diversity, the odds of finding support diminish proportionally. If you add adolescent naivety and immaturity to the mix you may also get a situation, such as my own, where I did not know how or where to seek allies and where I made some serious errors in judgment in pursuit of them. Where I grew up, rural children knew one another by the addresses we gave on the first day of school. Because we lived on roads with no names, in houses with no numbers, we gave our addresses with geographic specificity – our township, range, quarter, and meridian. We had in common two things: none of us had gone to kindergarten (because we were rural) and we had all experienced danger-enhanced childhoods of a different kind than urban children do. We played on and around machinery, in sloughs and dugouts, in grain bins, and in open haylofts. Our parents, busy with chores from sun-up to sundown and beyond, had no choice but to let us play unsupervised. They had to rely on the older siblings caring for the younger, and on the common sense they tried to instill in us all. My parents managed to get six children to adulthood with all our extremities intact because of a mix of good rules, good dogs, and plain old good luck.1

Fading into Silence It was easy for a young child to thrive in this world of chores and fresh air with abundant food, nature to explore, and kind, if overworked, parents. Thus I remained generally visible throughout primary, elementary, and junior high school. My slow fade began in high school. When I look back to those pre–high school years I realize there were earlier clues that I might disappear. Growing up in a small, 1,200-square-foot farmhouse occupied by eight people meant opportunities for privacy inside the house were rare. One of my earliest memories of a repeated activity is a little thought experiment I used to engage in. In the two years before I went to school, when all my siblings were off on the bus each morning, my mother would sometimes give me a mirror to play with. I would sit on the living room floor, with the mirror on my knees, staring at the

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reflection of the empty ceiling and imagining that that was my room. I loved that emptiness, that sense of available space that I could colonize for my own. I wanted to live in that magical, unavailable, unoccupied space rather than in the crowded bedroom I shared with my two sisters. The second clue to my approaching disappearance, also driven by a desire for a space of my own, was my move, when I was ten, into the cupboard under the eaves on the second floor. I cut a hole in a wall so I could have a reading light and dragged my mattress into the space, and slept there for a year. By the time I got to high school it wasn’t my search for private physical space that instigated my slow fade, but a gradual silencing that led to my instability in the visual field; I could not find a place into which I could fit. Judith Halberstam (now known as Jack) argues that “subcultures provide a vital critique of the seemingly organic nature of ‘community,’ and they make visible the forms of unbelonging and disconnection that are necessary to the creation of community” (2005, 153). One person, however, does not a subculture make. On your own, as a young person, you feel the “unbelonging” and the “disconnection” but cannot access the “critique” (153). The more difficult I found it to express myself, or affect the environment around me, the more I disappeared. So, just as I had withdrawn into the storage space under the eaves at home, I began to close up at school. The more I failed at finding anywhere to belong, the more I began to act on my increasing alienation and frustration. The struggle to find a cohort of my own was complicated by the way I perceived the fields, what I would later came to know as gender, around me. Rural masculinity seemed very narrow to me; rural women had a much broader range of gender performance available to them although their roles were no less defined.2 The men were all very traditionally masculine, with lots of practical skills that determined their value in the hierarchy of masculinity. They all seemed to dress in the same dark blues … and greys, and dark plaids. They all had one of two haircuts – buzz cut or short with a side parting – and one of two hats – baseball or cowboy. In contrast, rural women displayed a wider range of femininities. They might have their hair done in town and never be seen without their

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lipstick, and dress in reasonably fashionable, well-accessorized outfits (except shoes, because the lack of either asphalt or cement surfaces made sightings of heels rare; shoes remained resolutely practical). But women could also be farmers through and through in a wardrobe of jeans and plaid shirts (and look very uncomfortable when compelled to don a dress for a wedding or a funeral). They might be admired for their strength, their knowledge and skill with stock, or their way with horses. The skin of these women was sun-weathered, and they had the same head, neck, and forearm tan that gave rise to the “redneck” appellation. No one denigrated their femininity, no one ever used a word like “butch”; they were, every one of these women whom I knew, wives and mothers all. But a man who did not fit in with rural conventions of masculinity might be rumoured to be a “fruit” or “light in the loafers” (both terms I heard used by adult family members). Generally these were men either who were just visiting or who lived in town – no one on whom such an insult might land stayed in the countryside. When I moved to the city at sixteen years of age and met more people and saw a broader range of economic classes, I noticed that as wealth went up within the middle class (the extent of my range of acquaintance), femininity seemed more policed and more narrow and presented greater cause for comment outside that narrowness, while masculinity, especially within the creative industries, broadened out. The physical strength and masculine skills that a rural woman or a working-class woman might be admired for were neither sought after by, nor desired in, middle-class women. While I certainly saw a broadening out of choice for urban women in terms of work, I did not see a commensurate freedom in choosing how gender could be expressed. Until I moved to the city the models of adulthood in my life were either the rural people of my community, or teachers. Such was the compulsory heterosexuality of my small town that, in the 1970s, any teacher of either sex who got past the age of twenty-six without marrying was gossiped about. One young single woman teacher I remember in high school was rumoured to be a lesbian, though as far as I could tell from the student gossip the only evidence was the lack of a boyfriend known to us. The two single men among the high school staff were also gossiped

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about. One was talked about as shy and socially inept, and the other as a pervert who was rumoured to sometimes sleep in the school. When a fashionable, divorced, young male teacher from the city subbed in for a year, one of the local farm boys put his hand up in class and asked, “Are you a fag?” Needless to say, that teacher, one of the best I have ever known, did not stay at our school. Nothing about my experience of that community, or that school, made me feel that there was any option other than silence. As Didier Eribon points out: “A small town is a place where it is difficult to escape from the only available mirror, that offered by family life and by school, difficult to escape from the ‘interpellations’ that enforce conformity to the affective, cultural, and social models of heterosexuality” (2004, 24). Furthermore, if you know yourself to be different, every moment you are there you will face “the calls permanently emitted by every social agency to return to the heteronormative order, be they in the form of the ordinary violence produced by the most banal situations of family or school life or the traumatizing brutality of insult and attacks” (25). Years later, still not out to my parents, I came home from university to be regaled by them with the story of friends who, just that week, had gone to the city and taken their son out of the technical college he was attending because they had found out that he was involved with a man. My father, in particular, was very approving of their actions. Of course, I saw this as yet another trap that had to be dodged, another necessary silence. Still later, in my fourth year of university, the only out homosexual professor I had, a woman I admired (and on whom I had a crush), returned from a trip back to her childhood home where she had intentionally outed herself, with a broken nose and two black eyes. When she made her announcement, her brother, also a well-educated professional, beat her. Her family made it clear to her that she was not to press charges. For her the family dinner went from banal to brutal at the speed of her brother’s fists. This was a woman whom I admired very much, who had the career I wanted, the education I aspired to, who came from a family much better educated than my own, yet she, too, struggled to escape. Each time someone I knew came out only to suffer violence, insult, or exile, it increased my inability to speak my own truth.

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Gendered Performance Within my own family, gendered performance was well within the local norms. My father, who was tall and sporty (and liked to brag about his chest expansion), liked sporty, strong women with short hair; I was the only girl (of three) to grow my hair long, and he did not approve because he found an overinvestment in femininity impractical and frivolous. In one of our father’s few gestures to absolute gender equality we were all given a box of .22 cartridges for our twelfth birthday, though I never used mine. Two of my brothers had used some of my few toys for target practice, making me less than keen on guns. I also hated having to pick toothshattering buckshot out of my dinner when mother served the duck or partridge that father had shot. Not liking lead shot in my food was not my only failure as a farm child; I was an incompetent and uninterested farm labourer. All the sex and death of farm life either didn’t interest me or made me sad. The first job each of us had in chicken processing was running after the headless, blood-splattering chickens, who often kept going for another fifteen or twenty feet after father had chopped their heads off. This was, apparently, the perfect job for a five-year-old who wasn’t yet up to plucking and was years away from the knife skills required for cleaning. In addition, I was always terrified when having to herd loose animals. When I was about six, two of my brothers thought it would be funny to put me on the back of a cow, which then panicked and ran into the woods to scrape me off on a tree – an effective, if terrifying, strategy on her part. I also hated having to handle a steer in the three years of 4-H Beef my father insisted on from grades six to eight.3 I spent my time in 4-H illustrating and colouring the record book on my steer’s growth – not exactly useful animal husbandry skills. I somehow managed never to notice all the sex taking place on the farm in spite of the regular arrival of calves and piglets (we did not use artificial insemination for animal breeding at that time). I believed my father’s explanation that all those animals were just playing and having piggyback rides. My next oldest sister, mortified with embarrassment by the naivety regarding sexual matters that I demonstrated on the school

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bus one day, procured a copy of Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask and demanded that I read it. (I was eleven.) My ignorance reflected badly not only on the authority of her know-it-all-ness but also on farm children everywhere. Knowledge of the natural cycles of life was one of the few advantages rural kids had over urban ones, and I was failing the team. The other thing we had over urban kids was the knowledge of death. My farm tours for urban visitors were as horror-filled as I could manage and always featured stops at the chicken chopping block, the dead calf chained to the fence as coyote bait, the suicide cat (which had lodged its head so firmly in the eave of a granary when going after a sparrow’s nest that it had accidently hung itself. My father couldn’t get the head out either, so he left it to weather into a cat mummy), and whatever else I could find that might freak out city folk. One finds one’s superiority where one can; even I could toughen up for a rural-versus-urban takedown. In spite of this rare performance of rural superiority, I was the outof-place femme in this world of rural skills. I was fearful of almost everything – woods, large machinery, big animals (see cow, above), small animals (chicken beak puncture wounds hurt!), insects, power tools, large bodies of water, and heights. I had no physical skills and could not throw a ball, shoot a gun, climb a tree or a rope, run or jump with grace, ride a horse, or drive a tractor. I liked fashion dolls and stuffed animals with hair long enough to brush, swirly skirts, and pretty things. I went through a brief ballet obsession when I was ten, even though I had never been to a dance class and had never seen a live performance of ballet. My entire knowledge of ballet was limited to the occasional broadcast of the National Ballet of Canada on cbc (which I would beg to watch while my brothers said scathing things about men in tights and my father avoided coming into the room at all), and a children’s book called Laura’s Summer Ballet that I read over and over. I wrote a book on ballet (thirty pages of three-hole-punched school note paper held together with a kitchen twist tie). I wrote reviews of the few ballets I had seen broadcast. I glued in chicken feathers, glitter, and a bit of netting as costume ideas and I drew foot positions and wrote about barre exercises and other things I knew nothing about. Ballet seemed to me to represent

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an aesthetic as far from the world I lived in as I could find. Like the magic space of the reflected ceiling it was both real and unreal, not attainable but evoking the possibility of an alternative life. My next oldest sister and I represented as much contrast in the performance of gender as was to be found in my family. She was fearless to my risk-averseness; sporty to my overweight and klutzy clumsiness; practical to my arty bookishness. When we were young she convinced me that she was actually a boy, and only waiting for the right moment to reveal that fact to the rest of the family. She was not interested in masculinity other than as a privilege our three older brothers demonstrably had. Farm boys, though, often paid a price we didn’t understand at the time; they were frequently taken out of school as labour for planting and harvest. Only one of my three brothers graduated from high school, and he had to stay an extra term to do so. My next oldest sister was much admired in school (and by our father) for her apparent lack of abjection to anything. She was renowned in high school for her ability to dissect anything unflinchingly. While she learned to cook (very well) and sew (very well) and preserve food (very well), I spent my time on the impractical arts of embroidery and paper quilling and tatting; these pursuits set my pattern for preferring the useless and pretty over the functional. As a consequence of my careless acquisition of skills, I went through high school wearing an odd mix of vintage clothes and strange things I had made (bless my mother for that licence, even though my sartorial sense probably contributed to my alienation). My craft proclivities led to one instance of heightened visibility that also illustrates my inability, as a child, to understand the adult messages around me. When I was eleven, in grade six, I went clothes shopping in the city with my oldest sister. In the mall I saw a man wearing a blue T-shirt on which was written: “If you are Canadian show me your beaver.” My cute antenna was alerted (as was my patriotism), and I wanted a shirt of my own just like it. After all, I liked beavers (they were part of the local fauna where I lived), and I considered myself a proud Canadian. So when I got home I made myself a T-shirt. Wanting to up the cuteness quotient (which the young man’s shirt had sadly lacked), I added wood grain to the lettering and a cartoon beaver in a hard hat (copied from one of the Walter Foster

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how-to-draw books in the library). By this point in my life my three oldest siblings (including my two oldest brothers) had left home and my parents had not exactly led worldly lives. I went blissfully off to school in my new shirt and suddenly found myself getting a lot of unexpected attention from the few male teachers in my elementary school. They asked, “Where did you get that shirt?” and, “Did your parents see you in that this morning?” In the end, nothing was done about my shirt and I wore it until too many cycles of laundry made it unfit. In grade ten, halfway through reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, I suddenly found out what that old shirt had really meant and I was mortified (and grateful my parents had not owned a camera). I was also amused to imagine the conversation in the teacher’s lounge where the various staff who had questioned me debated who among them might call Jean and Barry and explain the colloquial use of beaver. Clearly no one volunteered. Growing up I had no antenna to pick up even the most in-yourface sexual innuendo, and I was particularly blind to the more subtle signals of queerness. My feminine style when I was young also increased my sexual invisibility because any ally I might have found in school or my early university days through visual recognition was lost to me. No one saw me or recognized me as a lesbian, and I, confused a bit by the range of expression of femininity and masculinity of the exclusively heterosexual (as far as I knew) women of my youth, didn’t know how to see lesbians either. Fat femmes (as I am) seemed particularly invisible. Twice at university I had the weird experience of trying to come out to a straight female friend and having them explain to me that I wasn’t a lesbian because they could always tell. What this really meant was that I did not fit their expectations of a lesbian, but it was very bewildering at the time. In those early days, when I really had to work up my nerve to tell anyone, the last thing I expected was to have my truth denied. Legal scholar Kenji Yoshino would interpret their responses as enforcing “covering.” My fellow students were objecting to my obtruding into their worlds. Since I was femme, I could pass for straight, and they would prefer I left it that way. As Yoshino argues, there are four axes on which people may choose cover (or be coerced into covering): “appearance”; “affiliation”; “activism”; and “association” (2007, 79). By denying my identity narrative they were telling

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me that if I intended to associate with them I would have to not be that thing which I was while in their presence. I never spoke of it again to either of them, and of course, neither friendship survived. Other friends did hear me, and some of them chose never to see me again. For Yoshino, coerced covering is harmful to the person because “when straights ask gays to cover they are asking us to be small in the world … to forgo equality” (2007, 107). Thus, he argues, coerced conformity is a human rights issue. Before I even knew I was a lesbian, I knew that I was unsuited to farm life, and as a consequence, I was very invested in school and the possibilities it seemed to promise. At the same time, the schools I was reading about in all those novels in the school library did not seem to match the one I was in. Consequently, by high school the only teacher I could consider an ally was himself an outsider: he commuted from the city, was well-dressed, cultured, and musical, and was a dedicated and inventive teacher. In short, he was the model I wished to emulate.

Disappearing As I got older my expectations of school became ever greater and ever more unfulfilled. By the start of grade ten (at age fourteen) it was clear to me that something was wrong – I was beginning to disappear. I don’t recall having any understanding of what it was specifically that was wrong, but I was not interested in all the boy/girl talk and the dating exploits of my peers, which took up more and more space in our interactions. I was shocked by the pregnancy rate in my high school and the resulting early marriages, which I saw as closing off all opportunity for the girls involved. My mother had always seemed much more tied down by her six children than my father, who continued to hunt and fish, play baseball and curl, serve on the church board, and do pretty much anything he wanted to do within the community. He also had the perpetual farmer’s excuse of needing to go into town for a part, which always seemed to magically coincide with farm friends also needing a part and a cup of coffee, and maybe lunch. I saw marriage and children as the drudgery of the poor rural women around me, including my mother.

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Because I could not articulate my feeling of difference, and because I did not know how to affect my environment so I could thrive, and because I did not know how to find a friend or ally, I became more and more alienated. I was angry at the school and at most of my teachers, many of whom had no, or very little, training in the disciplines they actually taught, and I was angry at the school board for thinking that that was okay. In my useless Occupations 10 class4 I wrote my whatI-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up essay on getting my PhD and teaching at a university. I accompanied my rather ignorant (because no Internet, weak library) understanding of that process with cute pseudo–Betsy Johnson drawings of big-eyed girls. The male instructor made fun of me, not for the laughable errors of my research (I thought all professors had degrees in philosophy), but because he found my ambition laughable. Mockery was a big part of his pedagogical style, and he liked to start the day by writing inspirational messages such as “Time passes: will you?” on the board. He was part of a school system that seemed to me to be dominated by teachers who had a contempt for learning, or, at the very least, for their own students. I will never forget the elementary teacher whose solution to the problem of the child who finished a task early was to have the child put her or his head down on the desk and wait for everyone else; this seemed, and was understood by everyone, to be a punishment. I did not know how to express my anger to the exclusively adult world of the school. My parents valued children showing respect to adults more than almost any other behaviour they expected from us. In grade ten I suddenly had too many teachers at once who did not like either the subjects or the students they taught. Halfway through grade ten, unable to find a path to a more mature way of expressing my growing alienation and anger, I began to express my feelings on my own flesh through cutting. The school counsellor (not a trained counsellor, but a teacher who had burned out on his original workload) stopped me in the hall one day to tell me that he was keeping a file on me so that it would look as though he had been doing something if I killed myself. I still find myself wondering what made him think that was an appropriate remark to make to a disturbed fifteen-year-old. As

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Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have argued: “Institutional needs frame the specific ‘reading’ of the disparate details and facts of the life recited by the subject; in so doing, they frame information selectively … to fit their institutional parameters. Thus in everyday life, autobiographical narratives are part of a frame-up” (1996, 4, emphasis in original). He was honestly not interested in what I had to say; he was interested in what the outcome of my story might say about the institution. Another teacher tried to fix me himself, and that created an emotional entanglement that violated professional boundaries in all sorts of ways. A year later, halfway through grade eleven and three months after my sixteenth birthday, I was placed in a psychiatric institution, where I remained for four and a half months. When I was released I did not return to my home in the rural community. The doctor in charge of the program was able to assign me to a social worker and grant me social assistance for twelve months while I finished high school in the city. I was not hospitalized for being a lesbian. As far as I know, no one in the school, or the hospital, recognized me as a lesbian, and I never said a word to anyone on the subject until the end of my third year of university. I was hospitalized because I was depressed and disappearing into myself, and increasingly erratic in my behaviour. I had become, for my bewildered parents, and to a lesser extent my school, a kind of emotional terrorist always at risk of some kind of inburst of rage. My behaviour fed my isolation since it hardly made me a desirable friend. It was not my nature to be content to be erased and silenced, so my rage at my situation was highly performative. Many of the behaviours engaged in by some of the equally angry boys around me – fast driving, vandalism, fights, and sexual aggression – did not appeal to me because they were too dangerous. At sixteen, in the psychiatric institution, I noticed that of the patients around my age, many of the boys were in for anger accompanied by delinquency (drugs, fights, vandalism), while many of the girls acted out anger on their own bodies (cutting, anorexia, bulimia). Those same patterns carried forward in various ways through many of the adult patients I met, though I was stunned (this was 1976) by the number of women who had been on Valium for decades – one since she was two years old!

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Four and a half months in a psychiatric institution certainly helped end much of my naivety about what went on in people’s lives, but it also demonstrated, all too clearly, the cost of not being normal. Though no one (that I knew of) was there for being homosexual, what we had in common was that we were all judged as abnormal. On Friday afternoons we had group outings and I used to amuse myself by watching the public try to figure out what we were, given that we ranged in age from fourteen to sixty-five, were mostly not visibly disabled, and were mostly low-risk depressives, only a few demonstrating visibly odd or clearly compulsive behaviours. We always had a set of herders and watchers signalling to the public that we were some custodian-necessitating group, and this prevented us, as I pointed out to one of the psychologists, from having most of the typical-seeming interactions they were hoping to foster.

Saved by the Urban In spite of what I learned about the costs of being not normal, I will always be grateful for the opportunity to live on my own and finish school in the city. In a big urban school I was able to find a small cohort of friends, enough to make me feel less alienated. I will always be grateful to that art room lunch trio of Nadine, Sheila, and David. I saw how hard I would have to struggle to catch up with my schooling. That inoculated me, to some extent, against the shock of not-great grades in my first year of university. That year also gave me the basic skills to look after myself so that when I went to university I wasn’t derailed by the difficulty of coping with new geography, new intellectual expectations, new chores, and new friends all at once, as some of my former rural schoolmates were. Over the year of completing the grade eleven and twelve courses I needed to matriculate I gradually became visible again. I started to see myself as having a future and found myself encouraged by my friends and teachers to set and pursue my own goals and to re-enter the narrative. Nadine, of the lunch room trio, had parents who took an interest in me and my circumstances, and I saw in their relationship, and in their encouragement of and expectations for their daughters, as well as their

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son, new ways of thinking about my own future. It seemed to me as if all of the girls I knew in grade twelve were expecting to go to university, and many already had post-first-degree education plans. As part of exploring possibilities I took up the task of becoming as cultured and wellread as I imagined my new city-dwelling, middle-class cohort to be. I joined the film society and got cheap student tickets to the symphony, three theatre companies, and the ballet (finally!). I learned that I didn’t actually like some of those forms of expression, while I loved others. As a consequence of that year of renewal, it has been a long time since I have felt completely invisible. But many rural youth still face kinds of isolation that the digital world of connectivity cannot address. If they, in their turn, cannot find a way to see themselves anywhere in the world around them, they remain at risk of becoming invisible and being lost. Listing subjects that were once excluded from autobiography, including mental illness and homosexuality, Smith and Watson write that “the very conditions of their unrecitability sustain the citations and recitations of privileged cultural narratives and privileged cultural identities. In citing new, formerly unspeakable stories, narrators become cultural witnesses insisting on memory as agency in its power to intervene in imposed systems of meaning” (1996, 15). In order to add their voices to the counternarrative these young people have to survive either until they are comfortable where they are or until they can make what Halberstam calls the “metronormative” journey from rural to urban, from “persecution, and secrecy” to “tolerance” (2005, 36). Some of these young people may find tolerance where they are, while others will not, and some may remain hidden, unable to risk discovery.

Conclusion Rural parents, even ones as well-meaning as my own were, cannot create openings for their children where none exist. The differences in rural lives – whether along the axis of economic class, or along the axis of degree of isolation – need to be paid attention to. All children, even the ones who live in some whited-out corner of the map, need to be seen, so that they can create a narrative in which they have a meaningful and authentic place.

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n ote s 1 According to Carrie Tait in the Globe and Mail (23 November 2015, A8), “farm kids under 18 in Alberta were 83 per cent more likely to suffer severe injury or death when stacked up against city kids between 1999 and 2010.” 2 For discussions of the role of performance in gender see Candace West and Don Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1 (1987): 125–51; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Raewyn Connell, Gender in World Perspective (London: Polity, 2015). 3 4-H clubs were founded as a way of educating rural children about new agricultural practices. In my region, beef was the most popular club focus. From their origins in rural America the 4-H association has spread around the world and into urban as well as rural areas. For a concise history of the origins of the movement, see http://www.extension.iastate.edu/4h/page/history-4-h. 4 Occupations 10 was a half-year course inserted in the Alberta high school curriculum. The vague curriculum centred on what is work and the working life. Our main project was to research and write on an occupation we wanted to hold. referen ce s Eakin, Paul John. 2001. “Breaking the Rules: The Consequences of Self Narration.” Biography 24(1): 113–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23540312. Eribon, Didier. 2004. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self. Translated by Michael Lucey. Durham: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: nyu Press. Plummer, Kenneth. 1995. Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change, and Social Worlds. London: Routledge. Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson, eds. 1996. Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tait, Carrie. 2015. “Boy, 10, Driving Forklift Is Latest Child to Die in Alberta Farm Accident.” Globe and Mail, 22 November. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/alberta/alberta-boy-10-driving-forklift-is-latest-child-to-die-in-farmaccident/article27435707. Yoshino, Kenji. 2007. Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights. New York: Random House.

9 Documenting a Transgender Rural Childhood: Exploring My Prairie Home Barbara Pini, Elizabeth Marshall, and Wendy Keys

Introduction This chapter explores the complexities, contradictions, and tensions in meanings of home for transgender youth growing up in rural spaces through a textual analysis of the 2014 Canadian documentary My Prairie Home (see Figure 9.1). The film, directed by Chelsea McMullan, details the troubled childhood of transgender singer/songwriter Rae Spoon, who was raised by Pentecostal Christian parents obsessed with the apocalypse. The father was an abusive schizophrenic. The documentary includes a soundtrack, also titled My Prairie Home, written and performed by Spoon. Along with their1 well-reviewed autobiographical novel, First Spring Grass Fire (Spoon 2012), these texts form a trilogy detailing Spoon’s youth in Calgary, Alberta. Originally penned by Spoon on the advice of McMullan, who wished to encourage her protagonist to open up to the camera, the novel incorporates a series of short stories, which are used as the film’s narration. We examine My Prairie Home through geographies of home, adopting a broad and elastic understanding of the home as being associated with the body, the landscape, and the household as well as the community, the workplace, and the nation (Blunt and Dowling 2006). The home is

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a material and physical space as well as a space of affect, imagination, and identity formation (Blunt 2005). Such a conceptualization posits that meanings, experiences, and subjectivities that encircle the home are inextricably bound to wider social and power relations, including experiences of childhood. Dominant discourses about the home privilege some definitions and constructions of this space while marginalizing and excluding others. Everyday vocabulary associated with the domestic space – including terms such as family room, parent’s retreat, breadwinner, and master breadwinner – illustrates this claim, as such vocabulary is inflected by the assumption that the home is an entity for the nuclear family (Gorman-Murray 2006a, 2006b, 2006c; Johnston and Longhurst 2009; Longhurst 1999). In this respect the home – in all its manifestations from the level of the household to that of the nation – is hegemonically inscribed as heterosexual. At the same time, meanings afforded to home are not static. Changes in the social, political, economic, and cultural processes of society affect the physical, material, and emotional conditions of the home, while within and through the home individuals may create new non-normative home-infused subjectivities and practices (Valentine and Holloway 2001). In taking up this complex, fluid, and multi-dimensional conceptualization of home to examine trans childhood and representations of rurality within the documentary My Prairie Home, we are aware of how our own positionalities shape the analysis, particularly our positionality in relation to the Prairies. Two of us (Barbara and Wendy) are Australians who have never been on the Canadian Prairies, while Elizabeth has lived on the west coast of Canada for nearly a decade, and, prior to that, in the United States. Our collective experience of the Prairies is thus through texts. At the same time, our discussions have revealed that we share with Rae Spoon the experience of connecting a sense of belonging with particular landscapes such as the Outback or the beach. Our analysis of the text follows the processes outlined by Rose (2012) in her book Visual Methodologies. This includes immersion in a text through repeated viewing, followed by a coding process nominating key themes, such as recurring images or key words; this in turn is followed by a more detailed inquiry identifying associations across dominant

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Figure 9.1 Film poster for My Prairie Home ©2013 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

themes, and, finally, the process of highlighting complexities, contradictions, and invisibilities in the text. Our collaboration added additional depth to the visual analysis, as we viewed the film through our own personal biographies and disciplinary backgrounds. We thus moved from individual to collective analysis to build our critique of Spoon’s relationship with home in all its multi-scalar manifestations, from their familial household and high school in suburban Calgary to the Canadian nation. We begin by situating our study within previous literature to highlight the limited scholarship on rural geographies of childhood and sexuality and the particular paucity of spatially infused studies of transgender

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rural lives.2 We rely especially on Halberstam’s (2005) much cited study of transgender representations in popular culture, which includes an analysis of the film Boys Don’t Cry, a docudrama about Brandon Teena in which sexuality, rurality, and youth intersect. We then turn to our analysis of McMullan’s Sundance-featured My Prairie Home, focusing on two key themes. First, we enunciate the ways in which the film depicts home as an oppressive and exclusive space in Spoon’s memories. Second, we show how in the film meanings of home are recalibrated by Spoon so that they experience a sense of peace, belonging, and inclusion that they lacked in childhood.

Geographies of Rurality, Sexuality, and Youth As Pini, Morris, and Mayes (2016) note, far too little attention has been given to the subject of sexualities in the lives of youth outside the city. An important exception to this is a detailed rendering of the story of Harry, a sixteen-year-old Anglo-Australian working-class gay man, undertaken by Waitt and Gorman-Murray (2011). Prior to turning sixteen, Harry lived in a remote mining town in western Queensland with his father. He is outed by his peers at school and ridiculed, harassed, and bullied. Seeking to escape the oppressions and exclusions of his small-town life, Harry visits Sydney. The urban centre has much to offer, but Harry experiences an increasing sense of alienation as he undertakes poorly paid service work and develops a drug habit. A desire to belong and to have a sense of home results in his moving to a regional city in northern Queensland, where he establishes a friendship circle and support. While Harry’s story can be read in numerous ways, three issues are of particular interest for this chapter. The first is the continued and pervasive heteronormativity of rural areas and the painful implications this may have for youth whose expressions of sexuality are viewed as transgressive. Indeed, the hegemony of heterosexuality in rural spaces has been a recurring focus of the still limited literature on rural youth and sexuality (Bryant and Pini 2011). A second key theme emerging from Harry’s story is that the city is not necessarily a space of inclusion for those living non-normative sexual lives, just as rural environments are

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not necessarily spaces of exclusion. Harry does not experience Sydney as the gay utopia of popular imagination and, in turn, disrupts conflations between the city and a fulfilling queer life. In a geographical reading of the award-winning young adult novel The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth, Pini, Keys, and Marshall (2017) reveal that rural space can be queered. A third theme to emerge from Harry’s story is that achieving a sense of home can be a profoundly complicated and fraught embodied and affective process for those whose sexuality is marginal to the mainstream. As Johnston and Longhurst acknowledge, there has been something “of a shift in recent years” with the queering of the home evidenced by the presence of gay men as designers and participants in lifestyle programs. Ultimately, though, “homes still tend to be hegemonically heterosexual” (2009, 49). While drawing on Waitt and Gorman-Murray’s (2011) case study of Harry to scaffold this chapter, we also depart from it in a significant respect in that our concern is not with the undifferentiated or subsumed category lgbtq. Rather, it is with the specificities of transgender experiences. As Nash argues, there is a need to interrogate terminology such as “lgbtq” and to attend to the “particular, historical and transformative operations of subjectivities, identities and forms of embodiment” (2010, 590) of those who are subsumed by such a categorization. Against a geographical field of scholarship in which studies of transgender lives have been limited (Oswin 2008), Halberstam’s (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives is a critically important intervention, especially for conceptualizations of queer youth. Halberstam undertakes a wide-ranging analysis of cultural texts, including paintings, music, sculptures, fiction, and films, in order to explore what has been labelled “the transgender gaze” (2005, 76). Included in the corpus of material are two texts focused on Brandon Teena, a young trans man who was raped and murdered in small-town Falls City, Nebraska, in 1993. According to Halberstam (2005), both the documentary film The Brandon Teena Story (1998) and the feature film Boys Don’t Cry (1999) depict Teena in ways that reflect negative characterizations of transgender people in mainstream culture. That is, as pathologized, sensationalized, and trivialized. Halberstam brings a spatial dimension

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to the analysis, noting that the attack on Teena was depicted in many texts as an inevitable outcome of his rural location. Complicating this reading, Halberstam suggests that the representation of rurality in the texts relies on dominant urban imaginaries of the rural queer as “sad and lonely or else stuck in place” (36). Since Halberstam’s (2005) insightful assessment of trans representations in popular culture there has, arguably, been greater visibility afforded to trans identities in visual media. Indeed, Ryan labels a group of films she reviews as representative of “a ‘new wave’ of trans documentaries” (2010, 10) that are distinctly different from traditional documentary trans films. She explains that past representations have been premised on binary constructions of gender and have thereby rendered the trans life as other. In contrast, the films she reviews suggest gender fluidity and see all of us as potentially oppressed by fixed gender/sexed binaries. Similarly, Woodward refers to two documentary films from the Pacific, Georgie Girl (2002) and Kumu Hina (2014), as illustrative of a shift towards “an alternative and more celebratory approach to gender diversity” (2015, 64). Again, a key dimension of this shift is that the films represent trans life through a prism of gender and sexual diversities and possibilities. As such, these are not stories of tragic or problematic lives (that need fixing), but stories of lives that are “valuable and normal” (Woodward 2015, 75) and that others may wish to emulate. In our reading of My Prairie Home (2014) we demonstrate that this more progressive and celebratory depiction of trans subjectivities continues with the depiction of Spoon’s life in the film. At the same time, the film confronts the abuse Spoon has faced from early childhood, including oppressions experienced in the home.

Home: Oppressions and Exclusions The fraught relationship Spoon has with home is established in the opening shots of the film. We are shown a wide-angle visual of the Prairies. The Prairies are a central motif in Canada’s mythologizing of nationhood (Calder and Wardhaugh 2005; Keahey 1998; Reimer 2008). Over many years the Prairies have been harnessed in social, political, economic, and

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cultural milieux as a symbol of Canadian exceptionalism, of nationbuilding as the conquering of the landscape, and of development, prosperity, and fertility (Calder and Wardhaugh 2005). McMullan’s opening shot offers the viewer the familiar romanticized image of the Prairies – the extraordinarily blue sky, bright sunshine, fluffy white clouds, and immense grasslands flowing in the breeze towards the horizon. What’s different is that the frame is inverted, so the Prairies appear upside down (see Figure 9.2). As the camera moves out and the film continues, we learn that the scene is what Rae sees from a Greyhound bus window. In opening the film in this way, McMullan asserts a subversive intent: as a filmmaker, she wants to give us a different view of the world, and of rural space in particular. We think we know the Prairies, but we do not. For example, we probably envisage this rural space as heterosexual, yet we are going to see it queered. This deliberate invitation to confusion is also evidenced by the fact that the film defies generic definition. It is noteworthy that reviews of the documentary contend that it is a generic amalgam referencing the road movie, the musical, the auto/biographical film, the political documentary, and the magic realist film (Purdy 2014). The disordered perspective McMullan uses to introduce the film is also an insight into Spoon’s positioning in a heteronormative patriarchal world. They are in the landscape – a landscape representative of the Canadian nation itself – but their experience of it is jumbled and confused. Such a visual emphasizes that, in terms of citizenship, transgender people are invisible and excluded (Johnston and Longhurst 2009). This visual is taken up and given further force in the first scene of the film, set in the iconic Calgary diner, the Blackfoot Truckstop. As is often the case in the documentary, we see Rae from behind. They sit as a lone figure at the counter wearing a plaid shirt and jeans and with a guitar slung on their shoulder. Rae finishes the coffee, turns and faces the camera, and begins to strum. As they navigate their way around the room, diners eat bacon and eggs and drink coffee while waitresses continue to prepare and serve food. The camera slowly zooms in on the indifferent expressions of the patrons who walk by, ignore them, or look away. Others stare openly in judgment. A range of images adorn the walls. One is of a large hauler (truck), with a hovering image of Jesus Christ on the right

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Figure 9.2 Upside-down image of Prairie. My Prairie Home © 2013 National Film Board of Canada. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

side of the frame with his hands in prayer. A second is of another large hauling truck (carrying logs) with snow-capped mountains in the background. While the diner is a place of movement referencing Rae’s ongoing placelessness, it is also a microcosm of the Prairies, Calgary, and Canada itself. Rae does not belong, is not welcomed or even seen. The experience of not being at home in the Canadian nation as a transgender person is echoed in Rae’s childhood experience of not being at home in the family household. The dominant notion of home as a haven, refuge, and sanctuary has been rightly critiqued by feminist scholars, who have highlighted that for many women and children, home is a site of oppression and abuse (Domash 1998; Gilmore and Marshall 2013; Marshall 2004; Marshall and Gilmore 2015). Similarly, studies of queer youth have found that family homes can be incredibly negative

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spaces marked by anxiety, trauma, and subjugation (Valentine, Skelton, and Butler 2003). In the documentary Spoon reveals that their childhood experience of home was abusive and dominated by a schizophrenic father. In one scene, Spoon paints their brother’s fingernails as the siblings talk about their childhood memories, including how, for example, their father attempted to take their younger brothers away to save them from the rapture. Spoon’s brother recalls that “[e]ven when he was on his meds he was still abusive … It would only let up on the medication ’cause he would slow down.” They remember that their father had his first serious mental health issue just after he had been made a deacon at the church. Spoon tells viewers: “My parents were both really proud of it so when he had his breakdown they were like, ‘Don’t tell anyone about the breakdown.’” As the anecdote concludes, Spoon begins singing “I Will Be a Wall,” with light acoustics giving way to a larger sound of marching drums and then horns: Hide the children. Hide the children a storm is coming. I will be a wall. I will be a wall. Hide the children. Hide the children a storm is coming. I will be a wall. I will be a wall. There are beautiful places that we can hide. Between the notes and the rhymes. I sang for my sister on the darkest nights and I sang for my brothers too. As the viewer listens to Spoon’s lyrics the screen shows the two adult siblings under a sheet placed over chairs arranged like an imaginary fort. Spoon holds a torch that illuminates their face, star-shaped lights are strung inside the tent, and the siblings sit on what looks like a child’s quilt. In this image we are taken back to childhood, to make-believe play and childlike activities reminiscent of love, happiness, and fun. These images of family life juxtaposed with the lyrics of the song are jarring and emphasize the traumatic nature of Rae’s childhood and experience of home. The siblings return to painful childhood memories and together build something new.

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Spoon explains that they eventually moved to their maternal grandmother’s house. They recall that their father’s violence had “intensified to dangerous levels” and that even though Spoon was no longer living in the family home, they “felt hunted because he was around.” As these words sit heavily in the air, McMullan focuses on a large outdoor steel replica of a cowboy. At first, we see just his left side; the right side of the frame is filled with the sky, emphasizing the sheer size of the figure. The camera then shifts to close-ups of the cowboy’s belt buckle, then his moustache, then his chaps. As the camera pulls back we see the incredibly large cowboy towering over a building wearing a particularly stern expression. Spoon continues the story, fear palpable as they remind us that their father was “a very predatory large adult figure in the house” to whom they could not relate. The cowboy – a venerated Canadian masculine archetype – is thus used to give visual impetus to the long legacy of living in the shadow of an emotionally and physically terrifying father. In this respect the sense of fear, exclusion, and oppression at the level of the household is mapped on to the nation. The troubled and frightening experience of home Spoon had as a child continues into adulthood: they live in a state of distress that their father may find them. Spoon tells viewers that as a performer “anyone can find me.” Indeed, their father surreptitiously attends a gig of Spoon’s in Regina. As the audience claps at the end of their final song, a voice is heard asking “Is that your dad?” We see Spoon running through the back of the venue and out to the parking lot as a middle-aged man hurries towards a blue car and drives away. In the next series of images, McMullan returns to a recurring motif in the film, that of placelessness and movement. Spoon is often framed in hotel rooms, on trains and on buses; as they say in the film, “I know what I am without a home.” We see an image of a motel corridor. The next shot is of a motel room with two single beds. Spoon lies on one, strumming. The camera then shows us the exterior of the motel, including the type of ubiquitous signage that marks such places, advertising the pool, movie channels, and the Internet. This is one of many motels in which Spoon is photographed in the film. They often are pictured narrating their story in this setting. Along with transit centres, small-town bars, makeshift venues, and diners, motels constitute a life constantly in motion as Spoon

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undertakes up to 250 gigs a year. McMullan reinforces this sense of movement with constant panning of the camera and a return throughout to the film of Spoon seated on a Greyhound bus. We have a sense of transience as we share Spoon’s view from the bus out to the treeless Prairies. The sense of ephemerality created by McMullan has a deliberate purpose in that it signals to the viewer Spoon’s lack of belonging and underscores how, from childhood, a sense of home has been elusive for them. Spoon cannot be identified and catalogued in the ways demanded of binary notions of gender. Just as the luggage we see must be fitted into one of four prelabelled compartments (Saskatchewan, Alberta, Manitoba, British Columbia), so, too, must people fit into one of two gender categories. The ubiquity of this type of gendered organizing of the social world and its exclusionary manifestations are highlighted in the film in a range of ways, including through images of children’s toys, conversations about religious practices, and a visual of shop mannequins dressed as a heterosexual couple. McMullan juxtaposes these reminders of the ways in which gender norms are woven into the fabric of childhood through the recurring trope of the restroom. As Spoon moves across Canada this enforced social division remains a constant. We see it first in the opening scene in the diner when, troubadour-like, Spoon lingers outside the toilets marked male and female strumming their guitar. They contemplate their options before turning away. Later in the film, toilet doors reappear in a scene in a transit lounge. There are three doors. The one in the centre is unmarked and remains shut. The one on the left bears the sign “women,” while that on the left is titled “men.” Each of these two doors is open. We see a woman enter the toilet marked “women.” Even in this everyday and mundane environment, Spoon must negotiate the gender binary. The final allusion to toilets occurs just after this scene. It is an image from a truck stop or diner. Two toilets are positioned side by side. One is marked male. On the other toilet door there is no signage. It has perhaps been vandalized. However, there is no need for signage as viewers are so schooled and disciplined in essentialized and fixed notions of gender that we can read who belongs here in the absence of words.

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McMullan connects ideas of belonging and home at the local level with the national level. A visit to the toilet can only occur under repressive binary terms. Such constructs also inform the right to citizenship. As the camera centres on the transit hall toilets, a voice-over from Spoon tells us there are times when they do not “argue with people about my pronoun,” such as at the Canadian/American border. To refute the categorization demanded of a bifurcated and hierarchal form of gender division and social organization risks losing any claim to a national home.

Home: Resistances and Recalibrations The negative and repressive experiences of home that are conveyed by the film are tempered by an alternative narrative of Spoon’s resistance to exclusions from home and their recalibrations of heteronormative configurations of home. This began in childhood, as Spoon explains, with the move into their grandmother’s home in northeast Calgary to escape their father, whom they described as a “tyrant.” Spoon tells the audience that their grandmother “accepted me more than my parents ever did.” Spoon notes that after the move, they began to be able to sleep again. Still, Spoon is haunted in dreams by their parents and has a recurring nightmare about their father’s moustache chasing them. The lyrics that come next capture feelings of refuge at their grandmother’s house as well as the fear that lingers as they attempt to escape the legacy of their parents: They own me in the land of dreams. Jesus didn’t save me but my grandmother did She pulled me from the wreckage and made me eat again She taught me to be strong and sing my way through things In this way, Spoon creates a home outside of their origin/evangelical home, and articulates how they cast off their religious upbringing and the worry it induced about the rapture. They state: “I think it’s that you can’t live in both worlds. If you are going to be queer and live in a Christian home that doesn’t accept you then that is like very messed up. You

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need to be able to take care of yourself so you don’t have room to worry about that.” The wide-open spaces of the rural landscape in which they grew up are juxtaposed with the constraints on Spoon from their religious parents, especially the abusive, mentally ill father. Spoon contests and recasts the concept of home in relation to childhood and rurality. The return to childhood and its objects and storylines is particularly relevant to this point because cultural texts aimed at a child audience – including children’s literature, films, and toys – tend to romanticize the rural and pathologize the urban (Jones 1997, 2007). Country childhoods are viewed as encompassing innocence, nature, adventure, freedom, health, and community. Spoon overturns common narratives and images of rural childhood as “the site of wholesome family life” (Reimer 2013, 5). Through McMullan’s documentary techniques and Spoon’s memories and song lyrics, they craft a different story about family life in rural space that exposes dominant representations of childhood as a fiction. Ultimately Spoon reclaims their childhood through the objects that populate the documentary (toy dinosaurs, quilts, makebelieve structures) as a way to confront abuse and to experience pleasures that were denied them as a young child. Throughout the film, Spoon consistently claims the right to the Prairies as home: “People always ask me why I came back to the Prairies so much. You know it can be really awkward for me but there is like a shared history and I feel like that is just as much mine as anyone else from here.” Spoon asserts her claim to the Prairies as home in a variety of ways. Of these, one of the most significant is when they return to their former high school to speak about queer teen romance and to visually re-enact their high school prom as a trans adult with their former high school sweetheart. In so doing, Spoon subverts one of the most gendered and heterosexist rituals of youth (Best 2000) and takes back the space of the rural high school as their own. As this section of the documentary begins, the camera focuses on Spoon and their high school sweetheart, now grown, standing outside the school building drinking slushies while hard rock music plays in the background. The camera provides a shot of football goalposts and a huddle of boys playing the game, attending again to how everyday spaces provide normative heterosexual education into gender and sexuality.

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Spoon’s friend, Rina, says “We were outcasts” and compares Spoon to Ally Sheedy (“but without the dandruff ”) from John Hughes’s 1985 film The Breakfast Club. Each speaks about the threatening behaviour of their peers. “It was like a real fear, actual literal threats” and “rocks.” In the documentary, they walk through the school hallway holding hands while Spoon sings: I don’t care if it’s right or wrong I just want what I want, what I want I don’t care if it’s right or wrong My first love, my first love, my first love And we might get caught If it’s a ledge then I’m one foot off I don’t give a damn what they say There is nothin’ that they can touch that goes between us. The two adults hold hands and walk confidently towards the camera past water fountains and lockers unfettered by fear of rocks or threats. They take back the halls in which they felt threatened in ways that construct a more diverse imaginary of the rural school, one in which embodiments of gender and sexuality are broad and inclusive. Spoon and Rina walk to a darkened gymnasium and dance together. A spinning disco ball hangs from a wooden ladder, and a circle on the floor is filled with white balloons. Spoon wears a blazer and pants and Rina is dressed in a knee-length magenta prom dress. Spoon pins a corsage on their date in the locker room, a significant location in schools. As Fields and Payne point out, “[t]hough not a formal site for the teaching of heteronormative sexualities and genders, the locker room is a school space in which sexualities and genders are repeatedly taught and policed” (2016, 3). Spoon and Rina reconstitute the locker room as a space open to queer bodies and desires. This scene stands in contrast to that of the diner at the beginning of the film since here Spoon (their sexuality and gender) takes centre stage. Through the visual rendering of the locker room as a space of queer romance, McMullan and Spoon offer viewers an alternative and aspirational pedagogy in which the school serves as a kind of home for queer and transgender youth.

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The prom scene repositions Spoon from margin to centre and from object to subject. In the same way, the placelessness of Spoon’s life gives them an opportunity to move away from the subject position of victim. While the echoes of transience and movement that resonate in the film may be read negatively, as a lack of home, Knopp (2004) observes that placelessness may be pleasurable for queers. This is highlighted as Spoon talks about their father, who haunts the film in the image of the hunter. Spoon says: His looming figure is something that is still there but it is something I am getting less scared of. I think I have realized over the past year … I am his worst fear. Like think about it. You do all these things to a tiny person and then they grow up to be an adult and you are scared of adults. I mean that has got to be his worst fear. Spoon articulates how their father should rightly be afraid of the now adult child, who remembers and can speak about abuse. Spoon is empowered by a capacity for movement. This is solidified in the next scene, in which Spoon sits in a bar called the Red Fox, which is decorated with Molson Canadian beer signs. The camera captures them playing a video game called Big Buck Hunter Pro. Spoon holds a gun and shoots at deer and foxes as they run across the video game screen. Other scenes follow in which Spoon appears in the woods in a black-and-red plaid wool hunting jacket with a gun, and as a live singing head alongside mounted animal trophies on a wall. They sing: You won’t see it until it’s too late Rolling from you in some unnamed way Love is a hunter Love is a hunter Love is a hunter and it is coming for you. Collectively, the images and lyrics counteract the frightening memory of Spoon’s father as predator. Simultaneously, Spoon moves from the

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victim/hunted/child to hunter/adult (if only temporarily). In this way, meanings of home are recalibrated by Spoon so that they experience a sense of control, belonging, and inclusion that they lacked in childhood.

Conclusion McMullan and Spoon demonstrate how home for the rural trans child is potentially marked by an affective landscape of fear, loneliness, and shame. At the same time they show that home spaces can be inclusive for the trans child living in a rural community. To do so they re-envision Spoon’s rural childhood as a trans-friendly space in a powerful reworking of the traditionally heterosexist school prom. Equally they counter the positioning of the trans rural child as victim relying on our familiarity with dominant urban imaginaries of the rural queer as “sad and lonely or else stuck in place” (Halberstam 2005, 36) and, instead, show Spoon content and empowered in their placelessness. Cumulatively they reveal the home – from the realm of the domestic to that of the nation – to be a fundamentally political space for the trans subject living in a world that continues to discount the plurality and fluidity of gender.

n ote s 1 As they explain in the film, Spoon prefers to use the gender-neutral pronouns they and their. We consequently do so in this chapter. 2 As cisgender people we do not position ourselves as outside the processes and practices of exclusions – we are all implicated here. referen ces Best, Amy. 2000. Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge. Blunt, Alison. 2005. “Cultural Geography: Cultural Geographies of Home.” Progress in Human Geography 29(4): 505–15. https://doi.org/10.1191%2F03091 32505ph564pr. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. 2006. Home. New York: Routledge. Bryant, Lia, and Barbara Pini. 2011. Gender and Rurality. New York: Routledge. Calder, Alison, and Robert Wardhaugh. 2005. “Introduction: When Is the Prairie?”

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In History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies, edited by Alison Calder and Robert Wardhaugh, 3–24. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Danforth, Emily. 2012. The Miseducation of Cameron Post. New York: HarperCollins. Domash, Mona. 1998. “Geography and Gender: Home, Again?” Progress in Human Geography 22(2): 276–82. https://doi.org/10.1191%2F030913298676121192. Fields, Jessica, and Elizabethe Payne. 2016. “Editorial Introduction: Gender and Sexuality Taking Up Space in Schooling.” Sex Education: Sexuality, Society, and Learning 16(1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681811.2016.1111078. Gilmore, Leigh, and Elizabeth Marshall. 2013. “Trauma and Young Adult Literature: Representing Adolescence and Knowledge in David Small’s Stitches: A Memoir.” Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 35(1): 16–38. https://doi.org /10.1080/01440357.2013.781345. Gorman-Murray, Andrew. 2006a. “Gay and Lesbian Couples at Home: Identity Work in Domestic Space.” Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design, and Domestic Space 3(2): 145–67. https://doi.org/10.2752/174063106778053200. – 2006b. “Homeboys: Uses of Home by Gay Australian Men.” Social and Cultural Geography 7(1): 53–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360500452988. – 2006c. “Queering Home or Domesticating Deviance? Interrogating Gay Domesticity through Lifestyle Television.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 9(2): 227–47. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1367877906064032. Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York: nyu Press. Johnston, Lynda, and Robyn Longhurst. 2009. Space, Place, and Sex: Geographies of Sexualities. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. Jones, Owain. 1997. “Little Figures, Big Shadows: Country Childhood Stories.” In Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalisation, and Rurality, edited by Paul Cloke and Jo Little, 152–72. London: Routledge. – 2007. “Rurality, Power, and the Otherness of Childhood in British Contexts.” In Global Perspectives on Rural Childhood and Youth: Young Rural Lives, edited by Ruth Panelli, Samantha Punch, and Elsbeth Robson, 193–204. New York: Routledge. Keahey, Deborah. 1998. Making It Home: Place in Canadian Prairie Literature. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Keys, Wendy, Elizabeth Marshall, and Barbara Pini. 2017. “Representations of Rural Lesbian Lives in Young Adult Fiction.” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural

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Politics of Education 38(3): 354–64. https://www.tandfonline.com/author/Pini %2C+Barbara Knopp, Larry. 2004. “Ontologies of Place, Placenessness, and Movement: Queer Quests for Identity and Their Impacts on Contemporary Geographic Thought.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 11(1): 121–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369042000188585. Longhurst, Robyn. 1999. “Gendering Place.” In Explorations in Human Geography: Encountering Place, edited by Richard Le Heron, Laurence Murphy, Pop Forer, and Margaret Goldstone, 151–72. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Marshall, Elizabeth. 2004. “The Daughter’s Disenchantment: Incest as Pedagogy in Fairy Tales and Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss.” College English 66(4): 403–26. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4140709. Marshall, Elizabeth, and Leigh Gilmore. 2015. “Girlhood in the Gutter: Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of Sexual Precarity.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 43(1–2): 95–114. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43958474. Nash, Catherine. 2010. “Trans Geographies, Embodiment, and Experience.” Gender, Place, and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 17(5): 579–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2010.503112. Oswin, Natalie. 2008. “Critical Geographies and the Uses of Sexuality: Deconstructing Queer Space.” Progress in Human Geography 32(1): 89–103. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F0309132507085213. Pini, Barbara, Wendy Keys, and Elizabeth Marshall. 2017. “Queering Rurality: Reading The Miseducation of Cameron Post Geographically.” Children’s Geographies 15(3): 362–73. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2016.1252830. Pini, Barbara, Deborah Morris, and Robyn Mayes. 2016. “Rural Youth: Mobilities, Marginalities, and Negotiations.” In Space, Place, and Environment, edited by Karen Nairn and Peter Kraftl, 463–80. Singapore: Springer. Purdy, Charles. 2014. “Outfest 2014: ‘My Prairie Home.’” Los Angeles Times, 13 June. http://www.latimes.com/brandpublishing/livingplus/lgbt/la-ss-lgbt-outfest2014-preview-my-prairie-home-20140613-story.html (accessed 17 October 2016). Reimer, Mavis. 2013. “The Child of Nature and the Home Child.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 5(2): 1–16. http://doi.org/10.1353/jeu.2013.0012. Reimer, Mavis, ed. 2008. Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Rose, Gillian. 2012. Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Los Angeles: Sage.

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Ryan, Joelle. 2010. “Diversifying and Complicating Representations of Trans Lives: Five Documentaries about Gender Identity.” Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women’s Studies Resources 31(3): 10–16. Spoon, Rae. 2012. First Spring Grass Fire. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press. Valentine, Gill, and Sarah Holloway. 2001. “A Window on the Wider World? Rural Children’s Use of Information and Communication Technologies.” Journal of Rural Studies 17(4): 383–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(01)00022-5. Valentine, Gill, Tracey Skelton, and Ruth Butler. 2003. “Coming Out and Outcomes: Negotiating Lesbian and Gay Identities with, and in, the Family.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 21(4): 479–99. https://doi.org/ 10.1068%2Fd277t. Waitt, Gordon, and Andrew Gorman-Murray. 2011. “‘It’s About Time You Came Out’: Sexualities, Mobility, and Home.” Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 43(4): 1380–403. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2011.00876.x. Woodward, Suzanne. 2015. “Being Both: Gender and Indigeneity in Two Pacific Documentary Films.” Pacific Journalism Review 21(2): 63–76. https://doi.org/ 10.24135/pjr.v21i2.117. f il m o g r a phy Goldson, Annie, and Peter Wells. 2001. Georgie Girl: The Remarkable Story of Georgina Beyer. New Zealand: Occasional Productions. Hamer, Dean, and Joe Wilson. 2014. Kumu Hina: A Place in the Middle. usa: Qwaves and Independent Television Service. Hughes, John. 1985. The Breakfast Club. usa: Universal Pictures. McMullan, Chelsea. 2013. My Prairie Home. Canada: National Film Board of Canada. Muska, Susan, and Gréta Ólafsdottir. 1998. The Brandon Teena Story. usa: Zeitgeist Films. Peirce, Kimberly. 1999. Boys Don’t Cry. usa: Fox Searchlight Pictures.

10 Pumpjacks, Social Class, and the Struggle for Belonging Maureen Kendrick

Pumpjack A slow muted ka-thummmp.....ka-thummmmp... ka-thummmp...fills the [Alberta] night. Just as you think the gasping engine has died a final death another quick succession comes ka-thummmp, ka-thummmp, ka-thummmp. Scattered across the flatlands like prehistoric beasts, raising their heads, moonlight glinting from crested brows dipping their long tongues into the Earth. Tasting, savoring, lapping up the thick black soup, returning it to the surface and the sunlight it has not seen for millions and millions of years. –Kenny A. Chaffin (2014)

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In this chapter I reflect on my childhood growing up beside a pumpjack, in the shadow of Alberta’s oil and gas industry. The pumpjack has long been a symbol of life across the Canadian prairie provinces. Its ubiquitous presence on the landscape represents livelihoods, politics, families, and social lives. I use self-study, visual methods, and newspaper clippings to reflect on my childhood in a rural oil town and my complicated relationship with the iconic pumpjack. Underneath my perceptions of growing up in this industrial context lies a story of social class, identity, and struggle. Tracing my experiences and perceptions from childhood to adulthood, I look inward and outward at the personal, social, and political effects of a childhood set amidst the oil and gas industry, drawing attention to the particular but also the universal.

Recursive Remembering Over the past fifteen years I have been engaged in the use of visual methods across a range of research studies (see, for example, Kendrick and McKay 2004; Mutonyi and Kendrick 2011; Kendrick 2016). In this chapter I turn the lens on my own life as a member of an oilfield family in the small town of Drayton Valley. Through a recursive process of taking photographs, note-taking, and collecting newspaper articles, I try “bringing memory forward” (Strong-Wilson 2008, 6) to create a narrative that weaves together my memories with historic events and images. The writing itself is recursive as well, spiralling back and forth from memory to image to history. This type of writing poses a particular set of challenges because there is no way of knowing in advance where the narrative is going or what the remembering will uncover. As several authors have pointed out, there is a strong relationship between recursivity and generativity. Ball (2012), for example, proposes that qualitative researchers adopt generativity as a principle and engage in a self-reflexive process that enables development of personal voice (cited in StrongWilson et al. 2013). Claudia Mitchell and Sandra Weber remind us that memory-work research also aligns with a generative research process because it cultivates “a self-reflexive capacity for ‘making a difference’ to the present and the future that may begin with the self but goes beyond it” (2005, 4). In other words, “looking inward can lead to a more intelli-

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gent and useful outward gaze” (4, emphasis in original) and draw attention to the political and social. My narrative traverses three primary themes: (not) belonging, imagined futures and the hidden curriculum, and living invisible lives. The themes intersect across past and present, with a pointed gaze towards both the political and the social. My perspective is a socio-cultural one, which emphasizes the importance of understanding how children’s experiences in particular geographic locations shape their beliefs, behaviours, values, and futures. For all children, the complex ways in which families, communities, and institutions interact and differ in their values and practices emphasize the situated ways in which children learn, negotiate, and access education (see, for example, Auerbach 1989; Delpit 1995; Heath 1983; Polakow 1993). I set the scene by introducing my theoretical perspectives. I view the context in which I grew up as “a nested arrangement of concentric structures, each contained within the next” (Bronfenbrenner 1979, 22). The events, experiences, and perceptions that were part of this ecological environment all took place within the larger structures of provincial, national, and global events that in turn affected the smaller structures in my life along with my personal and social development. Within this ecological model, I take into consideration figured worlds, recognizing that the concentric circles of my life are a socially produced and culturally constructed “realm of interpretation in which a particular set of characters and actors are recognized, significance is assigned to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over others” (Bartlett and Holland 2002, 12). James Gee argues that there are different types of figured worlds, which he describes as “taken-for-granted theories or stories about how the world works that we use to get on efficiently with our daily lives” (2011, 95). We build so-called little worlds or simplifications about the world as stories, images, and frames that we turn to in understanding and acting on the world. I regard my identities as multiple and situated. Catherine ComptonLilly explains that “identities are … the result of negotiations, reversals, exchanges, rejections, adoptions, dismissals and renegotiations as we claim, abandon, and rework the ways of being that are available to us as we find ourselves in different situations and interacting with different

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people over time” (2008, 23). In other words, we see ourselves through the lens of “the relationships we share with others, the knowledges and experiences we bring, and the contexts within which we live and learn” (2006, 57; see also Norton 2013). For Bonny Norton, identity is “how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is structured across time and space, and how the person understands possibilities for the future” (2013, 45), with imagined identities and communities integral to how and why we invest in particular futures.

(Not) Belonging My narrative begins with reflections on the iconic pumpjack, the childhood memories it evokes, and how these recollections shaped my sense of belonging and connection to a particular geographic space. In September of last year, I returned to my childhood home to visit my mother. I stood for a long time staring out the large picture window, which looks out onto a grassy field, still mostly green at this time of year. The house was originally a two-bedroom bungalow built to accommodate the workforce that flocked to Drayton Valley in the years following Mobil Oil’s discovery of oil in 1953, then the largest find in North America. I spent eighteen years in this house, living in this small town among many other oilfield families and service workers. Initially a hamlet of seventy-five people, it grew rapidly from the famous skidshacks (small, temporary trailer-like dwellings) where my father and grandmother lived when they first arrived from Ontario to the rows of nearly identical bungalows built to house the new workforce. The town had limited infrastructure at the time and relied on the local agricultural population to dig trenches for water pipes and sewer lines. This labour force included my maternal grandfather, a Ukrainian farmer who like others in a nearby hamlet had escaped Eastern Europe during the Stalin era. By the time I became a resident of the town – years later – it had a wellearned reputation for having tough, self-made, independent people who lived a life of risk, reward, and resilience. Now decades later as I look out the same window and across the field, past the junior high shop building (for the large number of students who

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signed up for industrial arts courses), I can no longer see the black pumpjack silhouetted against the big blue sky. As a child, I remember habitually watching it as it moved up and down, “ka-thummmp … kathummmmp …” Sometimes there were tweens playing baseball in the field around the pumpjack, or teenagers hanging out smoking. All that remains now is the chain link fence marking off where the pumpjack used to stand, a reminder of the life it once had, and for some, of the life it gave. I distinctly recall my father’s reaction when the pumpjack was first retired. He was angry and couldn’t bear to see its lifeless head, to know that its purpose had come to an end. For him, it signalled a changing industry, an industry upon which his livelihood had always depended. Ironically, it was also an industry that he would sacrifice his life to after asbestos-related tumours were discovered in his lungs. Although we never talked much about that lifeless pumpjack, my father seemed to need to know that his own existence in this oil town wouldn’t change, that the next generation would be able to rely on “the oil.” As a young girl, my own relationship with the iconic pumpjack was much more tangential and ambivalent. When I look at it now, there is a familiarity but what also comes to mind are feelings of instability and uncertainty, a disquieting sense that if I turned away and then looked back again everything would suddenly have changed. Growing up in an oilfield family meant there were times of abundance but also frequent experiences where weather conditions, oil prices, and volatile employment opportunities put my father (and our family) in precarious holding patterns. He had to choose between taking up employment opportunities in other parts of the province or enduring the highs and lows of the oil industry. Looking at the pumpjack, I still get a hollow, displaced feeling in the pit of my stomach that conjures up feelings of being trapped between nothing changing and everything changing. It was a powerless sense of living betwixt and between, amidst a growing awareness of not being in control and emerging questions of where I fit in. When I think about this feeling of alienation, I am reminded of how as an adult I had to learn to engage with family members in a way that didn’t accentuate my disconnection or lack of knowledge. Even as a teenager employed as a summer student with Alberta Tourism I struggled to respond to questions about the oilfield. I specifically recall

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tourists visiting from Quebec asking to see a pumpjack. I directed them to my street and the field across from my house (all the while secretly wondering why anyone would want to see a pumpjack). But when they had questions about how a pumpjack works, I had no answers. I had admittedly never really thought or wondered about it. What did it do besides nodding eternally: “ka-thummmp, ka-thummmp?” Later that day, when I asked my father to explain the operation of a pumpjack, he seemed bewildered. How could I not know this? In a town where almost everyone had oilfield ties, and in a household where oil-related matters were the constant topic of kitchen table conversations, these were local “funds of knowledge” – the practices and bodies of information deeply embedded in families like mine (Moll et al. 1992). But for me, it was an industry that I felt cut off from; it caused instability in my family, and much to my father’s disappointment, it did not engage or interest me. As a girl, with my primary options to work in the service sector of the industry, it was not a place where I could imagine a future.

Imagined Futures and the Hidden Curriculum This section of the narrative clusters together memories of my childhood, both in and out of school. I reflect on my imagined identities and communities (Norton 2000) in relation to my school experiences and the hidden curriculum entrenched in this small-town context. The town itself overlooks the North Saskatchewan River. A drive into the surrounding Brazeau County takes you through agricultural lands dotted with cows, horses, and farm buildings. The river valley has a beautiful escarpment that shows off the distinct seasons in this part of Alberta. There are bunches of birch and spruce, areas of muskeg, and, of course, the omnipresent pumpjacks and oil derricks. Drayton Valley was at the heart of Alberta’s “boom or bust” era in the 1970s, and from the beginning, there were high rates of social stress, divorce, drug and alcohol abuse (including among the adolescent population), and suicide (cbc Learning 2001). During that time, the population was largely white with a few families who were visible minorities (for example, the family who owned the one Chinese restaurant), plus a small population with Indigenous heritage, mostly living in nearby ham-

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lets. We were a socially and economically stratified population, depending on our relationship to the oil, with those who had prospered at the top, followed by those who were oil executives. In the middle and towards the bottom were the rest, the working class like my father and mother who provided labour and service to the oil and gas industry. But the quick rise of the province’s oil boom took its toll on the town’s population as well. Although the town often tried to proclaim itself “the Oil Capital of the World,” in the early 1980s a worldwide economic recession hit the industry hard, and as unpredictably as it started, Drayton Valley’s oil boom came to an end. A Globe and Mail headline from 25 June 1981, “Bankruptcy Hits Firm in Alberta,” tells part of the story, in the course of which time unemployment and addictions rose, economic security disappeared, and many people began leaving Drayton Valley. The town’s reputation for being tough, hard-lined, and independent played out in the streets and alleys. It was expected that ways of dressing, speaking, valuing, or being would not push the boundaries of the established social hierarchy. There was, in general, limited exposure to – and often a low tolerance for – diverse people and perspectives. What comes to mind are both insignificant examples – such as friends pointing out that my mother had “an accent,” something I never noticed as a child – but also much more serious instances. Although the details are no longer salient, one memory in particular stands out because of the potential consequences had no one intervened. At my high school graduation party, a car was intentionally set on fire, and inside was a teenage boy who had passed out. The boy was unpopular for reasons I don’t fully recall, but most likely because something about him challenged accepted notions of masculinity. People were quick to fight when their position in the social order, their territory, or what they considered to be their property was challenged. I witnessed countless teenage fights out the front window of my house over something said or done. These claims to power and dominance were symbolic displays of individualism and resilience beneath which was defensiveness and the need to prove one’s worth and social position. The photo of the rural lease road pictured in Figure 10.1 was taken on my recent visit to Drayton Valley. The picture shows a pumpjack surrounded by a chain link fence. The fence is meant as a safety barrier but

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Figure 10.1 Pumpjack on a rural lease road on the outskirts of town.

seeing it now I am immediately reminded of the times I saw it scaled by someone intent on mounting the neck of the pumpjack and riding it like a horse as it moved up and down. By day the pumpjack pulled oil from the earth, maintained by those who had official access – our fathers, brothers, and sixteen-year-old schoolboys lured by the good life promise of oil companies. But at night, it became the play equipment of teenage boys, who were typically fuelled by drugs and alcohol and eager to exercise their masculine bravado in this town brimming with muscle cars and pickup trucks. From a young age, many of us had high levels of independence and walked to school, rode our bicycles through the streets, and played in one of the few playgrounds without adult supervision. Organized activ-

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ities were far less available. We could join the Boy Scouts, Brownies, or Girl Guides, and we could choose from a few seasonal sports like baseball, softball, and ice-skating. Hockey dominated (and had substantial sponsorships from local oil companies); boys who didn’t play tended to be on the social periphery. Some children joined the 4-H club, a youth development club focused on agriculture and the outdoors, but this membership inevitably established a marked divide between an agricultural family and an oil patch family. Mainly, we created our own amusements. I remember being dressed in patched jeans and a baseball cap, wandering with my friend through the shops that lined the two main streets of the downtown area. Home Centre, a two-storey furniture store, was our favourite. We spent entire Saturday afternoons selecting furniture, decorative pieces, and carpets for our future imagined homes. Summers were passed gardening and picking wild berries with my mother, and rescuing injured birds and feral cats, which nurtured my interest in animals. In the winter, I built snow forts with friends, read endless books in my parents’ bedroom closet, and combed through classifieds in the local newspaper looking for exotic animals that I imagined I could one day care for. The imagined future of my early childhood days stood in sharp contrast to the reality of life in junior high school. The teachers in general had limited aspirations for us, and the educational goals were in no way focused on preparation for high school or university. Rather, they were about maintaining social control, demonstrating appropriate respect for authority, and following the pre-established rules. Corporal punishment played a pre-eminent role in ensuring that we learned these lessons and understood that we had no recourse to question existing practices. Students were regularly strapped for insubordination for a range of offences from chewing gum and talking out of turn to overt disobedience of authority. Although a good student by academic standards, and respectful in my interactions with teachers, I was not exempt from needing to be reminded who had power in the classroom and what my position was in the social order. I clearly recall my grade nine math teacher singling out a student in my group for talking out of turn. It was obvious to everyone

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in the group that he had identified the wrong student. Knowing what her fate would be, I decided to speak up but was immediately silenced by the teacher. Taking my concerns to the school guidance counsellor marked me as disobedient and as questioning a teacher’s authority – also punishable offences. I lost count of the number of times the math teacher strapped me, claiming he would only stop when I admitted my wrongdoing. When I came home from school with hands so swollen I couldn’t hold a pen, my parents were outraged and threatened to move me to another school, but in this small town with one high school, there was nowhere else to go. As students, we received ambiguous messages about our social mobility and possibilities for the future. Although we could select the option of applying for higher education, I don’t recall any overt encouragement, assistance, attempts to inspire, or acknowledgment that we might have passions and interests beyond the oil patch. In grade ten, our math teacher would regularly leave school at the start of class to participate in fire drills for volunteer firefighters. We were left to figure out the lessons from the textbook and complete the assignments (or not) on our own. There were high levels of disengagement, with disenfranchised students walking out of class on the heels of the teacher. Our Biology 20 teacher had low aspirations for girls in particular, having declared that the only reason for us to go to university would be to get an “M-R-S” degree. My involvement in the local workforce started at the age of thirteen, when I was employed as a chambermaid for one of the many hotels that had popped up to temporarily house the transient population working in the oilfield. It was an after-school and weekend job that I would hold until I moved up the ranks of the service industry to stocking shelves in one of the two grocery stores in town. In high school, with my parents’ strong encouragement, I was pointed towards a work experience program that would set me up for future employment as a bank teller. In this new role, during the year after high school, I followed in my mother’s footsteps, working in a local bank serving the oil and gas industry and its employees. Less than a year later, I quit, opting to attend university instead, a decision that was not well understood or initially supported by my parents. Indeed, attending university would foster a distant rela-

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tionship with my family, in particular with my father, who would routinely question who I thought I was now that I was attending university. My experience as a first-year university student would cause me to ask similar questions of myself. As a new student, I found no references in my classes to the experiences that had shaped my life. Throughout university, I would struggle with feelings of inadequacy and a strong sense of not belonging. Looking back on junior high and high school, what I remember best is how the hidden curriculum communicated strong messages about students’ worth and value to society and about their prospects as adults. The lives of the characters in the many books I read as a child bore little relationship to my reality. Most of our teachers had roots in the town, and for many of them, what seemed most feasible and within our reach was to track our aspirations laterally towards the local industry rather upwardly towards higher education and broader horizons. Their approach was conservative, pragmatic, and narrow in its hopes for us. For many male students in particular, the enticement of a good job in the oil patch had already eroded the value they placed in schooling.

Living Invisible Lives This final section chronicles three significant events in the history of Drayton Valley that reflect the politics of resources and my experience of living an invisible life in the shadow of the oil and gas industry. The first event was the provincial–federal confrontations between Alberta and the Trudeau government during the oil crisis in the 1970s, which culminated in the National Energy Program (nep) in 1980. The nep deeply divided my family. Liberal prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau introduced a series of changes aimed at making Alberta oil more available across Canada, and this would require strengthening the federal government’s role in the supply, distribution, and pricing of Alberta’s oil and gas. Many in Drayton Valley would come to resent this policy, and that resentment would carry forward for many decades in the historic memory of the townspeople. Their perception (see the 1974 Calgary Herald cartoon in Figure 10.2) was that Ottawa’s energy policies

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Figure 10.2 “The Oil Patch” by Tom Innes, editorial cartoonist for the Calgary Herald, 18 May 1974.

(represented by a caricature of the then federal mines and resources minster Donald MacDonald) were harming Alberta’s oil industry and economy (represented by a caricature of Alberta’s premier at the time, Peter Lougheed). For people like my father, the nep hadn’t just caused the industry to slip, it had completely pulled it out from under their feet. The federal government’s new policies also resulted in the creation of Petro-Canada, a Crown corporation, which came to serve as a symbol of the nep. My father would forever boycott the corporation. “I would let my gas tank run dry and walk 100 miles in the snow before I’d ever give Petro-Canada a god-damn nickel,” he would rage at his three kids, expecting all of us to follow suit. My mother, on the other hand, was uncharacteristically vocal about her support for Trudeau, something that further angered and antagonized my father. In a town with staunchly conservative values and an industry that had never been unionized, the

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nep and Petro-Canada have become part of the intergenerational memory of many people. In 1977 the Globe and Mail published an article, headlined “The Foul Smell of Wealth” (Butters 1977), describing how Alberta had earned the wrath of most Canadians by hiking its oil and gas prices. Meanwhile in Alberta, vehicle owners began displaying the popular bumper sticker “Let the Eastern Bastards Freeze in the Dark!” The political divisions that were first evident in my family and that later became more pronounced at the municipal and national levels would teach me important lessons about the politics of resource production and distribution, as well as the relationships between local, provincial, federal, and global interests. A second event was the sour gas well blowout in the winter of 1977. At the time, gas was a relatively new commodity in Alberta and was little regulated. Although there is much that is not said in the clippings in Figure 10.3, their juxtaposition evokes memories of what it felt like to live with the inherent risks of the oilfield, in fear of the “one spark” but also amidst the town’s odd celebrity status that came about when Red Adair, the superhero Texan oil well firefighter, was called in to cap the well. As the technical account in the first clipping indicates, the well burned out of control for two weeks. It is interesting that the responsible oil company was given the authority to report on the wild well – this was typical of many local news reports. This presumed mandate may partly explain why the article fails to highlight the effects the blowout had on the local population, which became accustomed to inhaling poisonous hydrogen sulphide. I vividly recall the “rotten egg” smell and how impossible it was to escape as it seeped from the outside into our homes, burning our eyes and noses. For my family, and for many others, environmental and health issues were complicated by our dependence on “the oil,” and life continued in a business-as-usual fashion. There were no orders to evacuate from local or provincial authorities, and there was little open public criticism of the oil company responsible or of the industry in general. Instead, what seemed of most interest to many – and my father in particular – was Red Adair’s arrival in the community, which as the newspaper clipping on the right describes, “attracted so many people that the rcmp have been called in.” The social and environmental issues and the impact on other people such as trappers and

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Figure 10.3 Left: Potential for disaster. Ottawa Journal, 20 December 1977. Right: Red Adair’s celebrity status. Ottawa Journal, 30 December 1977.

farmers – an impact that should have been of central concern to the authorities, the oil companies, and the townspeople – were overshadowed by the heroic efforts of Mr Adair in particular and of the powerful oil industry more generally, and were never discussed in my classrooms or among my family. A third event occurred in 1982, when another Amoco sour gas well blew out (see Figure 10.4), again spewing a “witch’s brew of methane, hydrogen sulfide, and liquid hydrocarbon vapour” (Jaremko 2013, 60). Previous records from Alberta Environment indicated that gas plants

Figure 10.4 “Witch’s brew of methane, hydrogen sulfide, and liquid hydrocarbon vapour.”

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handling sour gas had violated provincial air standards 1,104 times in 1980, yet no prosecutions were pursued then or following the blowout in 1982 (Edmonton Journal, 18 November 1982). Nor had new safety standards been put in place following the 1977 incident (Lizée 2010). The 1982 blowout would come to be regarded as the worst in Canada’s history. Douglas Martin of the New York Times reported on the incident in an article headlined “Oil Blowout Is Sowing Fear in Alberta Backwoods” (Martin 1982). Two things are striking about that story. First, that a small town in rural Alberta was on the radar of the New York Times says something about the magnitude of the crisis. Second, whatever importance might have been communicated by the coverage, labelling the area as the “Alberta backwoods” signalled how outsiders perceived the people living in this area. The question of what and who mattered would play out over sixtyeight days as the wild well continued to expel toxic gas into the air. The Pembina Institute (n.d.) reported that the contamination spread across the countryside, with the rotten egg stench reaching as far as Saskatchewan. Other news reports indicate that the smell extended south to Montana and east as far as Manitoba. Martin’s New York Times article described miscarriages, constant headaches, nosebleeds, stomach aches, cattle aborting, and pets dying in the local community. Walking out my door each morning, I would be met by a thick cloud of debris. I distinctly remember a burning sensation in my eyes and nose, as well as a bright glow in the sky that persisted even after dark. Accounts of these things in Drayton Valley’s Western Review were non-existent; instead, that newspaper gave the responsible oil company the power to control what information was shared with the public. Just as in 1977, the Lougheed government and Amoco Dome, the responsible oil company, failed to address the environmental and health issues or to acknowledge the economic losses to farmers and trappers living and working in the area, many of whom had served the oil industry for decades. For most people, life carried on as normal amidst the extreme safety hazards. My father went to work each day, driving to nearby sites in the surrounding area to check on other oil and gas wells. My mother, employed at the front counter of the Royal Bank, continued to serve local residents. As a teenager, I felt completely powerless to do

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anything except endure. I recall no examples of people leaving, no lineups for treatment at the medical clinic, and perhaps even more remarkably, no local public criticism of the oil company or the Lougheed government. The lesson we repeatedly learned was that what mattered most was the oil and gas – people and the environment were far more expendable (and much less profitable). The Western Review described the environmental effects of the blowout as a “harmless nuisance.” In an Amoco-sponsored press conference, prominent place was given to company spokesperson Ron Findlay’s statement that the hydrogen sulphide levels posed “no health hazard to area residents” and that the “concentrations [were] more in the obnoxious range” (Western Review, 27 October 1982). Even when two workers died from H2S exposure, the local newspaper didn’t give the accident any prominent space (Lizée 2010). Meanwhile, the community continued to put up a strong defence against any criticism of the oil company in particular or the industry in general. As Lizée writes, critics were routinely silenced by being told simply to turn off their furnaces during the winter. Residents of Drayton Valley, who at the time had high levels of tolerance for the missteps of the oil and gas industry, avoided addressing the most negative effects of the blowout, and any “criticism was framed in a manner that discounted serious probing” (2010, 118). Notably, urban residents in Edmonton, 150 kilometres away, expressed considerably more outrage with Amoco, the provincial authorities, and the energy industry as a whole.

Final Thoughts Why engage in this remembering anyway? Why bring forward these memories? They are – as a collection – not especially fond memories; they don’t hold much nostalgia or sentimentality about a childhood past. But the remembering has been productive. Claudia Mitchell (2013) writes about the tension between oil rites and oil rights in terms of her own family history. She offers a counter-narrative intended to decentre myths about growing up on the Prairies. Her story is one of prosperity rather than drought, depression, and iconic representations of prairie life. Her productive remembering serves to create “a new space, a critical space

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within which to live and within which to imagine the future” (136). My story of growing up against the social, economic, and political backdrop of the oil and gas industry offers another kind of counter-narrative, one that is intended to dispel notions of innocent, idyllic rural childhoods and that offers its own window on the future. As I look in particular towards Canada’s energy and resource future through the lens of my own childhood narrative, I can’t help but wonder how the lives and identities of working-class children living alongside proposed rural oil pipelines and fracking sites will be positioned in relation to political agendas and corporate profits. In the 1970s and 80s, the residents of Drayton Valley were never included in democratic conversations with governments or energy companies. They were never given opportunities to express concerns or have questions answered about the consequences of living next to oil and gas sites on the well-being of their children, themselves, or rural ecosystems. Many of them blindly trusted the authorities to prioritize human, animal, and environmental welfare over profits. Canada’s energy and resource future undeniably hinges on young people’s stewardship; their commitment to this future is highly dependent on their connection to the land, their sense of belonging, and the will of politicians and energy corporations to put youth voices, identities, and everyday worlds at the forefront of policy development and political change.

reference s Auerbach, Elsa Roberts. 1989. “Towards a Socio-Contextual Approach to Family Literacy.” Harvard Educational Review 59(2): 165–82. https://doi.org/10.17763/ haer.59.2.h23731364l283156. Bartlett, Lesley, and Dorothy Holland. 2002. “Theorizing the Space of Literacy Practices.” Ways of Knowing 2(1): 10–22. Bronfenbrenner, Urie. 1979. The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press. Butters, Brian. 1977. “The Foul Smell of Wealth.” Globe and Mail, 24 December. cbc Learning. 2001. “Boom and Bust in Alberta: An Oil Boom Creates Scores of Multi-Millionaires but Then the Party Ends.” Le Canada. A People’s History: Une histoire populaire. http://www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP17CH3 PA1LE.html.

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Chaffin, Kenny. 2014. “Pumpjack.” In Mansions of the Mind: Insurance against Alzheimer’s, Dementia, and Senility or Perhaps Proof Thereof. https://mansion softhemind.blogspot.com/2014/12. Compton-Lilly, Catherine. 2006. “Identity, Childhood Culture, and Literacy Learning: A Case Study.” Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 6(1): 57–76. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1468798406062175. Delpit, Lisa. 1995. Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: New Press. Gee, James Paul. 2011. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, 2nd ed. Oxford: Routledge. Globe and Mail. 1981. “Bankruptcy Hits Firm in Alberta.” 25 June. Heath, Shirley Brice. 1983. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jaremko, Gordon. 2013. Steward: 75 Years of Alberta Energy Regulation. Edmonton: Energy Resources Conservation Board. http://www.aer.ca/documents/about-us/ Steward_Ebook.pdf. Kendrick, Maureen. 2016. Literacy and Multimodality across Global Sites. London: Routledge. Kendrick, Maureen, and Roberta McKay. 2004. “Drawings as an Alternative Way of Understanding Young Children’s Constructions of Literacy.” Journal of Early Childhood Literacy 4(1): 109–28. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1468798404041458. Lizée, Erik. 2010. “Rhetoric and Reality: Albertans and Their Oil Industry under Peter Lougheed.” ma thesis, University of Alberta. Martin, Douglas. 1982. “Oil Blowout Is Sowing Fear in Alberta Backwoods.” New York Times, 13 December. http://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/13/world/oil-blowout -is-sowing-fear-in-alberta-backwoods.html. Mitchell, Claudia. 2013. “Oil Rights/Rites: Autoethnography as a Tool for Drilling.” In Productive Remembering and Social Agency, edited by Teresa Strong-Wilson, Claudia Mitchell, Susann Allnutt, and Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, 123–38. Rotterdam: Sense. Mitchell, Claudia, and Sandra Weber. 2005. “Just Who Do We Think We Are … and How Do We Know This? Re-Visioning Pedagogical Spaces for Studying Our Teaching Selves.” In Just Who Do We Think We Are? Methodologies for Autobiography and Self-Study in Teaching, edited by Claudia Mitchell, Sandra Weber, and Kathleen O’Reilly-Scanlon, 1–9. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Moll, Luis, Cathy Amanti, Deborah Neff, and Norma Gonzàlez. 1992. “Funds of

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Knowledge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms.” Theory into Practice 31(2): 132–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/004058 49209543534. Mutonyi, Harriet, and Maureen Kendrick. 2011. “Cartoon Drawing as a Means of Accessing What Students Know about hiv/aids: An Alternative Method.” Visual Communication 10(2): 231–49. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1470357211398447. Norton, Bonny. 2000. Identity and Language Learning: Gender, Ethnicity, and Educational Change. New York: Longman. – 2013. Identity and Language Learning: Extending the Conversation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Pembina Institute. n.d. “The Pembina Institute Story.” Pembina Institute. https://www.pembina.org/about/our-story. Polakow, Valerie. 1993. Lives on the Edge: Single Mothers and Their Children in the Other America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strong-Wilson, Teresa. 2008. Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education with Teachers. New York: Peter Lang. Strong-Wilson, Teresa, Claudia Mitchell, Susann Allnutt, and Kathleen PithouseMorgan. 2013. “Productive Remembering and Social Action.” In Productive Remembering and Social Agency, edited by Teresa Strong-Wilson, Claudia Mitchell, Susann Allnutt, and Kathleen Pithouse-Morgan, 1–16. Rotterdam: Sense.

11 An “Indian” Doll: A Mohawk Child’s Identity in Crisis Sandra Owén:nakon Deer-Standup

This memory piece is dedicated to you, Lois. You were at my side from the day you were born up until the day you died. I love you and miss you deeply.

Introduction The landscape of my story is an Indian reservation called Caughnawaga, the English spelling of its Mohawk name, which is Kahnawa:ke (By the rapids). Kahnawa:ke is pronounced Ga-na-wau-gay, in my language. The name Kahnawa:ke points to the fact that the community’s historical location was alongside the rapids of the mighty St Lawrence River. This story is not necessarily or directly related to the land itself, but it is about living out rurality on what is now known as Canadian soil. My story is personal and may or may not resemble other Native childhoods across Canada, but what I have come to know is that there will be some Native/Aboriginal/First Nations peoples whose lives and communities reflect or may resemble the cultural issues that I speak of in my own experiences as a Native child living out rurality on a reservation. This story is also reflective of our rural selves through what I call Indianness, and a child’s identity in the socio-cultural evolution of the 1970s on a

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Native (Indian) reservation located on the south shore of what was once Hochelaga and is now known as Montreal. The Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk people) moved their village several times before they settled on its present-day location, directly across the St Lawrence River from the boroughs of Lachine and LaSalle, Quebec. The encroachment onto, and the occupancy of, our land by the French during the mid-sixteenth century convinced chiefs to leave the area and move farther down the river. The Kanien’kehá:ka moved four times between 1667 and 1716 (Blanchard 1980). The former farming and hunting community now mimics the Canadian suburbs. However, the spirit of our heritage, language, and culture remains instilled in the memory and practices of the community. In Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors, Dr Gerald Alfred, whose Kanien’keha/Mohawk name is Taiaia:ke, writes about being a Mohawk of Kahnawa:ke: “It has been said that being born Indian is being born into politics. I believe this to be true; because being born a Mohawk of Kahnawa:ke, I do not remember a time free from the impact of political conflict. It is a difficult existence, [with] turmoil [that] has been a constant feature of life in Kahnawa:ke ever since I can remember” (1995, 1). I, too, recall being raised in an atmosphere of political strife experienced by community members, families, friends, and husbands and wives, who suffered under the politics of the Indian Act, the remnants of residential and day schools, and religious beliefs held by past generations of overburdened ancestors. Yet somewhere in our deep memories of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, silenced stories live through the faint image of their cultural practices and their living well off the land and the water. Patricia Hampl explains that memory has value; exploring the significance of memories can reveal why such memories were stored and what meaning they may have in the present. We are what she calls a “faithful retainer” (1999, 30) of our hidden feelings. Some of my own hidden memories and feelings lie beneath the surface of old photographs and glimpses of souvenir shops, a leather dress worn on a hot summer day, a phone call, and the image of an Indian doll. The story I am going to tell takes place on the grounds of a tourist attraction – an Indian village as it was termed then – developed solely for

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entertaining white European tourists. I have been told by my parents that the tourist attraction mimicked old Wild West performances that had travelled the country (and the United States) during the late 1800s. According to Johnny Beauvais, the “Buffalo Bill Cody Wild West Show was put together in 1883 and would continue for thirty-three years” (1985, 136). The fur trade began to dwindle when the North-West Company was absorbed by the Hudson’s Bay Company (which moved to Winnipeg), and Kahnawakehró:non (people of Kahnawa:ke) had to seek an alternative income. Many produced crafts (beadwork) to sell, and others joined dance troupes that performed around the country and then locally at the Indian Village in Kahnawa:ke (Beauvais 1985, 136). During the earlier years of performing and participating in the dance troupes, the Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk people) had attempted to maintain their own traditional dress and dance, but Europeans were more interested in the American West, and because of the popularity that had been built around this “Sioux Indian look,” Kahnawakehró:non (people of Kahnawa:ke) adopted it for performance. And where a dance troupe was performing, there were crafts being sold. Those crafts were also stereotypical images, which is what tourists wanted to see and buy (Beauvais 1985, 136–8). For me, remembering these places is essential to critical memory work. Mitchell and colleagues discuss how “place thus becomes an anchor to our memories.” Place thus shapes the “memory story” acting as a hook that “can allow for a different kind of narrative” (2011, 3). Each time another place is reflected upon, another story may arise, somewhat connected to the first narrative. The history of Kahnawa:ke and its rurality play a significant role in my own history and anchor my memories to these places and what they mean to me and to the community, past and present. In referring to autoethnography and narration of lived memories triggered and stored in various forms, Giorgio notes that “we close our eyes and remember” (2013, 409). My stored narrative is most likely similar to that of many Kanien’keha:ka children I knew, but the profoundness of each of my experiences holds its own form of meaning constructed by my own understanding of myself. Our own understandings influence our own and other’s perceptions of who we are and where we come from.

Figure 11.1 Top The original building of the Indian village prior to the fire in the 1940s. Figure 11.2 Bottom A postcard image of the front entrance of the same site.

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Memory’s Methods Pontso Moorosi explains how women’s narratives reflect “memories of experiences that have shaped their adult lives” (2011, 210). Remembering these past events helps those involved make meaning of the experience, and this may lead to social transformation. Working through these memories or “doing memory work is like peeling an onion that has no core”; through analysis, more knowledge appears and more understanding is revealed, which then “generates more questions” (Allnutt 2011, 20). I was first introduced to arts-based research through a curriculum studies course called Foundations in Curriculum. As I continued with my PhD studies I began to familiarize myself more with memory-work, portraiture, narrative, and self-study. However, my initial thoughts were about how this could be real research, for it all sounded as though the authors were telling a story. I quickly began to appreciate the form and detail of the writing. With time, the literature began to validate my experiences and my own thoughts. I now wanted to explore the capacity I had to learn about these forms of research because to be able to capture “the spontaneity, complexity, and ambiguity of human experience” (Grumet 1991a, 67) is probably one the most beautiful experiences a researcher could have. In Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation, Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, and Zilber contend that “people are storytellers by nature” and that stories are a significant way of communicating. Stories are also one of the easiest ways of learning about the inner experiences of an individual. “In other words, narratives provide us with access to people’s identity and personality.” By creating a story, then revising it and retelling it, we can “[re]discover ourselves, and reveal ourselves to others” (1998, 7). Giorgio’s statement that “we close our eyes and remember” (2013, 409) is in some ways as simple as it sounds, but the amount of energy it takes to venture back into the past is possible only for the strong as we move backwards not only through images of memories, but also through feelings that have lingered on, sometimes for years. I believe that sifting and poking through what we were feeling, why, and how this was so and trying to make sense of it all to discover how we each came to be is like

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unfolding a large blanket filled with the reality of mind, body, and spirit of both past and present. Venturing back to those days of the Indian village and all it entailed opened a tightly wrapped bundle of images that were buried deep in my childhood emotions and memories. Unravelling the ties and waiting to re-experience what these images felt like reminds me of making maple syrup. You start with clear sap water and you boil it down, and the more you boil it the darker and thicker the sap becomes. As I sat and thought about the memories I had of the Indian village, all sorts of images began to surface and flood my mind, splashing in like huge waves rolling in from the deep dark ocean where no one else had ever been. They rolled in and out, quick and heavy, with a powerful thrust that stabbed at my emotions. The deeper the thought the larger the wave, until it pierced through what felt like a large mudslide that was stuck in my throat, freeing the flood that was now flowing through as heavy tears pouring down my face. After the release, I had to stop thinking for a moment and get my bearings. The images evoked feelings of sadness, loss, and grief over my sister’s death and questions about why I was never asked to go back and dance. I settled myself down and thought about how to go about telling my story. I am so hurt and I feel so much pain thinking about us as children. I look at the picture of us – all five sisters – next to my computer. I stare at my younger sister’s face and remember that place and that time, a hot August day, and how we all had such a good time laughing and telling stories about our day and our week and probably sharing the latest gossip around town. As I began to write, I simply thought about how I would tell this story to someone sitting in front of me or how I would tell my grandchildren this story. As thoughts flew, the rush of anxiety filled my body and I thought about who was going to read my story and what my family would think when they read it. I wanted to hold back my true feelings and the hurt with all my might, but I also wanted this story to sound grand and yet not cause more heartache for my family and me. As I sit and type, I stop many times to think about several other memories associated with my sister. My mind now sits in the images of my memories, viewing them through a lens that turns everything grey, al-

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though I know the colours were there long ago. I go back and forth tracing my steps and seeing the images I saw as a child. I’m looking through the images from deep inside myself. I’m seeing through my body’s mind where these images are held. I slowly bring each image to the surface and carefully examine what I had felt and thought and how it makes sense to me now. Hampl writes that “there must be a reason I remember that little story” and goes on to say that it wasn’t a story at all, it was “just a moment, the beginning of what could have become a story” (1999, 24). The images of the Indian village and the Indian doll (see Figures 11.3 and 11.4) are just moments in time, my moments in time. Why has this memory, as Hampl puts it, “trudged forward, clearing the haze of forgetfulness, showing itself bright with detail decades after the event?” (1999, 25). For me, this memory has always been there, sitting and waiting for me as a moment in time, a moment in my lifetime. The opportunity to share these moments in time and my memories through my writing decades after the events took place seemingly plays well into the emotional turmoil that has been walking beside me for the past four months.

The Indian Village The Indian Village was situated at the other end of town. During the mid-1970s (I was told by my parents and elders), our town was a lot smaller than it is today in terms of population and the physical development of roads, water lines, electrical poles, and modern homes, of course. You could say that it was somewhat underdeveloped, if you are looking strictly through a contemporary lens. The stories I heard mostly told of how things used to be in this very close-knit community, with people helping one another when times were hard, caring for each other’s children, accepting food, and so on. Today the Indian Village site has changed somewhat. The wooden fence that surrounded the site is no longer there; it began to topple over when I was a teenager. Over the years, the fence has been removed section by section until it is no longer visible. The site is now wide open, the grounds are visible, and trees have grown in. What remains is the domed building that has always been there, as far as I can remember.

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Figure 11.3 “Indian Village,” Chief Poking Fire Indian Museum.

The domed building was filled with crafts and souvenirs. Outside the building along the fenced area were wooden stands or small three-sided buildings where vendors set up their crafts for sale. All the vendors sat behind the long sheet of plywood that ran across the length of the stand making a tabletop where more crafted objects for the tourists were displayed. Each stand held many craft items in bright colours and designs and most were similar in style, including little multi-coloured drums held together with plastic twine and an odd-looking rattle that had no resemblance to the rattles I am used to seeing and hearing during ceremony time at the longhouse. There were colourful feathers, dyed, I now assume, hanging from different items, but at six years of age I did not know what dyeing meant or that it was possible to change the colour of a feather, a piece of leather, or anything else for that matter. Tourists buy these colourful headdresses and headbands for their children. Beaded necklaces made with plastic twine (the same twine that holds those funny-looking drums and the

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bow and arrow sets) are also for sale. Recently my father told me that when he was young (during the 1940s) my grandfather made the bow and arrow sets that were sold at the Indian village. However, I recall the plastic ones for sale during the late 1970s. Off to the side of the domed building there is a space for dancing. The space is partly created by the dancers themselves. Their footsteps circling around to the beat of the drum have worn down the grass and left an almost perfect circle in the dirt.

The Dress When I think hard about preparing to dance at the Indian village I cannot see or remember myself getting ready and putting on that dress. I don’t think I had a dress at all; it was more like a longer shirt, not quite long enough to be called a dress. I can, however, see my two sisters dressed in those leather outfits. My younger sister and I wore the same outfit and my older sister wore a longer version of leather and fringe that fell past her knees. I do recall the dress being belted around her waist. Perhaps it was, unless I’m projecting a photo taken of her standing in our kitchen in that dress. I remember thinking how beautiful she looked compared to me. There is a picture somewhere in our family photos, which could be anywhere now, of my younger sister and me wearing those leather dresses or the shirts. The picture shows us playing on the ground as though we’re playing with something or just frolicking around in the dirt, but the image that remains in my mind is of just her and me wearing those fringed leather dresses. I often thought about why we wore the dresses only to dance or to attend ceremonies. Things of this nature were never communicated to me. However, I had a keen sense that dressing in leather, beads, and moccasins was not something that you did regularly. I already saw, felt, and knew how attending cultural ceremonies caused tension in my own home. Although many of my earlier childhood memories are associated with various events, photographs, items, and landscapes, “it is in dwelling on how people were dressed that other memories associated with a specific event often surface” (Weber 2011, 240). For instance, I remember

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my oldest sister’s wedding and the red shoes that I wore. I will never forget those shoes and how they made me feel on the inside. Over the years, the image and memory of this photo have always aroused some of the shame I grew to feel at having to wear that leather dress. It seemed that my sister and I were the only ones who were made to wear those dresses. I always felt awkward just because everyone else wore everyday clothing at longhouse ceremonies. Yet wearing those dresses felt acceptable at the Indian village tourist site. My long shirt-dress was made of a kind of brown brushed leather, but what did I care about brushed or non-brushed leather? I’m wearing the short dress with a pair of shorts barely long enough to show beneath the ends of the leather fringes hanging down my legs. The brown shirt is warm and heavy. It has very few beads on the chest, and the sleeves have fringes that move up and down when I dance. I feel the fringes hit my skin as though slapping my arms each time I move. They hit the front and then the back of my arms, and the bottom fringes hit the top of my legs, burning my skin. Weber (2011, citing de la Haye 2008) states that clothing is both object and image and that dressing is a way of performing and displaying. Performing and displaying what I call Indianness through wearing leatherfringed dresses, moccasins, and leather headbands showcased the North American Indian still alive (and dancing) here. But in a sense, dressing like this also represented an act of self-survival through “the fantasies and dreams [the clothes] inspire” (2011, 242). I was inspired by the fantasies and dreams that I constructed through the environment and landscape of the Indian village. These were dreams of being proud of who I was as a Native person, and yet also feeling ashamed for not being invited back to dance.

An Indian Doll I walk along the site and come across the Indian dolls, made in China, that are for sale at almost every stand. I stare at the dolls’ faces and clothing (for an example of an Indian doll, see Figure 11.4). Each doll is wearing similar clothing but in different colours – white, dark, and light brown, with some in blue and red. The dolls’ skin is very dark. I don’t

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Figure 11.4 Indian doll image.

think I have ever seen anyone with skin that dark. My father and two of my sisters are dark-skinned but not that dark. The dolls’ skin is like dark chocolate. The dolls were so dark in tone that they seemed bluish or purplish in color. Perhaps the sun’s reflection off the dolls made those tones stand out on their faces. I stare at the dolls and their long straight black hair and dark plastic skin. The image is engrained in my mind and transforms into embarrassment about the colour of my skin and the tone of my curly brown hair. I understand Hampl’s claim that “we store in memory only images of value. And, of course, often we cleave to things because they possess heavy negative charges. Pain has strong arms” (1999, 29). The image of this doll is far from what I am living and far from what I look like dressed in that fringed shirt-dress with a band around my head. The more the stereotypes are flaunted in the merchandise of the

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Indian village souvenir shops and vendor stands, the more I recognize that my skin and hair are not the colour I want them to be. Why am I not a beautiful dark Indian doll-like child? I know that it is this doll that whites are coming to see dancing on the dirt outside the Indian village site. As I walk away from the dolls wishing that I could have the one in the white faux-leather dress, I venture off into the domed building where there are more crafts being sold but in larger quantities – more headdresses, more headbands, and more Indian dolls. I run out of the building into the wide-open space of the Indian village site and look around for my sisters. I walk around looking through the crowd of people who are also walking around looking at the same crafts I have seen. The bright hot sun shines in my eyes and I squint to look further into the crowd. I walk towards the large circle where all the dancing takes place. I see my younger sister waiting alongside one of the stands. She stands behind all the other girls, almost invisible. I had never noticed how little she was compared to me. I glance over at the other girls standing closest to the dance circle; my eyes look over what they’re wearing, their skin, and their moccasins. Not every girl is dark-skinned, one has brown hair like me but it’s very straight and hangs all the way down to her lower back. My hair is braided in two braids that hang down in front of my shoulders. I am the only one with braided hair? Are the braids meant to keep my curls from showing? The older girls are all laughing and talking. Briefly I feel a little older and independent standing close to them, and making my little excursion alone around the site. Nonetheless, I feel that I have satisfied my curiosity for the moment in looking at all those dolls, with their pretty colours, that tantalize my little ego. However, I do notice the emotional confusion about what I am and what I look like compared to the other girls and to that coveted Indian doll that has no voice but speaks loudly in my head. The girls all line up and wait for the lead dancer to begin. Drumming begins, the lead dancer makes her way towards the worn-out path in the dirt. I watch the older girls and try to mimic them. The crowd gathers around, stops, and watches the dancers dance to the beat of the drum.

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Some watch through the cameras held at their faces and others just stare at the life-sized Indian dolls dancing in the circle of dirt.

The Phone Call My mother received a phone call one day while my little sister and I were playing in the kitchen with our toys. This memory remains entangled with my memories of the Indian doll I wanted so much and the time of dancing at the Indian village. As a six-year-old I began to assume that dancing took place when there was no school. This was my sense of time. And if it weren’t for my older sister telling me that dancing took place over weekends I would not have recalled the actual day on which we danced. I was beginning to make my own patterns based on the information I saw, heard, and moved through daily – school time, summer time, bedtime, bath time, play time. My sense of grounding was beginning to take shape, and my relationship with the world I was currently living in started to thread itself together as the things we – my sister, my family, and I – just did. As Grumet puts it: “For most of us, the location of our earliest and most poignant experiences of fear and pleasure, disgust and comfort, boredom and excitement, was home” (1991b, 74). I also recall that my mother was frolicking around as she usually was in doing some sort of housework, cooking, cleaning, or laundry; she was always busy doing something. But this phone call was different, unusual, and short with very little conversation. The telephone rings, I hear it like it’s right at the back of my head, but it is just in the distance. My mother picks up the phone and says, “Hello?” as always and I tune the conversation out. However, I hear her responding to whatever news she’s receiving: “Yes, okay, onen” (goodbye in Mohawk). Time passed and I wondered why I didn’t go back to dance. I never asked my mother. As more time passed, the anticipation of going to the Indian village began to dissipate. By winter the thought of dancing began to disappear like an icicle slowly melting and soaking into my mitten: water remains in the glove but the icicle is now gone, just as dancing remained in my head but I no longer danced, ever.

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Susan Allnutt (2011) cites Steedman’s (1985) observation that “children cannot analyze what is happening to them or around them, so the landscape and the pictures it represents [in their minds] have to remain a background, taking on meaning later, from different circumstances” (17). I am not so certain that children cannot analyze what is happening around them, but my own childhood memories and images of the Indian village are projected through the act of dressing and performing the latest stereotype of the Indian Doll for tourists enthralled with seeing what is left of the great North American Indian in a community colonized by religion and the fur trade.

Reflections Images flash by in my mind, and I believe that if I chose not to reach and pull the veil over I would not quite understand how they have transformed my life’s situations and circumstances. Susannah Radstone (2013) writes that memories brought forward from the past are subject to revision through one’s current conditions as though evaluated by how people understand and see things now and not how they saw them as children. As a child, I saw clearly and learned that there were schedules to follow, rules at school and rules at home, rules outside, and rules of the community to follow. These rules translated into what Grumet calls “daily ceremony” (1991b, 74), which was continuously revised, debated, and constructed in relation to family norms. Memories of my mother’s voice telling others how Indian (Native) my sisters looked were held deep and true in my feelings. As I look at what I felt then and what I feel now my feelings differ in some ways but remain alike in other ways. I see now how the colour of my skin and the image of the Indian doll did not come solely from the mind of a sixyear-old child. They were also perpetuated by the circumstances of my home, my neighbourhood, my family, and my community. These were the circumstances of a people living under the duress of colonialism while trying desperately not to forget who they were and are, and to be recognized as Kanien’kehá:ka. I have walked through my memories of the Indian village and the Indian doll and am now left with questions of why I was not sent back to

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dance at the Indian village and what the telephone conversation that I recall so vividly was about. Was it only my older sister who returned? Recently I asked her what she remembered about dancing at the Indian village. She said that she remembers Ma making her dress. I have no recollection of this. She recalls riding her bike to the Indian village on the weekends. She said she was paid one dollar a dance. She had no recollection of my younger sister and me dancing with her but recalled other cousins dancing. She said she has blocked out most of her childhood. My own recollections are also hazy. I, too, blocked out or just cannot recall times of great joy and wonderful family moments. I am left with mundane moments; I vividly remember my sisters making beaded belts on wooden looms. The looms were handmade from pieces of two-by-four that were kept around the house. I saw them frequently with bundles of beads and leather, scissors, and thread. My mother also had jars of beads and pieces of leather for her own projects. I recall the beaded Indian head she made that was to be sewn onto my brother’s jean jacket. Soon enough the whole neighbourhood of teenage boys wanted a beaded Indian head on the back of their jean jackets. My mom copied the famous nhl Chicago Blackhawks logo. Looking back at the images said to represent Indigenous peoples – the Chicago Blackhawks logo, the Indian doll, the leather-fringed dress – stirs up the mixed emotions I have had over the past four decades. When I was a child, attending the Indian village felt good and exciting. This feeling gradually gave way to disappointment and then eventually faded away into the backdrop of my existence, similarly to the way we replace old school photos with more recent ones. The image does not change. It just seems to grow into what we interpret it to be. As children, we are accustomed to fading in, in the sense of blending into our parents’ lives yet remembering all our own experiences apart from them. Hourig Attarian writes that “from memory come the narratives, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves to ourselves and to others. Memory is identity, and how memory is remembered will affect the identity one claims” (2011, 146). This formulation of self and identity is relative to the memories and narratives I have carefully selected. Analyzing identity through memory will require some insight into the spiritual, social, political, and physical landscapes through which we have all journeyed. Our narratives

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all differ in more ways than we know, but to some degree the strength, sorrow, pain, worry, happiness, power, and love remembered carry similar vibrations across humanity resembling shared human emotion.

Conclusion At the very start of this memory-work project on childhood in the context of our rural lives, I knew and understood that the concept of rurality relative to an Indigenous person would be embedded in the cyclical pattern of lived experiences storied through the entanglement of one’s own mother and father, and through their ancestors, culminating in a narrative about land, culture, and history translated into the identity of an Indigenous person’s reality. Initially the idea of this chapter did not include so many memories of my younger sister’s presence. Since her death that occurred when I was in the middle of writing this chapter, I’ve struggled with my thoughts and emotions about writing it because I knew what would pour out of me. After months of deliberation, I decided to write the chapter for her and dedicate it to her. It soon became evident that the issues would be ones that would be very difficult to address because autoethnography and memory-work both contribute to a “self-reflective” form of research “specifically in relation to the culture of which we are a member” (Allen-Collinson 2013, 283). And, as noted earlier by Alfred, “being born Indian is being born into politics” (1995, 1). Therefore, defining any narrative I tell or construct through memories surrounding the rural landscape of my childhood reflects an identity formed through cultural and historical memories of my ancestors, including the four memory pieces constructed here through the interpretation of my own narrative. The narration of my childhood memories has burgeoned since my sister’s death. Unearthing the details of our childhood histories through my interpretation of the memories we may have shared entices me to “draw form out of the chaos” (Grumet 1991b, 81) that is called lived experience. As children our geographies were affected by globalization and the changing political social structure of our communities. As Julia Ellis

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writes: “A cultural geographer recognises that children can be the ultimate victims of the political, social, and economic forces which contrive the geography of the built environment. In spite of children’s own agency and competence in creating culture, forces beyond their control can shape their lives” (2005, 56). Canada’s Indian Act and its law based on the notion of blood quantum remains a powerful force in the lives of today’s Indigenous people in Canada. This law defines who is considered a real Indian and who is not. This has created an overwhelming identity crisis in Kahnawa:ke. Status cards with photograph and an identification number are now proof of one’s Indianness – no card, no status. This means that one is not recognized as an Indigenous person no matter what one believes or feels. The Indian Act decides who one is. Culturally and historically the Kanien’kehá:ka are a matrilineal society, but the Indian Act is based on a paternalistic model that disregards the matriarchal clan family system that has sustained the identity of the Haudenosaunee (the people of the Longhouse or the Six Nations or the Iroquois) for centuries. “Our capacity to move forward as developing beings rests on a healthy relation with the past” (Hampl 1999, 33). Writing this piece has shown my capacity to move forward. However, I am inclined to move at my own pace and in my own time. Eber Hampton describes his own memories and explains that if he wants the “full value” of his experience, he must pick up the memory and “unwrap the bundle” (1995, 79) and feel again what he felt. Radstone argues that memory travels through a process that is never-ending: “meaning will always be revised and … stories have no end” (2013, 238). My story has not ended; this narrative tells more than just a memory. It speaks about the rurality of living and growing up on a Native (Indian) reservation and about the effects of modernization, industrialization, and the socialization of a Native child looking for validation of her Indigenous identity, one that is truly moulded by the past. The process of memory-work increases my capacity to make meaning of my present reality through memory and history relative to the rurality of living on Indigenous land now called Canada.

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Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation, edited by Amia Lieblich, Rivka Tuval-Mashiach, and Tamar Zilber, 1–20. Thousand Oaks: Sage. Mitchell, Claudia, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Kathleen Pithouse, and Susann Allnut. 2011. “Introducing Memory and Pedagogy.” In Memory and Pedagogy, edited by Mitchell, Strong-Wilson, Pithouse, and Allnut, 1–13. New York: Routledge. Moorosi, Pontso. 2011. “Looking Back: Women Principals Reflect on Their Childhood Experiences.” In Memory and Pedagogy, edited by Claudia Mitchell, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Kathleen Pithouse, and Susann Allnut, 209–22. New York: Routledge. Radstone, Susannah. 2013. “Telling Memory’s Story: Memory Studies from the Past to the Future.” In Productive Remembering and Social Agency, edited by Teresa Strong-Wilson, Claudia Mitchell, Susan Allnut, and Kathleen PithouseMorgan, 227–41. Rotterdam: Sense. Weber, Sandra. 2011. “Dressing Memory: Clothes, Embodiment, and Identity.” In Memory and Pedagogy, edited by Claudia Mitchell, Teresa Strong-Wilson, Kathleen Pithouse, and Susann Allnut, 239–52. New York: Routledge.

12 Teaching Larry Loyie’s As Long as the Rivers Flow: Real and Imagined Childhood Memories and the Intransigence of the Cattle Truck Teresa Strong-Wilson and Amarou Yoder

Introduction Bev Sellars grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Deep Creek, a tiny community north of Williams Lake in British Columbia. Sellars is a member of the Carrier tribe, descended from family members (grandparents, parents) who were all forced to attend residential school; hers was the last generation. Sellars writes a moving account of the years she spent in residential school. However, she also describes growing up in the countryside (before going to residential school), where she was raised by her grandparents in an old log house. The house served as a crossroads for her siblings, such as her brother Ray, whom they nicknamed “Ray Boone,” and for extended family who regularly came to stay and who would often participate in traditional hunting and food-gathering activities. Sellars remembers a house filled with stretching frames for furs. She recounts that when she was young, “we would trudge over frozen ponds and creeks to where he [Ray] had set his traps. Even though sometimes it was bitterly cold, we dressed for the weather and enjoyed ourselves out in the bush” (2013, 17). The bush represents the undertheorized rural (Matthews et al. 2000), denigrated as unruly and untamed and typically contrasted with the so-called tamed pastoral ideal: gentle, rolling hills; ploughed land; stacks

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of hay; farm animals; and a human presence. The bush is like the black sheep of the rural family. Yet for many Indigenous peoples in Canada, the land means precisely this bush place of traplines, trees, rivers, land, and waterways that have served as traditional food-gathering places. The opposite of the bush was school: institutions that, for the better part of the twentieth century, claimed that Indigenous children were educated in them (Daniels 2016). As late as the 1980s, residential schools still existed in Canada. One of their central practices was the sundering of Indigenous children from home and family for eight months or more out of the year, year after year, for a decade or more that coincided with the entirety of their childhood. Out of this experience has emerged a growing body of children’s literature. This literature began to be published in Canada in 1990, with Sterling’s short memoir, My Name Is Seepeetza (1992), followed by books issued in the 2000s such as As Long as the Rivers Flow (Loyie 2003); No Time to Say Goodbye (Olsen 2001); Shi-shi-etko (Campbell 2005); and Shin-chi’s Canoe (Campbell 2008); along with Jordan-Fenton and Pokiak-Fenton’s Fatty Legs (2010); Stranger at Home (2011); When I Was Eight (2013); and Not My Girl (2014). The literature has taken the form of short novels and increasingly, picture-books. In these books, the land (or bush) takes on aspects of the idealized rural pastoral in English literature, in the sense of being a site of deep longing and nostalgia for what was not allowed to be left to itself within an Indigenous world view that felt at home and at ease there. The primary audience for this children’s literature, though, is not Indigenous children or their parents but other children – non-Indigenous ones. This was recently brought home in the recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc), one of which was that curricula and schools ensure that they teach non-Indigenous children about the history and legacy of residential schools in Canada. A key vehicle for instruction in schools, especially elementary schools, is children’s literature (Strong-Wilson 2008). This chapter focuses on non-Indigenous children’s responses to one of these stories, Larry Loyie’s As Long as the Rivers Flow (2003). The title speaks to the rural (bush) idyll that Larry, the adult, remembers as the basis of daily life as he knew it during that pre–residential school time. These non-Indigenous children of ten to twelve years of age, with various

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ancestries and prior claims on their sense of self (Portuguese; Greek; Chinese; Jewish), were in grades five and six in an urban classroom in Montreal. We spent five months in their teacher’s classroom as they were reading Loyie; their teacher, Gabriela,1 was participating in a study with teachers on how to incorporate Canadian social justice literature into their pedagogy.2 One characteristic of residential school children’s literature is that most of the narrative tends to be located in a time and place organized around the rhythms, priorities, and values of an Indigenous family and community. That place is on the land – in the bush. Typical episodes in the Loyie book include looking for berries and plants (for example, herbs, like mint); finding an orphaned owl; confronting a bear; and the entire family gathering around a campfire and telling stories. The inevitability of attending residential school haunts the story but does not obtrude explicitly until the very end, when the children are rudely snatched from their familiar surroundings and their close connections to family and land. The last image we see in the story is of the children, with sorrowful, tear-stained faces, pressed tightly together against the wooden slats of the back of a cattle truck (see Figure 12.1). Two of the questions we address here are: In what way do non-Indigenous students (children) experience and understand what Loyie narrates? And how do they respond to the rural in relation to its abrupt disruption by the arrival of residential school time? An important question currently animating the field called children’s geographies, of which there is a branch that has recently begun to concern itself with rurality, is whether the rural ideal/idyll corresponds to any rural child’s experience. For instance, Powell, Taylor, and Smith (2013) challenge in turn each of its tenets – such as unconstrained freedom, safety, and close-knit community – in asking whether studies of children’s rural lives can support these. Behind such questions, useful though they are, lies a certain distrust of memory. A key player – and culprit – in this is nostalgia. Adults are not children, yet the “emotional charge of memory” can lead (so the worry goes) to “memories being so shaped by present circumstances that their meaningfulness … is thrown into doubt” (2003, 10), says Philo, summarizing the arguments of critics like Owain Jones. Jones sternly reminds us: “Once childhood is super-

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Figure 12.1 Image from As Long as the Rivers Flow.

seded by adult stocks of knowledge, those adult filters can never be removed to get back to earlier states. Adult constructions and memories of what it is/was to be a child are inevitably processed through adultness” (Jones in Philo, 9, emphasis in the original). While this very sensible observation needs to be granted (adults are not children, or, even, the children they once were), Philo questions whether childhood memories of place can be entirely discounted in favour of (only) hearing what actual children have to say about the places in which they live. Philo invokes the intimacy associated with memories of childhood spaces, drawing on Bachelard. “Bachelard is not saying that adults need to revisit exactly the same spaces as spawned childhood reveries, merely that certain spaces are likely to be triggers because something about them returns to us the sensations and even contents of these childhood moments” (14). Philo’s argument moves in the direction of what in memory studies is being called critical nostalgia – the situating of nostalgia within a critical landscape that takes into account the intense sensory experience that

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nostalgia brings but in relation to the loss of otherness as well as others (Atia and Davies 2010). A critical nostalgia “insists on the bond between our present selves and a certain fragment of the past, but also on the force of our separation from what we have lost” (184). Nostalgia, Radstone counsels, “is best approached, too, not as an end-point or theoretical home-coming but as point of departure, opening out into those questions of knowledge and belief, temporal orientations and cultural, social and sexual politics that it condenses” (2010, 189). This is the perspective we would like to develop in this chapter, but by asking a question different from Philo’s. What happens when older children (ten to twelve years of age), in response to a children’s picturebook, begin to wax nostalgic about their childhood, even as they are still experiencing being children and where so-called rurality acts as a powerful trigger? Most pertinently, how does such nostalgia productively contribute to the children’s critical understanding and deeper appreciation of the legacy of residential schools in Canada, or is there counterevidence of its blunting, numbing, or otherwise diverting understanding in unhelpful, even dangerous ways? What role does the adult – the teacher (and her nostalgia) – play in guiding and shaping the children’s engagements with, and conversations about, the book? What might we conclude about the pedagogy of memory (including critical nostalgia) within an Indigenous-informed curriculum that takes its cue from the education recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015)? Further, how does all of this stand in relation to what Atia and Davies (2010) would call subaltern critical nostalgia – the aspiration on the part of Indigenous peoples to find strength in their own memories of their loss of (plural) childhoods?

Residential School, Rurality, and Critical Nostalgia For Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (1996), “[h]ow the Indian narrative is told, how it is nourished, who tells it, who nourishes it, and the consequences of its telling are among the most fascinating – and at times, chilling – stories of our time” (cited in McKegney 2007, 31). The children’s and teacher’s responses to the Loyie narrative fall here, in an almost swooning way, through the deep and sustained manner in which the text was taken

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up by those in the room. Nourished it definitely was. McKegney’s study of “Aboriginal writers remaking community after residential school” looks closely at three adult writers’ autobiographically informed narratives. As McKegney notes, these stand out as literary examples of how the central episode of residential school has been shaped, confronted, addressed, and transformed into something significantly other than a story of something being done to someone. Words become “magic weapons” – a phrase in the book’s title. In the Arthurian romances, the heroes survived ordeals through their courage but also their talismans – small objects, weapons, words of counsel – from which they drew strength precisely in that moment when strength was most required. McKegney proposes four possible periods of an Indigenous writer’s life – that is, a writer who underwent residential school. The periods are: “Community/Tribal Identity”; “Institutionalized Identity”; “Spectral Identity”; and “Imaginative Literary Identity” (2007, 46). Community/ Tribal Identity depicts close connection to family and tribal community, but McKegney (who is non-Native) does not specify land, which is curious, since within an Indigenous world view, land, or a sense of place, is often inextricable from family and community (Cook-Lynn 1996). Perhaps the word “tribal” is meant to encompass it? This tribal period is not pre-contact; it may be characterized by various traces of colonial contact, but these traces are firmly embedded in an overriding tribal connection. Most of the residential school children’s stories occupy this zone, especially the picture-books. In fact, most of the narrative in the picturebooks, like Campbell’s Shi-shi-etko (2005) and Loyie’s book among others, centres on developing this phase. As might be expected, Institutionalized Identity refers to time spent in residential school – in prison (to which residential school has been likened by many Indigenous writers, for example, Sellars 2013). Fatty Legs (2010), in which Olemaun (who is re-named Margaret at school) needs to figure out how to survive within the school’s inhospitable environment, takes place during this phase. McKegney links this stage with loss – the forced denial of tribal identity (family, traditions, language), a denial that, we note, is not entirely characteristic of children’s stories. Memory of community/tribal identity often becomes a source of power – a concrete example of this is Shin-chi’s canoe, which his father made

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for him, and which he manages to keep in residential school and play with by the river, in Shin-chi’s Canoe (2008). Another such source is visits back home – for example, in Sterling’s My Name Is Seepeetza (1992), with the narrative moving back and forth between twin poles (the imposition of forgetting and the resurgence of remembering). Some recent stories – for example, Fenton-Pokiak’s Stranger at Home (2011) – have begun to take up the unlikelihood and the challenges of going home unchanged. McKegney’s third phase is Spectral Identity. Stories written in this idiom imagine what the individual might have been without residential school. This phase is interesting; we are thinking here of the children’s stories, and where the picture-books especially (including Loyie’s) seem to try to re-create this kind of spectral identity by focusing almost the entire narrative on a pre-residential school child identity – McKegney’s first phase (community/tribal identity), with which the spectral identity overlaps. The final phase McKegney calls Imaginative Literary Identity. This identity draws on all of the other three but in complex and creative ways, resulting in “creative self-definition” (2007, 46). Do the children’s picture-books attain this fourth phase? They point towards it, we believe, by emphasizing resiliency and survival, conclusions that are not foregone before the children attend residential school but that represent powerful possibilities based on the strength of the Community/Tribal Identity depicted as constitutive of the children’s identities. The fact of the books themselves being published in remembering mode represents a strong indication of this. McKegney’s phases provide a useful starting point from which to see that children’s residential school stories tend to be narrated within a Community/Tribal Identity phase, to which we have added Connection to the Land. When children come to accounts like these, the story is probably familiar to them, at least on a certain level. Children living or growing up in Canada would likely have encountered fields and forests, such as the farmlands that still take up vast tracts of land (that can be seen, for example, when one is driving along the Trans-Canada) in between cities, or the backwoods and forests that are often locations for school field trips or family or community activities (for example, camping; and expeditions undertaken by Boy Scouts or Girl Guides). Even those urban child

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dwellers who have never seen an actual farm or forest would have encountered literary, pastoral-like ones, whether through Canadian children’s literature (for example, the iconic Anne of Green Gables [1908]) or, equally as likely, through British or American literature. We call to mind American children’s author Jan Brett’s detailed renderings of northern farms, or the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, with their frontier pastoral imagery popularized by the novels’ covers as well as by the television series. In other words, older, urban children (like those in the study that is the subject of this chapter) come to Loyie already infected with nostalgia – a “sense memory [that] registers physical imprint” of an event (Bennett 2003, 29) – for what they think of as country-like ways from literature (media and television) and from their own lives and those of their families, many of whom have immigrated to Canada. One of the more generative activities that the teacher, Gabriela, created as a spinoff to the study of the Loyie book was for children to research and re-create (learn how and try for themselves) a process of learning to make something, whether it was strawberry jam or a knitted hat. Atia and Davies remind us that the seventeenth-century word nostalgia (from the Greek nostos, “return to native land,” combined with algos, “suffering or grief ”) originally referred to a medical condition (2010). It was a feverish state that could only be assuaged by a return home. Not surprisingly, it was a condition with which soldiers were often afflicted – away from home and quite possibly unlikely to return, except in a box, thus magnifying nostalgia’s effects. With the emergence of psychiatry and psychophysiology, it attracted interest as a form of memory. Not long after, it also became of use to writers – the (Romanticized) “ruins” of memory becoming firmly embedded in a Victorian literary aesthetics with its “endorsement of sentimental selective forgetting” (182). In present postmodern times, nostalgia is a retro phenomenon associated with longing and loss – the endlessly deferred object. This is how nostalgia has been commonly characterized. Svetlana Boym (2001) challenged this characterization by distinguishing between restorative and reflective forms of nostalgia. Restorative nostalgia entrenches, whereas reflective nostalgia is more subtle, ironical, and critical. The work of Atia and Davies goes even further by arguing for nostalgia as a form of consciousness that can advance future-oriented thinking.

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Atia and Davies suggest that the suffusion of sensory memory that typifies nostalgic accounts, instead of posing a liability, could mark the beginning of a critical consciousness of loss and identity, where a nostalgic perception helps give “sensory depth to our awareness.” Nostalgia, while it insists on our connection to the past, also helps focus on the force of separation from what we have lost. Nostalgia can “take on critical agency in relation to the particular object of its longing” (2010, 184). Contrary to expectation, then, nostalgia might prove to be a particularly useful tool in the hands of a teacher who wants her non-Indigenous students to understand the impact of an Indigenous child’s separation from family, community, and land that residential school imposed and who wants to produce this shock in them through the kind of verbal and visual pictures that can first bring them there, to a pre-residential school identity before the children are torn away. (On the use of what are called dialectical images in residential school children’s picture-books, see Strong-Wilson, Yoder, and Phipps 2014.) In the next section we enter the teacher’s classroom and the children’s discussion around the Loyie book. The teacher, who had a very digressive style of teaching (Yoder and Strong-Wilson 2017), often lingered over matters that she considered important for the children to appreciate the texture of Loyie’s life as a boy (Community/Tribal identity) but verging on inordinately so at times, as we discuss. The class became thoroughly engrossed in vicariously living/reliving “the rural”; this was ostensibly meant as a way into Loyie but almost threatened to become a distraction. We now examine the nature of that distraction, how it infected the class, and speculate on how it contributed to the students’ shock as well as to their critical awareness of Loyie, and themselves, as non-Indigenous ethical readers of a true account of someone’s loss and his survival. We also look at how this excess was usefully channelled by the teacher and by certain students.

Responding to Loyie in an Elementary Classroom Memory – remembering – is both a recurring theme and a learning strategy in Gabriela’s pedagogy for teaching residential school stories. She looped with this grade six class, so she had had most of these same

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students as fifth graders. During grade five she had used the picture book Shi-shi-etko (2005). Like As Long as the Rivers Flow (2003), Shi-shi-etko dwells in the time just before residential school. It follows a young girl as she collects memories of natural scenes, experiences, and other sensory details. As Yoder (2013) documents, one of Gabriela’s culminating activities for the students was to have each create a quilt square of memories, after which the quilt squares were assembled. The quilt is itself evocative of rural living, of networks of relationships with one another and with the land, but also a feature in the story’s illustrations. Shi-shietko is tucked under a quilt during her countdown of sleeps to starting school. It is a comforting motif but also unsettling, as Gabriela consistently travelled a fine line in her pedagogy between pre- and postresidential school life and identity. As she taught As Long as the Rivers Flow, there could be no secret or suspense about what was going to happen to Larry; the students knew. Rather, through her digressive approach of lingering on the details of his life, she invited them to “remember,” that is, to think about the details of Loyie’s pre-residential school life as something that had been lost but was worth recalling for the characters in the story and also for the students in her class. It was in this enthusiastic exploration of what those memories might include and signify that the students and the teacher spent much of their time. Reflecting on the difference between learning about the experiences of Indigenous peoples in residential school, and the more apparently anthropological – or more accurately, stereotypical – teepees-and-feathered-hats approaches in other grades, one student, Matthew, remarked: “If anything sticks with me it was how I thought about them before [the story] and how I think about them now. It’s a huge difference.” Loyie’s recollections in As Long as the Rivers Flow of his family’s hunting and gathering excursion into the woods for the foodstuffs and medicines that will sustain them through the winter (a winter he will not share with them) take on particular emotional significance in light of that most basic of residential school traumas – foreign food, imposed as part of the regime to “kill the Indian, save the child.” The particular power of taste and smell in remembering is easy to overlook in curriculum and instruction, despite being the subject of perhaps one of the most famous literary excursions into the senses and nostalgia. Musing

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on his madeleine, Proust comments that “when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us …” ([1913] 2000, 58, cited in Rossington and Whitehead 2007, 1). The emphasis on the senses in both As Long as the Rivers Flow and Shi-shi-etko is fertile ground for nostalgic feeling. Food, and memories of the bush with its berries and herbs, provided important occasions for Gabriela’s digressions (indeed, food production and gathering invariably recalls the rural, since urban food production is limited to a garden plot). Students could imagine the longing, the hunger that followed being removed to residential school, where the food was a constant reminder of displacement and captivity. A student wrote in an assignment in which she was asked to imagine what Larry felt after the cattle truck drove away: “I’m mostly going to miss my Mama because she’s my mom and she cooks really good food.” The horror of hunger, of eating nasty, strange food, is surely an accessible emotion, especially to children. It is perhaps through this basic understanding of hunger, of yearning, that the children so enthusiastically pursued the details of living in the bush. Taking her lead from the text itself, from Loyie’s own memories, Gabriela encouraged students to find out about the foods (“What is Bannock?”), food practices (smoking, preserving), and foodstuffs and medicines being hunted and gathered. In reading groups, each working with an iPad, the students looked up the unfamiliar words in the text, the words that recalled Loyie’s everyday life as he had lived it before residential school. As the students worked, there was an excited buzz; they wanted to tell Gabriela what they’d learned almost as soon as they’d found something out. She met their enthusiasm with further explanations, questions, or invitations to extend their thinking or make a personal connection, which some did on their own time, after school. In a particularly pointed digression, she had her students prepare traditional foods from their own families, bringing in the prepared dishes that formed some part of their identity as members of particular family/cultural traditions. Also, following Holtzman (2006), she drew subtle attention to the importance of food, memory, and identity, besides

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making a contrast with modern, industrial food supply and production. Gabriela talked about “the intergenerational project where people made traditional foods” and went on to ask her students, “Didn’t you have a greater appreciation of the food? It’s not store bought, it’s ‘Seth made this food.’” In Holtzman’s review of scholarship from a number of disciplines on food, memory, and nostalgia, he notes that nostalgia related to food “may also be seen as a longing for times and places that one has never experienced” (2006, 367). The bush, and the knowledge of how to steward its resources for food and shelter, was seen by one student (Chloe) as safer, for example, during times of natural disaster, such as a tornado. One senses the anxiety of urban life, where what, on the one hand, makes things simple – such as being able to go to a grocery store – also, on the other, makes urban life complicated and vulnerable. In revealing current anxieties, a sense of loss of self- and community reliance is underscored. The bush as an untamed wilderness, beyond the pale, was idealized for Chloe as a place of safety and community. Rendering the bush “safe” made the removal of the children to residential school even more traumatic. But it should be noted that the bush was rendered “safe” through Gabriela’s dwelling on the details on which Loyie himself dwelled, remembering the “time before.” Indeed, questions around food and food production elicited in response to Loyie’s text and images threatened to overwhelm the final focus group discussion about the text. In response to the questions, “What have you most learned from reading this book, and Shi-shi-etko last year? What would you want other people to know?,” the students pursued a twenty-minute digression, at the centre of which was the ethics of raising/killing chickens for meat. Gabriela included a story of her own memories from childhood. The conversation was driven by a fierce energy, so that some students became audibly impatient. The final turn away from the subject came as the result of a student’s question that drove to the core of white settler complicity in the captivity of First Nations children in residential schools. Lillian said: “It’s not about chickens. I was just wondering, the person coming to take the children away from their families to the residential schools, regardless of if they were mean to the children or not, I really wonder what they felt.” The shift was made

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from animals in forced captivity to human beings in forced captivity. Another student, Ryan, asked about the teachers at residential schools: “Were teachers forced to work at the residential schools? I don’t think it’s a job that people would want to do.” Shortly after, another student commented about the misery of the cattle truck. What had been a discussion about the ethics of animal welfare and food laid the intellectual foundation for an important exploration of the captivity of Indigenous children and of non-Indigenous complicity in the nuts and bolts of residential school as a system of captivity, including the transportation of children and the staffing of schools by teachers. People knew it was wrong yet still participated, and students increasingly began to wonder how the people (adults) around them (children) could knowingly engage in such practices. At key junctures in this otherwise very voluble class, there was silence (see Yoder and Strong-Wilson 2017). This silence occurred whenever the shadow of residential school descended on the story, on Larry Loyie. The children were there with Larry and his family. Did this silence represent an interruption of nostalgia or its continuation in another form? We would suggest that both happened. The students both reached the end of their “reverie” about Larry’s rural life (with its ending, as Larry prepares to go to school), while their own journeys “back up the side hill” contributed to a nuanced understanding of the profound effects of residential school on Indigenous peoples in Canada. The phrase “to go back up the side hill” comes from Bachelard and is meant to suggest (in a very Rousseauian way) the difference between children being shown something and seeing for themselves. Bachelard exclaims: “What a release for your reverie when you leave the classroom to go back up the side hill, your side hill!” (Poetics of Reverie, 127, as cited in Philo 2003, 13). While Bachelard equates this space of reverie with being alone to think, seated on a proverbial hill, away from everyone and everything, Philo contextualizes it to times when the mind is allowed to wander, which we argue it does in listening to a story. The mind wanders to that place of the story, where the story itself, in this case, describes a place of reverie, a place of being in nature and among one’s relations (human, animal). That space of reverie, as Philo notes, is one of memory and imagination, and its entry-points and triggers are constituted

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through sensation – nostalgia’s forte. Nostalgia, Atia and Davies remind us, has a certain structure “by the way it correlates place, time and desire” (2010, 184). Nostalgia is what allowed these students to be brought (or to bring themselves) to a phenomenological site of intense empathy with Larry’s story, even as nostalgia is also what left them, with Larry, outside of that place, mourning having to leave a place of such deep meaningfulness as this. When the students were confronted with the image of the cattle truck, with Larry pressed against its boards and his younger siblings huddled close to him, faces sorrowful and suffused with the pain of loss, the students recognized their difference from Larry. They recognized that in this image, their part (as members of a settler society) was with the cattle truck even if their emotional allegiances lay with Larry, his family, and all Indigenous children and families who experienced residential school and its effects.

Conclusion Nostalgia can serve as an “interpretive tool” (Atia and Davies 2010, 182), as well as a methodological and pedagogical tool in the hands of a sensitive researcher or here, teacher, for engaging critical consciousness of children’s geographies with a social issue of the scope and magnitude of the history and legacy of residential schooling in Canada. Critical nostalgia allows for the kind of intimate remembering that can contribute to a heightened awareness of loss, especially of others’ loss. Gabriela helped the children forge connections to Loyie’s story – an essential pedagogical piece in learning (Gear 2015) – even as those same connections scaffolded the students’ depth of understanding of Larry’s (and his family’s) loss. Rurality played a pivotal role as the Proustian prompt that released both children’s and the teacher’s memories of connections to the land and what a close relationship to the land, and culture, can give. Philo coined the phrase “geographies that wound” (2005, 441) to point to new directions in children’s geographies that would acknowledge the interconnectedness of lives and places and where this interconnectedness “create[s] vulnerability for certain peoples and places more than others” (442, emphasis in original). Vulnerabilities, Philo points out, do not simply “happen,” passively or accidentally; they are made, thus provoking

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“thinking about … the aftermath of wounds, the treating of the scars that can be left” (442). This was certainly the direction that the students and their teacher took as they considered where Loyie’s story left them along with the wounds and scars. How were they changed? More importantly, how was Larry changed? And how would they know about this character/person/family that they as a class had come to care for? Larry Loyie passed away on 18 April 2016 but not before publishing a play and several books as well as founding, with Constance Brissenden, the Living Traditions Writing Group (Robertson 2016). Especially in the wake of the recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Loyie’s body of work stands as a living legacy and a challenge to educators. “To the Commission, reconciliation is about establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in this country. In order for that to happen, there has to be awareness of the past, acknowledgement of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behavior” (trc 2015, 6–7). As the students pored over the end of the picture-book, including its photographs of Loyie in residential school, Matthew was reminded of the owl, Ooh-huu. “He wasn’t mentioned much” in the story, Matthew mused aloud. “We got left off at a random point. We didn’t get to read the rest of the story,” he continued to reflect. It was unclear if he was thinking then of Larry, or the owl, or both. One student noticed that the owl reappeared, perched on the tree beside the cattle truck as it drove away. Another student noticed the owl flying away, in the final illustration, winging its way through a dark sky lit by stars. Matthew was then as if struck by a profound realization that the Loyies kept the owl “so that he could get educated to go back [to the wild]. And we were educated about the story.” Gabriela asked Matthew whether he was saying that the owl was symbolic. Matthew tried to explain what he was thinking and feeling: “It’s like a lot occurs to us in reading the story.” It was Lillian who took this thought further, suggesting that this was not “our” (the readers’) owl, but Larry’s. “The book starts with finding Ooh-huu but notice Ooh-huu comes in not too long before they’re to go off to residential school.” Gabriela then helped the students create the interconnections between and among wounding and scarring and beginning to heal. “Do you see how that was the biggest in-

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justice with residential schools? Not only that they were taken away from their families but that even when they came back, they came back to something that felt like a stranger?” She persisted, as if encompassing the entire discussion that the class had had during the length of time they spent with Loyie’s story, including all memories jogged of what was meaningful and salient in their lives: “But do you think they didn’t want to re-learn their culture? Think of your own culture. And many of you here have very strong cultural roots. Is that something you are willing to let go of easily?” Erin, quiet yet deeply thoughtful, responded: “If I were Lawrence, I would start writing.” This was in fact what Larry Loyie did, as part of a subaltern critical nostalgia (Atia and Davies 2010) and “creative self-definition” (McKegney 2007, 46), one with collective resonances, and where what might be called a tribal rurality played a pivotal role. This brings us back to calls for studies of rural childhoods to document actual childhoods, which for Indigenous peoples means stories of living on the land as well as of dispossession. At the same time, as part of the critical work advocated by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, urban (and rural) non-Indigenous children need to understand the important legacy of rurality in constructing notions of place and belonging, both imagined and real.

n ote s 1 All participant names are pseudonyms. 2 “Engaging Teachers with Canadian Literature for Social Justice” (2011–15) was a pan-Canadian study, spanning seven researchers and research sites across Canada (East to West). Ingrid Johnston (University of Alberta) was the grant’s principal investigator. We are grateful to sshrc for support with this research (sshrc 410-2011-1145). referen ces Atia, Nadia, and Jeremy Davies. 2010. “Nostalgia and the Shapes of History: Editorial.” Memory Studies 3(3): 181–86. doi: 10.1177%2F1750698010364808. Bennett, Jill. 2003. “The Aesthetics of Sense-Memory: Theorising Trauma through the Visual Arts.” In Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, edited by Susannah Radstone and Katharine Hodgkin, 27–39. London: Routledge.

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Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Campbell, Nicola. 2005. Shi-shi-etko. Toronto: Groundwood Books. – 2008. Shin-Chi’s Canoe. Toronto: Groundwood Books. Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth. 1996. Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Daniels, Lyn. 2016. “Memories of Aboriginal/Indian Education: Decolonizing Policy and Practice.” PhD diss., University of British Columbia. Gear, Adrienne. 2015. Reading Power: Teaching Students to Think While They Read. Markham: Pembroke. Holtzman, Jon. 2006. “Food and Memory.” Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 361–78. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.35.081705.123220. Jordan-Fenton, Christy, and Margaret Pokiak-Fenton. 2010. Fatty Legs. Toronto: Annick Press. – 2011. A Stranger at Home: A True Story. Toronto: Annick Press. – 2013. When I Was Eight. Toronto: Annick Press. – 2014. Not My Girl. Toronto: Annick Press. Loyie, Larry. 2003. As Long as the Rivers Flow. Toronto: Groundwood Books. Matthews, Hugh, Mark Taylor, Kenneth Sherwood, Faith Tucker, and Melanie Limb. 2000. “Growing-up in the Countryside: Children and the Rural Idyll.” Journal of Rural Studies 16(2): 141–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(99) 00059-5. McKegney, Sam. 2007. Magic Weapons: Aboriginal Writers Remaking Community after Residential School. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press. Olsen, Sylvia. 2001. No Time to Say Goodbye: Children’s Stories of Kuper Island Residential School. Winlaw: Sono Nis Press. Philo, Chris. 2003. “‘To Go Back Up the Side Hill’: Memories, Imaginations, and Reveries of Childhood.” Children’s Geographies: Advancing Interdisciplinary Understanding of Younger People’s Lives 1(1): 7–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/147332 80302188. – 2005. “The Geographies That Wound.” Population, Space, and Place 11(6): 441–54. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.400. Powell, Mary Ann, Nicola Taylor, and Anne Smith. 2013. “Constructions of Rural Childhood: Challenging Dominant Perspectives.” Children’s Geographies: Advancing Interdisciplinary Understanding of Younger People’s Lives 11(1): 117–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2013.743285.

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Radstone, Susannah. 2010. “Nostalgia: Home-Comings and Departures.” Memory Studies 3(3): 187–91. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1750698010364808 Robertson, Becky. 2016. “Obituary: Cree Author Larry Loyie.” Quill and Quire, 27 April. http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/2016/04/27/obituary-cree-authorlarry-loyie (accessed 30 October 2016). Rossington, Michael, and Anne Whitehead. 2007. “Introduction.” In Theories of Memory: A Reader, edited by Michael Rossington and Anne Whitehead, 1–18. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sellars, Bev. 2013. They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Sterling, Shirley. 1992. My Name Is Seepeetza. Toronto: Groundwood. Strong-Wilson, Teresa. 2008. Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education with Teachers. New York: Peter Lang. Strong-Wilson, Teresa, Amarou Yoder, and Heather Phipps. 2014. “Going Down the Rabbit-Hole: Teachers’ Engagements with ‘Dialectical Images’ in Canadian Children’s Literature on Social Justice.” Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education 21(1): 79–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/1358684X.2013.876143. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 2015. “Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/File/2015/Findings/Exec_ Summary_2015_05_31_web_o.pdf (accessed 12 February 2017). Yoder, Amarou. 2013. “Something Resembling Hope: Notes on Strategies for Teaching Canadian Social Justice Literature.” McGill Journal of Education 48(2): 435–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1020980ar. Yoder, Amarou, and Teresa Strong-Wilson. 2017. “The Limits of ‘Understanding’: Teaching Residential School Stories in the Classroom.” In Challenging Stories: Canadian Literature for Social Justice in the Classroom, edited by Anne Burke and Ingrid Johnston, 88–105. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press.

13 Mapping Futures, Making Selves: How Rural Young People Experience The Real Game Kate Cairns

Introduction Hilary tugs at the frayed cuff of her sweatshirt and shakes her long bangs off her face. She appears unfazed by the audio recorder on the table between us and speaks candidly about the surprises she encountered in The Real Game. This career-based educational program encourages seventh and eighth grade students to envision adult futures in the so-called real world. For the past three months, I’ve spoken with Hilary and her classmates as they navigated various Real Game activities – assuming mock occupational roles, making wish lists for their ideal home, planning monthly budgets, and negotiating the struggles of job loss. These experiences have been unfolding within the grade seven/eight classroom in Fieldsville,1 a predominantly white working-class rural Ontario community where I have been conducting ethnographic research. I’ve come to students’ experiences of The Real Game through an interest in imagined futures – how rural young people envision the person they hope to become and how this process fits into the formation of rural selves: Kate: So what did you think about “The Real Game?” Hilary: I think it helps a lot to know what it’s actually gonna be like

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when we grow up. And how you have to pay the bills and how you have to fill forms out and stuff just to like, live at your house. Over the course of our thirty-minute interview, the conversation gradually shifts from the specific lessons Hilary took away from The Real Game to a broader sense of her hopes and dreams. Among these is her dream to eventually assume ownership of her parents’ rural home in Fieldsville. “I like to be able to look out my window and see nature,” she says, reflecting on the benefits of rural living. As a self-proclaimed “country girl,” Hilary sees herself building a life within this same community, locating her future within the rural landscape. Yet these images of rurality intertwine with other aspirations, such as her desire to become a fashion designer – an occupation that is seemingly incompatible with a life in Fieldsville yet integral to her vision of the future. When I ask her to paint a picture of her life twenty years from now, she pauses to contemplate the possibilities: I think I’ll either still be a fashion designer, or if that kinda goes downhill, all that stuff goes downhill, I think I’ll just do something like work at a general store … But um, I’m gonna grow up and I’m gonna have a good job, and my husband’s gonna have a good job. And we’re gonna, if I have kids then it’s not gonna just be about me and my husband, have to involve them and stuff. I don’t know how to explain, like, I don’t know [laughs]. However tentative they may be, these visions of the future offer a glimpse into what Hilary considers meaningful in life. Through these narratives she projects herself into a respectable future as a responsible person who works hard to support herself and her family. As the careeroriented lessons of The Real Game are drawn into the realm of fantasy, they become enmeshed in a network of investments that surround Hilary’s sense of self – a relational self that is constructed through systems of gender, class, race and space: I think it’s important to have money, but not just for stuff that you want. You have to provide stuff for your family. Like, clothes, ’cause

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you can’t walk around naked [laughs]. So like, clothes and shoes to wear and school supplies and food and all that stuff. And it goes on and on … It’s like a fact of life, you need that stuff. You can’t just go on living without it. Like those commercials on tv with people that live in these, like on the other side of the world in um, [pause] I forget what it’s called. But me and my grandma always go to McDonald’s and we get McDonald’s toys and we send them to Haiti where they don’t get much. And you see these commercials on tv of these kids that don’t even have food, they can’t go to school, they have to drink from like, mud water and stuff. And I feel so bad for them. And it’s just like animals in the pound and they’ve like, been abused and stuff. And also you’d need stuff to feed your animals as well. Cuz I’m gonna grow up and I’m gonna have a big Saint Bernard. Upon first reading, the above paragraph might seem like an unfocused rambling, jumping between issues of responsibility, experience, and desire. Surely, one might suggest, Hilary’s past trips to McDonald’s and dreams of future pets are not grounds for theoretical investigation into questions of subjectivity, space, and imagined futures. While it’s true that these narrative traces do not add up to a coherent life plan, I want to argue that this very scattered quality offers rich analytic potential. Hilary draws on multiple discursive frames to articulate what she considers important in life, moving from the necessity of money as a “fact of life,” to media representations of an impoverished Other in the global South. Although The Real Game serves as the shared context for our discussion, this aspect of formal schooling provides just one discursive thread within this textured tapestry. What kinds of theoretical tools can facilitate an analysis of Hilary’s identifications in their multiplicity, as well as the shifting alignments through which she fashions her subjectivity? This chapter explores dynamics of spatiality and temporality in the formation of rural selves. To that end, I reflect upon ethnographic research exploring how young people in Fieldsville envision their futures. Images of rurality play a central role in this process as students craft lifenarratives from specific social and geographic locations. At the same time, their future selves cannot be contained within the rural landscape;

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local geographies intertwine with gendered investments in popular culture, classed mobility narratives, and dominant visions of the “good life.” Taking guidance from youth’s narratives, the chapter builds upon critical scholarship theorizing young lives as socially, spatially, and temporally situated by exploring processes of location within subjectivity formation. I begin by situating the chapter in the context of my research exploring how rural young people envision futures in neoliberal times. Then I examine the interrelation of spatiality and temporality within two different sites of self-making: first, the task of envisioning a future home, which leads young people to reflect upon the significance of their rural Canadian location; and second, the aspirational project of becoming what is known as a good person, crafted through gendered and classed narratives of morality and respectability. In the conclusion, I reflect upon the interrelation of spatiality and temporality in the formation of rural selves.

Subjectivity, Place, and Imagined Futures My interest in young people’s imagined futures was originally inspired by critical scholarship on neoliberalism and education (Apple 2001; Davies and Bansel 2007). If, as this literature suggested, students were now encouraged to embrace the position of the enterprising agent of the future, how were they responding to this invitation? The Real Game provided a fascinating site through which to explore how dominant educational discourses are enacted in local classroom contexts. This program espouses ideals of flexibility, mobility, and self-reliance that are commonly associated with the formation of the neoliberal subject (Gonick 2007). Developed in Canada in 1994, The Real Game gained international popularity as a way to prepare youth for the shifting realities of a neoliberal economy.2 Promotional materials published by Canada’s National Life/Work Centre frame the program within a “new career management paradigm” (Jarvis 2003, 1), developed in response to rapidly changing working conditions that render traditional approaches to vocational education obsolete. This new model of career education seeks to help a student become the kind of worker and citizen who can achieve success in a changing world. In addition to planning educa-

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tional pathways towards their desired careers, students are encouraged to develop capacities for flexibility, mobility, and self-invention in the face of economic uncertainty (see Figure 13.1 for an overview of units). My own research approached The Real Game not as the central object of study, but as an entry point into the processes through which young people imagine their futures. More than just a vision of what is to come, future narratives reveal a great deal about how young people understand themselves in the present. Thus, imagined futures not only reflect but also actively contribute to the formation of rural selves. To explore how these processes were unfolding in a particular rural context, I spent September through December of 2009 conducting ethnographic research with grade seven and eight students at Fieldsville Public School. With less than four hundred residents, Fieldsville is not unlike the small town in which I grew up, also in southeastern Ontario. The town has a general store, several churches, and a mix of small bungalows and old farmhouses; its farming history is evident in the sprawling fields that line the gravel roads. However, today few Fieldsville residents are able to sustain a living through farming. Some piece together odd jobs in the community, but most commute for thirty to sixty minutes to one of three small surrounding cities, where they find jobs in manufacturing, corrections, or service industries. Given these limited employment opportunities, it is arguably the public school that sustains the community’s core. Spanning kindergarten through grade eight, the school’s six split-grade classrooms line a single hallway. Only a few students are able to walk to school from their homes “in town”; the rest travel long distances on the two circuitous bus routes that collect students along the backroads. This vast community geography makes it difficult for youth to gather on weekends. Save for the few who are allowed to traverse the fields independently by all-terrain vehicle, most are left to convince parents or older siblings to drive them to a friend’s house. On the occasional Saturday when a parent was driving into the city, the youngsters would invite friends to pile into the car, taking advantage of the chance to spend a few hours at the mall or go to a movie. Relaying the experience at school on Monday, they would remark that the movie was pretty good, but that the city was crowded, as always, and that they were happy to get back to the country.

Figure 13.1 Brochure for The Real Game.

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I approached this research with a conception of subjectivity as dynamic social practices performed through discourse. This framework is rooted in a Foucauldian approach to discourse as a system of meaning that structures ways of thinking and being in the world (Foucault 1991). From this perspective, Hilary’s narrative in the introduction may be read as an expression of how discourses of middle-class femininity (represented by the hard-working parents who sustain the heteronormative family) are negotiated alongside moralizing (and racializing) discourses of the Canadian citizen who gives to those less fortunate around the globe. My own approach to imagined futures challenges the discursive boundary that often separates the study of young people’s supposedly playful fantasies from what is thought of as the more serious imaginative work that is demanded of them in school (McLeod and Yates 2006). While programs like The Real Game encourage students to narrate life plans through educational qualifications and job titles, young people look towards the future with a desire to “become somebody” (Luttrell 1997, 126). My research explored how such imaginative projects contribute to the production of rural selves, with particular attention to the way temporality and spatiality intertwine in the formation of subjectivity.

Locating Selves: Dreams of Rurality “I wanna live in the country cuz I wanna have a barn and I don’t want all the traffic,” Hilary declared. Her friend Jessie nodded enthusiastically and placed a Real Game worksheet in the middle of the table. “I’m in the country,” she said, pointing to the image of a white farmhouse that she’d circled among various housing options depicted on the page (see Figure 13.2). “I couldn’t afford that house!,” exclaimed Rebecca, clearly frustrated. “I picked a house but then I realized it was in the city so I was like, no way,” said Hilary. “So, I picked a different one.” Tucked in the back corner of the library for our first focus group, the girls were comparing the “wish lists” they’d created during a Real Game activity called “The Dream.” As described in the Facilitator’s Guide, in this exercise “students explore and express their dreams by creating wish lists (homes, pets, cars, leisure pursuits, etc.) they would like to have as

Figure 13.2 One of the housing options available in The Real Game lesson “The Dream.”

adults” (Barry 2005, 55). The week before, each student had been randomly assigned an occupational role that would become her character for the rest of the program. The challenge of today’s activity was for students to balance the cost of their desired items with the salary attached to their character’s occupation. As students excitedly compared “wish lists,” they often slipped out of character and approached the task as if they were drafting their own futures. For instance, even though Real Game roles are explicitly single and childless, Hilary explained that she had included two trucks on her list “’cause if there’s two of us, and my husband needs to go to work and I need to go to work, then we both need one.” For Hilary, the process of projecting herself into the future was shaped both by her commitment to rural living (making a truck the most appropriate mode of transportation) and by her vision of the heteronormative family. Tanya also adapted the game to better reflect her rustic vision of the future, selecting a small cabin in the woods as her primary residence, even though it was clearly listed as a “Seasonal Home” on the handout. The seemingly straightforward task of envisioning a “dream home” raised questions of belonging that forced students to articulate where they fit in the world – to locate their future (and current) selves in space. Drawing upon idyllic discourses of rurality, Fieldsville students project their futures onto a mythic countryside that epitomizes ideals of

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nature, safety, and community (Matthews et al. 2000; Rye 2006). In the process, they invest the rural with socio-spatial meanings that exceed its physical and demographic characteristics. When asked to describe their community, students spoke warmly about a town that’s “friendly,” “quiet,” “nice and peaceful” – a place where “everybody knows everybody.” As these warm community relations are mapped onto the physical environment – the “nice fields,” and the fact that “there’s lots of room for bike riding” – the social and material landscape blends into a mix of people and places, as well as the feelings that tie them together. As young people locate their futures within the rural landscape, they also draw upon imagery of national space. Notably, many described Canada in similar terms to their local environment, depicting a picturesque landscape covered in forest, lakes, and open fields, and home to a peaceful national community. Paul described Canada as “homey,” while his friend Cody emphasized the spacious territory. Comparing Canada to China, he said: “You’re not squished like they are. You’ve got lots of room that’s not even being used.” What was most striking in these conversations was students’ tendency to represent Canada as overwhelmingly rural. For instance, when asked how they would describe Canada to someone who had never been here, Kristin and Jessie said: Kristin: Most of it is countryish, except for like, some of the cities. But like, a lot of Canada is like/3 Jessie: Country. Kristin: Ya. Trees and all that stuff. Jessie: I’d tell them that it’s like, a great place for nature and all that. Here, the imagined geographies of community and nation intertwined to render rurality a defining feature of the Canadian experience. Even when I encouraged students to speak about other aspects of Canada, they continued to emphasize characteristics that aligned with rurality: Kate: What about things that don’t necessarily have to do with weather and nature? Other things about Canada as a place to live. Rebecca: It’s quiet. Hilary: There’s a lot of nature.

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Rebecca: It’s not busy. It’s a lot of wildlife, and it’s a lot of just like, trees. Like, Vancouver is like, all trees. Hilary: If you tried to turn around and look at another house, you’d see a field and trees around it and like hay bales and/ Rebecca: I’m pretty sure that everyone’s house has at least three trees in front of it. Amanda: Yep. The girls characterized the national territory in terms of its rural spaces, offering a vision of the Canada they know best. Beyond the lived experiences of Fieldsville students, these imagined geographies tapped into a national narrative that defined Canada through its wilderness spaces (Cairns 2013). While students drew upon idealized depictions of Fieldsville as a closeknit community that fit neatly with their vision of Canada as a whole, their construction of the rural also relied on the production of outsiders. Paul lamented that while Fieldsville is generally peaceful and quiet, “some people can get pretty loud at night.” As he elaborated, classed differences emerged within this distinction: “Usually it’s people that, like, don’t really have a lot of money, and they just throw parties to have fun.” Rebecca, Kristin, and Hilary drew similar boundaries between legitimate locals and unwanted outsiders: Hilary: New people that move in, they don’t get that we’re quiet people. Kristin: Ya. They make a lot of noise. Kate: So who, like, who would that be? I don’t mean names, I just mean, like/ Rebecca: Like there’s a lot of new kids in our school, and well, there’s this one house and it’s like really close to my house, just down the road/ Hilary: Is that the Jackson house? Rebecca: Ya. And there’s like ten kids who live in it and they’re really noisy. Hilary: Actually, I think there’s twelve. Rebecca: And they’re like all over Fieldsville and they’re always

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down at my house and they’re so noisy. And my parents work shift work so they’re tryin’ to sleep and everything and, I’m like, “Oh my god! Leave me alone!” [laughter] The girls painted a picture of disruptive outsiders to capture a perceived clash between long-standing members of the community and “new people” who “don’t understand” the local lifestyle. The fact that they focused on a house with several children (likely shared among relatives) suggests that these boundaries reflect – and reproduce – classed divisions, evoking, as Skeggs (2004) points out, images of poor people as loud and disruptive. Doreen Massey’s work sheds light on how young people forge place-based subjectivities by constructing boundaries and exclusions. She notes that individuals define their place through understandings of whom and where they are not, such that “the social definition of the place involves an active process of exclusion” (1995, 194). By disidentifying with noisy “outsiders,” young people establish themselves as deserving members of the community who make a legitimate claim to this rural place. By contrast, students with more limited material resources negotiate classed boundaries on a personal level, acknowledging the gap between their own lived experience and idealized conceptions of the rural “home.” Arbor described how her family’s move from a farm outside the village to a one-floor apartment in Fieldsville had been “kind of a shock for all of us.” She explained: Cuz we moved from a farm to here, into town, and it’s kind of weird because we only have, like, our house pets and I was used to riding almost every day, twice a day, up a trail … And now we’re in the city, like, in the town, and we don’t have any land that I can do that on. Like, we have a donkey that we’re boarding and we have no land for him. And that’s really hard. Arbor experienced the move into the village as a spatial loss – not only in territorial terms, but also in relation to the lifestyle associated with a particular rural geography. Matthews and colleagues suggest that “what particularly distinguishes a rural upbringing … is the sharp disjuncture

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between the symbolism and expectations of the Good Life (the emblematic) and the realities and experiences of growing-up in small, remote, poorly serviced and fractured communities (the corporeal)” (2000, 151). While the discourse of the rural idyll is central to students’ sense of self, their own experiences reveal considerable diversity contained within the category of a “rural childhood.” The Real Game’s invitation to project oneself into an imagined future prompted students to reflect on their fit within this landscape. These reflections exceeded the perceived boundaries of a curricular program framed around budgeting skills and career pathways, and pointed toward the interrelation of spatiality and temporality in the formation of rural selves. While rurality is central to the current and future selves of Fieldsville’s young people, these attachments are fraught, as students negotiate the threat of rural pathology. Contrary to the rural idyll, contemporary representations of rurality are often embedded in narratives of stagnation, where apparently “backward” rural communities lag behind Canada’s cosmopolitan cities (Cairns 2013; Corbett 2006). This tension became apparent when I travelled with Fieldsville students to the regional volleyball tournament. While riding the bus through a small rural community about thirty minutes from Fieldsville, I overheard a student in the seat behind me say, “This is such a hick town.” To an outsider, this village would look much like Fieldsville. Nevertheless, the student’s comment shows how subtle distinctions are drawn between seemingly similar places. It also shows how even as students forge rural identifications, they mark off their own rural selves from those who are less desirable (the hicks). Indeed, other studies have found that young people locate themselves in terms of “differing degrees of ‘ruralness’” (Vanderbeck and Dunkley 2003, 250), identifying with valued aspects of rurality and disidentifying from others. Thus, even as students invest in a version of the rural idyll that they view as quintessentially Canadian, their sense of their own location is not uniformly experienced through the category of rural youth. Rather, these spatial identifications are always articulated through other social categories (Cairns 2014). In the next section I examine how students’ narratives of becoming a “good person” reveal gendered and classed complexities in the formation of rural selves.

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Mapping Futures: Becoming a Good Person Central to Fieldsville students’ future narratives is the desire to become a good person. While widely shared, this imagined ideal is constructed in diverse ways that speak to gendered and classed dimensions of students’ current identities. Christie spoke openly about her desire to be good, which she defined as someone who supports those around her: “I see myself when I get older being a good person where if something ever happened I’d be right there, no matter what.” When I asked her to tell me more about what it means to be a good person, she said: “Like, if somebody was picking on your friend, don’t just stand there, actually do something about it.” While not always discussed in these terms, this emphasis on helping others was central to many students’ future selves. For instance, when I asked Kyle what he was looking forward to about his desired career as a lawyer, he said: “Pretty much going into court and helping people … Ya, pretty much really looking forward to doing that.” Although Christie and Kyle placed different practices at the centre of their imagined futures, they were both committed to “helping others” as a defining feature of a life that is good. The contrast between Christie’s and Kyle’s responses reflects a gendered distinction that emerged across students’ helping narratives; while girls tended to draw upon relational discourses of helping others through caring professions or interpersonal connections, many boys invested in protective discourses of helping the public good through law and order. Amanda explained that her mom wanted her to become a nurse, like her, because it suited her caring personality: “I just think I’m really caring for a lot of people, and stuff like that. I like to help people and be there and everything.” Although Amanda wasn’t sure that a career in nursing was what she desired, she was certain about her identity as a caring person, and she saw this as an important part of her future. Offering a different approach to helping others, Tim told me he wanted to work as a paramedic. He gestured towards the ambulance he’d drawn on the front cover of his Real Game folder and explained what appealed to him about that job: “You’re helping out the law. You’re helping out people with their medical problems. Car crashes, helping them get rescued.” Tim went on to say that he looked up to his aunt and uncle,

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who were both police officers, because “they help out the law, too. Arrest those who are being bad, don’t follow the law.” Tim’s desire to work alongside those who were “helping out the law” aligned his future with a particular vision of the good person that fit comfortably with dominant conceptions of rural masculinity (Cairns 2014). Just as the boundaries of rurality are defined through the production of outsiders, this ideal of the good person is produced in opposition to one who is not – in Tim’s case, the “criminal.” This category is a common site for drawing moral boundaries since many boys invest in protective masculinities that work to cleanse the social fabric by expelling crime. In these narratives, boys position their future selves as defenders of the public good; they see themselves stopping crime” and punishing “scumbags” in order to “help people out.” Sometimes these visions emphasize improving the lives of others. In Scott’s words, “There’s a lotta crime here-adays, now more than there used to be. And the world needs more safety and all that. So I just thought I’d be a police officer, so the world can be a better place.” At other times, boys’ visions of helping others were tied up in sensationalized stories of danger and adventure that centred on the performance of a risk-taking masculinity: Kate: What appeals to you about being a police officer? Cody: Just like, you’re not sittin’ in an office on a computer. Like, you’re ridin’ around in a car. Paul: You get to help people. Cody: Help people out. Like my aunt’s friend, right now he’s up in, he’s got the scariest job [as a] police officer. He’s in Toronto right now dealin’ with bike gangs. Paul: He gets, like, a shotgun. Cody: He gets a shotgun and a taser and everything. Kate: Would you like that? Dillon: Ya Cody: Ya, it’d be fun ridin’ around in a car and Paul: It’d be scary [laughs] Cody: It’d be a scary job, but it’d be like [nods his head repeatedly as if he’s getting pumped up] Paul: It’d be, like, endurance. [pumps his fists]

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Cody: It’d be endurance. You’re running around with a gun and everything. People are out, knock ’em down. Get to chase cars, pull ’em over. Here, the notion of “helping others” by fighting crime is located within an imagined geography of urban danger (Cairns 2013). Elsewhere (Cairns 2014), I’ve written about how Fieldsville boys’ attraction to careers in law enforcement can be understood as an extension of idealized traits within the construction of rural masculinities, such as physical toughness and the skilled use of firearms, which the boys currently use for hunting. This exchange demonstrates how youth’s investments in “doing good” are not isolated from other aspects of their subjectivity, but are, rather, embedded in these local identifications and attachments. In contrast to these masculine tales of risk and outdoor adventure, girls more commonly located their images of a good future within domestic space. Here, the boundaries of the good person were drawn not through tales of criminality, but through narratives of feminine respectability. Consider the following response from Hilary: I just don’t wanna grow up to live in a dirty house and stuff. Cuz you gotta have responsibilities. Like, when you brush your teeth you don’t just leave the toothpaste layin’ on the sink. And like, when guys go to the washroom, they don’t just leave the seat up. And, when people eat food and they don’t want anymore, they don’t just leave it on the table, or you don’t wash the dishes. If you cut up food and you take what you want and just leave it there, that’s gross too. And if you don’t clean the tub or the toilet at all, yuck! Ugh, it’s nasty! After her initial statement about not wanting to “live in a dirty house,” Hilary shifted to a normative assessment of the responsibilities required for respectable living. In this account, the “dirty house” came to symbolize someone who lacks responsibility, reflecting poorly on her inner character. As Hilary worked to produce herself as a good person, classed discourses of hygiene intersected with feminine ideals of domesticity, such that her future home became a site from which to judge her moral worth.

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These moralizing distinctions between a clean home and a dirty one also map onto the body. When I asked Kristin how she would describe herself, she first said she didn’t care what other people thought of her, but then she amended her answer: I would say, um, I don’t really care what other people – like, I care what I look like and stuff like that. Cuz I don’t really like to go around in my pajamas, [laughs] I never go around in my pajamas. But it’s okay if other people do [said quickly, as if in defence] but I don’t really do that cuz I don’t really want people to get that feeling on me that I’m kind of, like, sloppy and I don’t really care and anything. But I would say, I don’t really care what other people think, except for like, what they think of, well, no – it’s confusing! [laughs] As Kristin attempted to articulate a coherent self-description, she struggled to negotiate a series of conflicting statements about herself. On the one hand, she took up a liberal narrative of the autonomous individual who is free to be herself, unconcerned about others’ views. But when it came to embodiment, Kristin cared a great deal how she appeared to others. Drawing boundaries around those who were “sloppy,” she read the body as a reflection of one’s inner character. Much like Hilary was disgusted at the idea of a dirty home, Kristin distanced herself from a “sloppy” appearance, identifying with a clean and well-cared-for body. As key markers of femininity, the home and body become sites for the production of good feminine futures. The boys’ stories of fighting crime, and the girls’ investments in a clean home and well-kept appearance, reproduced gendered narratives of care that they imagined would secure a future good life. Narratives of becoming a good person designate ways of living that are worthy of legitimacy, and those that are not. These moral boundaries become integral to subjectivity formation, as youth draw upon the discourses available to them in order to make sense of – and create value within – their lives.

Conclusion I entered Fieldsville with an interest in how neoliberal educational discourses come to life in the classroom. Using The Real Game as a lens

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through which to view this process, I was curious about how young people in one rural Ontario community were responding to the invitation to craft their futures as self-reliant subjects who could flexibly adapt in an uncertain world. My own relationship to theories of the neoliberal subject shifted over the course of this project. In my early field notes, I noted students’ strong investments in their rural environment, as well as the complex gendered performances that structured classroom interactions. As I probed these processes more deeply, The Real Game began to recede into the background. While the program continued to provide a shared context to engage with students about their visions of the future, in fact, it was somewhat secondary in terms of what these young people wanted to talk about. As I took my cue from students about what was significant in life, the image of the neoliberal subject became a somewhat distant figure, more fit for the pages of academic journals than for the everyday context of rural schooling. In Canada’s educational policy discourse, the category of rural often signifies a geographically and economically marginalized population of students, who are assumed to struggle in the context of limited resources (Corbett 2006). Indeed, with its short supply of jobs and aging population, Fieldsville could be seen to exemplify dominant narratives of rural decline. Yet this community is still very much alive to the youth who live there, providing a counter-narrative to the story of Canada’s dwindling rural communities frequently told in the media (Corbett 2010). While this framing may reflect certain aspects of students’ lives, it fails to consider the power of rurality in shaping young people’s sense of self. Programs like The Real Game are designed to cultivate “self-reliant, contributing and prosperous citizens” who will advance Canada’s standing in the “knowledge economy” (Jarvis 2003, 17). But youth’s imagined futures are not entirely determined by neoliberal conditions; they are crafted from specific social and geographic locations that give rise to particular conceptions of a life that is good. As Fieldsville students articulate visions of the future, they make use of the discourses available to them in order to establish their place within legitimate categories of being. This process is not easily contained within the linear model of an internally consistent biography. In an effort to

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grapple with the multiple attachments that structure students’ imagined futures, I propose a theoretical approach that attends to ongoing processes of location within subjectivity formation. In this chapter, I’ve provided a cross-section of the kinds of conversations that emerged in my research with Fieldsville’s young people, from envisioning one’s ideal future home and discussing the dynamics of rural Canadian living, to envisioning one’s future as a good person who embodies gendered performances of morality. Isolating any one of these narrative traces would fail to capture the complex project of crafting rural selves, which is not only about retrieving memories of the past, but also about projecting oneself into an imagined future. By retaining this messiness, I hope I have offered a glimpse into the interrelations among social, temporal, and spatial locations in the production of subjectivity.

n ote s 1 The names of people and local places are pseudonymous in order to protect the confidentiality of participants. 2 The official website for The Real Game Series provides links to versions used in Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America. 3 The forward slash indicates that an interruption has been made in the conversation. referen ce s Apple, Michael. 2001. “Comparing Neoliberal Projects and Inequality in Education.” Comparative Education 37(4): 409–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/030500 60120091229 Barry, Bill. 2005. The Real Game Facilitator’s Guide. St John’s: The Real Game. Cairns, Kate. 2013. “Youth, Dirt, and the Spatialization of Subjectivity: An Intersectional Approach to White Rural Imaginaries.” Canadian Journal of Sociology 38(4): 623–46. https://www.jstor.org/stable/canajsocicahican.38.4.623. – 2014. “Both Here and Elsewhere: Rural Girls’ Contradictory Visions of the Future.” Gender and Education 26(5): 477–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253. 2014.927835. Corbett, Michael. 2006. “Educating the Country Out of the Child and Educating

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the Child Out of the Country: An Excursion in Spectrology.” Alberta Journal of Educational Research 52(4): 289–301. https://ajer.journalhosting.ucalgary.ca/ index.php/ajer/article/view/582/567 – 2010. “Standardized Individuality: Cosmopolitanism and Educational DecisionMaking in an Atlantic Canadian Rural Community.” Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 40(2): 223–37. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03057920903546088. Davies, Bronwyn, and Peter Bansel. 2007. “Neoliberalism and Education.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 20(3): 247–59. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09518390701281751. Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Politics and the Study of Discourse.” In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality with Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 53–72. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gonick, Marnina. 2007. “Girl Number 20 Revisited: Feminist Literacies in New Hard Times.” Gender and Education 19(4): 433–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 09540250701442625. Jarvis, Philip. 2003. Career Management Paradigm Shift: Prosperity for Citizens, Windfalls for Governments. Ottawa: National Life/Work Centre. Luttrell, Wendy. 1997. Schoolsmart and Motherwise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling. New York: Routledge. Massey, Doreen. 1995. “Making Spaces, or, Geography Is Political Too.” Soundings 1: 193–208. http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/soundings/01_193.pdf Matthews, Hugh, Mark Taylor, Kenneth Sherwood, Faith Tucker, and Melanie Limb. 2000. “Growing-up in the Countryside: Children and the Rural Idyll.” Journal of Rural Studies 16(2): 141–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0743-0167(99) 00059-5. McLeod, Julie, and Lyn Yates. 2006. Making Modern Lives: Subjectivity, Schooling, and Social Change. New York: suny Press. Rye, Johan Fredrik. 2006. “Rural Youth’s Images of the Rural.” Journal of Rural Studies 22(4): 409–21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2006.01.005. Skeggs, Beverley. 2004. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge. Vanderbeck, Robert, and Cheryl Morse Dunkley. 2003. “Young People’s Narratives of Rural–Urban Difference.” Children’s Geographies: Advancing Interdisciplinary Understanding of Younger People’s Lives 1(2): 241–59.

14 Our Rural Futures Claudia Mitchell and April Mandrona

Introduction The presence of memory and memory-work in the previous chapters in this book is not meant to signal only rural pasts but, as we explore in this concluding chapter, also rural futures. How might the idea of a futureoriented remembering help frame this work? By this we do not mean the future of the past so much as a consideration of the ways in which the rural or non-urban might have an impact on the Canadian social, political, and demographic landscape, and how that, in turn, could have an impact on the kinds of memories that contemporary children and beyond might hold. As is so powerfully represented in the previous chapters, place in childhood is critical since it serves to help shape belonging, desire, and identity. So with that as a backstory or backdrop to future-oriented remembering, what might our rural futures look like? Rurality in the popular imagination of Canadians has perhaps never been so vivid as it was in the first months of 2017, with the daily images of asylum seekers fleeing to Canada in the wake of the inauguration of Donald Trump and the new immigration policies south of the border (Shingler 2017; Woods 2017). Night after night on The National and in the various social media, we are inundated with scenes of the snowy

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fields around Emerson, Manitoba, or Roxham Road in Quebec, as individuals and families from Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Turkey, and Myanmar navigate these border outposts. Officers at the scene ready themselves to handcuff asylum seekers as gently as possible – unless they are officially arrested, they cannot claim asylum – and then transport them to the closest major border crossing, where they become the responsibility of the Canadian Border Services Agency. In a recent newspaper article a Roxham Road resident and retired police officer described the now regular occurrence: “They come every week. Sometimes you see whole families with babies. One suitcase still has the tag from the airport in Plattsburgh [ny]” (Shivji 2017, n.p.). Another news report notes: “On a daily basis over the past month, parents pushing strollers and couples clutching backpacks pull up in taxis at the end of the dirt road, lined by trailers and pickup trucks” (Shingler 2017, n.p.). Locals, journalists, and politicians contemplate what this influx of people into small communities, even on a temporary basis, might mean. Some rural residents react with disdain: “In my eyes, if you’re not legal, you should be doing something to get legal … It shouldn’t be that f— king easy … I have a bunch of guns in the house if I need them” (Shingler 2017, n.p.). And we wake up one morning to hear the voice of Susan Heller (see Chapter 5) being interviewed about what this influx means to Roxham Road; she expresses her sympathy towards refugees. And there is, of course, the question of what these spaces might look like and what they might mean to the asylum seeker. This chapter is not meant to be some kind of crystal ball in which we claim to be able to see the future, so much as a social reading framed by a number of interrelated themes, reflecting critical issues raised in the chapters in this volume as well as emerging themes that respond to local and global concerns. We start with the contested nature of land itself and consider what this might mean in the context of “our rural selves.” As Canada’s 150th birthday commemorations in 2017 highlighted, place as an issue in Canada is far from being a thing of the past. The critical social and legal challenges related to land and land claims by First Nations and Inuit people suggest the significance of a new imagining of the past and the future. Related to this we consider what this might mean in the context of Indigenous girlhoods. As a second theme we explore gen-

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der, sexuality, and rural futures. A third theme relates to the notion of reinventing rurality and what a renewed interest in the back-to-the-land movement might mean. We then go on to consider the contemporary context for rurality, migration, and resettlement, framing these things both as hearkening back to Canada a century or more ago and as responding to the social and political in global contexts. Finally, in keeping with earlier chapters that considered images of rurality in the arts and popular culture, we turn to the resurgence of images of rurality in popular culture and the possibility of new imaginaries.

Theme 1: What Land? Whose Land? Perhaps one of the most significant disruptions to the way in which rurality in Canada is thought about – and hence a critical feature for thinking about childhood and rurality and rural futures – is the question of land itself. Many contemporary memories of rural childhoods that are settler-based may be more about absence or erasure. People may talk about settling the land, as in, “My grandfather came to this country,” as though there was no one here before, thus failing to recognize the impact of colonization on what land and whose land. As Lowman and Barker observe in talking about Indigenous and Settler identities, “It’s always about the land” (2015, 48). These conversations, of course, do not take place just in rural contexts. Entire cities in Canada are settled, as we call it, on Indigenous land. There is, however, perhaps a more immediate recognition of dispossession when the stakes are rural. A good example of this can be seen in the very territorial practices attached to surveying land in order to portion it out into farms. As a farm child, Claudia recalls the significance of section-township-range to the positioning of her family’s farm. From the age of six or seven she knew exactly that the farm was 28-10-26. Teachers at the beginning of the school year would go through their registrars asking each farm child to clarify these details. Increasingly, many Canadians will also identify where they are in terms of treaties. Indeed as Lowman and Baker observe, “‘We are all Treaty People’ is a rallying call” (2015, 66). We are not arguing against nonIndigenous Canadians becoming more aware of place and history – and particularly histories of displacement and dispossession – but we share

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Lowman and Baker’s concern that the “rallying cry” could selectively ignore the responsibilities for understanding sovereignty. The rallying cry also needs to be a critical one. As they observe: “Claiming an identity as a treaty person cannot be done without a deep critique of one’s own relationship with Settler Canadian society and present-day settler colonialism” (67). The document Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence (2015), produced by the Women’s Earth Alliance and the Native Youth Sexual Health Network, is a good example of a pedagogical project that seeks to draw attention to environmental violence and, more especially, to its impact on Indigenous women and young people: The lived experiences and deep impacts of environmental violence we heard about during our year of testimony gathering and community visits lay out the difficult and dangerous reality Indigenous women and young people face on a daily basis. At this moment in time, the story goes like this: industries are often allowed to extract resources from Indigenous lands with very little regard for people’s safety and well-being. As some of those who offered their testimonies shared, the end goal of colonization has always been the erasure of Indigenous peoples in order to gain access to their lands and territories. This is why women and young people – those who carry forward life and create the next generation – have been, and continue to be, those most heavily impacted by the processes of patriarchy, land dispossession and violence. (58) Going back to Maureen Kendrick’s work (Chapter 10), we see a strong reminder of the impact of the extraction industry on young people. If we layer over concerns such as those pointed out above, it is clear that a rural future must be framed within a consciousness that considers the consequences of colonization on Indigenous children and young people. Of concern to a Rural Futures context is the work with and about Indigenous girls and young women in relation to the high levels of sexual violence and exploitation that they face. As studies carried out by the Girls Action Foundation (2009, 2012), Farley, Lynne, and Cotton (2005),

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Sethi (2007), and Varcoe and Dick (2008) point out, many factors contribute to the much higher-than-average rates of sexual violence and abuse of Indigenous girls and young women in rural contexts. Some of the health issues highlighted in Girls’ Action Foundation research on rural Aboriginal girls and young women include the devaluation of them as sexual and reproductive beings, higher rates of sexual abuse, higher rates of cervical cancer, and higher rates of stds. Moreover, the report reveals that “up to 75% of survivors of sexual assaults in Aboriginal communities are young women under 18 years [of age] and 50% of those are under 14 years [of age]” (2009, 24). According to Varcoe and Dick (2008), the lack of work opportunities and the limited resources available in rural locations may force Aboriginal girls and young women to remain in abusive relationships and to succumb to unwanted and unprotected sex for the sake of economic security. Sethi (2007) explains that geographical isolation and minimal access to alternative housing services for Aboriginal girls and young women of broken relationships lead “traffickers [to] lure young girls by glamorizing life in a big city and presenting it as a way out of their communities” (62). Matthew Smiley’s 2015 documentary Highway of Tears depicts the high rates of violence against young Indigenous women along a 724-kilometre stretch of road between Prince George and Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia. It makes visible, perhaps more than any research report, the situation of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and the ways in which place, distance from a large centre, absence of public transportation, and economic challenges intersect to construct a space of danger.

Theme 2: Gender and Sexuality, and Rural Futures The discussion in the previous section about sexual violence perpetrated against Indigenous girls and young women links to broader questions about gender, sexuality, and the rural. As several of the chapters in this collection have explored, rural childhoods are gendered childhoods. Corbett and Horner (Chapter 5) look at rural masculinities and explore the ways in which work plays an important part in the memories of men looking back on their boyhoods on the east coast. Stanley (chapter 8) and Pini, Marshall, and Keys (Chapter 9) offer queer readings on a social

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landscape that often has very rigid heteronormative rules for the expression of masculinities and femininities. These very powerful memory accounts could work towards the creation of narratives that are less bound by rigid stereotypes and that offer greater possibilities for young people growing up. As Corbett and Horner note, there is, to date, relatively little literature on rural masculinities, though it is noteworthy that the Canadian tv series Letterkenny created by Jared Keese and Jacob Tierney, set in a small Ontario town – perhaps not unlike the town Cairns describes in Chapter 13 – continues to accent stereotypes of farm culture, and the importance of hockey, and to offer humour that is misogynistic and homophobic. Because of the persistent gender inequality in Canadian society, girls and young women continue to experience many forms of violence in their daily lives. As several studies have shown (Girls Action Foundation, Glass, and Tunstall 2013; Hall, Kulig, and Kalischuk 2011; Sandler 2009), girls and young women are particularly vulnerable. In a participatory action research study conducted in rural Nova Scotia, girls and young women were invited to describe their experiences of violence. The study found that this group continues to struggle with gender-based violence. Along with physical violence, verbal and emotional violence were identified; one girl reminds us that “some violence can’t be seen” and that “it can happen to the last person you’d expect” (Sandler 2009, 8). While violence is not limited to rural communities, such settings affect the choices girls and young women make and increase their vulnerability. Living in a rural area adds additional barriers to those experienced by their urban counterparts; greater isolation, fewer shelter services, the need to travel long distances, and the lack of transportation together mean they have access to fewer support systems (Girls Action Foundation et al. 2013; Biesenthal et al. 2000; Sandler 2009). Moreover, Sandler’s (2009) study shows that youth in rural communities have fewer physical spaces in which to gather and thus tend to hang out in marginal, isolated places. One girl states: “The cops keep kicking people out of place after place. There’s no place you can stand anymore without getting a charge” (7). She adds that “[t]hey go out to camps – in the woods” (8). Because of the physical isolation of such hang-out areas, girls and young women experience even more vulnerability to violence.

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The literature also points to the lack of education in rural communities regarding relationship violence, sexual violence, and sexual health (Maticka-Tyndale 2008; Sandler 2009). Maticka-Tyndale posits that one factor contributing to the perpetuation of sexual violence and abuse is the poor sex education programs youth living in rural areas receive in their schools and communities. She notes: “Sexual harassment and unwanted sexual comments are experienced by the majority of females … and is the most prevalent form of sexual abuse … Women are consistently more likely to be victims of all forms of sexual abuse than are men” (2008, 87–8). Corroborating evidence is found in Sandler’s work, which shows that some girls, particularly given the increasing attention being devoted to bullying, identified relationship violence as an issue that is underrepresented in schools. One girl stated: “I never realized how bad a relationship I was in when I was in it. He [my ex-boyfriend] would go to hockey and he wouldn’t want me to go with him because he’d want other people to think that he was with another girl – but he wanted to be with me. I don’t know … it was just … messed up” (2009, 10). The girls in this study also identified the long-term effects of their past abusive relationships. One girl said: “I didn’t even realize until the first of this year how big an impact it had on me from then until now … If my [new] boyfriend was standing behind me and he went to grab my hip or something – I would automatically turn around like I was going to hit him. I just get so jolty … like I don’t want to be touched” (10). A layer of complexity is added to the realities of immigrant and refugee girls and young women living in rural settings (Girls Action Foundation et al. 2013; Jiwani 2005; Sandler 2009). The girls in Jiwani’s study spoke about their experiences of being part of a culture that has been constructed as exotic, where “the ‘exotic Other’ is sexually available to the dominant culture” (2005, 860). Jiwani warns that the sexualization of immigrant and refugee girls and young women by the dominant culture can lead them to trust white males, for they are seen to be providers of resources. This can lead to violence and rape. Moreover, since there are fewer immigrant families in rural areas (Beshiri and He 2009), girls and young women have fewer peers with whom to share their cultural background and may thus experience greater isolation and ostracism. According to Jiwani, this lack of networking is a key risk factor

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for violence among girls and young women and may lead to an internalization of the violence they experience.

Theme 3: Back to Basics: Reinventing Back-to-the-Land A different angle on rural futures is to think about the ways in which new generations of young people come to a realization about land and the back-to-the-land impetus as described below. In Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America (2011), Dona Brown describes the cyclical occurrence of young people seeking an idyllic agrarian lifestyle. Others like Eleanor Agnew (2004) point to the failure of the last movement to dismantle oppressive socio-political structures and the eventual return of many back-to-the-landers to a middle-class lifestyle. According to Agnew, many of those who migrated did not have the rural skills required for survival and found themselves still bound to the capitalism they sought to shirk. For others, the isolation of rural places and the lack of physical and social infrastructure took their toll. Nevertheless, the new millennium witnessed new imaginings of rural futures in the form of a back-to-the-land revival. Catalyzed by the market meltdown of 2008, contemporary back-to-the-landers across North America are influenced by factors such as an increasing distrust of food sources and the possible demise of cheap oil, which would effectively collapse the global industrial system. In Canada, people born in the city, originally from places such as Vancouver, are seeking fulfillment and economic freedom in the countryside. Although the majority of Canadians live in urban areas, since 2006 British Columbia’s rural population has been steadily increasing because of migrants, most of them aged twenty to thirty. From her off-grid home in the Kootenays, writer K. Linda Kivi says: “I don’t think there is a second wave of back-to-the-landers, it’s more like a bunch of ripples … I’m more like a forward-to-rural-radicalism type. In terms of the back-to-the-land thing, I’d say I and my land partners have more realistic aspirations and less fantasy. We make the lifestyle work for us instead of working for it” (cited in Woodend 2006, n.p.).

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Whether a wave or a ripple, the new era of going rural is taking place across Canada, and people from various walks of life are participating. In recent years, terms such as “radical homemaking” “simple living,” “intentional living,” “sustainable living,” “slow living,” “voluntary simplicity,” “downshifting,” and “homesteading” have emerged or re-emerged to describe this “new kind of self-sufficient, home-focused, frugal, sloweddown lifestyle” (Matchar 2013, n.p.). Since the early 2000s, workshops and gatherings devoted to reconnecting with nature and living well off the land are becoming more frequent. In 2013 the inaugural Do-It-Yourself Homesteaders Festival was held in rural Manitoba, where 350 people took part in hands-on workshops and food preparation (Enns 2013). The festival’s objective is “to connect Manitobans with the skills they need to lead a more sustainable lifestyle and to bring them together with the farmers, producers, artisans, and crafters who can provide them with the support they need to take the first step” (diy Homesteader Festival 2017, n.p.). Claudia’s nephew, Jeremy, has one such story. Born in a city but with a father (Claudia’s brother) who grew up on a farm in Manitoba, and with early childhood memories of visiting his grandparents who lived on a farm, Jeremy has purchased his own eighty acres of land an hour or so away from Winnipeg (see Figure 14.1). As he writes: Some of my earliest memories are of spending summer vacation on my Grandparent’s farm near the town of Virden in Southwestern Manitoba. I recall the excitement and happiness I would feel turning into the yard and driving up the long approach to the farm house passing by tall prairie grasses and under stately trees. It was a special place for me and I was happy to be there. As an adult I often reflect on those special times and have come to realize that these early experiences were formative in developing my life long desire to have a connection with the land. As the pace of daily life becomes more hectic and the complexity of society continually increases, we often seek an escape or refuge. For me, the escape and refuge I am seeking is a connection with the land and a “back to basics” lifestyle.

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Some may wonder what would cause an urban dweller living in the 21st century with an array of technical gadgets and every possible human comfort, to turn his back on society and return to the land. For me it was the feeling that modern society no longer functions on a human scale. It seems that every day we become disconnected from the natural rhythm and pace of nature. When one chooses to connect with the land and embrace the spirit of nature, one cannot help but slow down. The seasons cannot be rushed or controlled, the sun rises and sets at her own pace. Our day to day lives have also become more dependent on unsustainable and complex systems. Simple living provides an opportunity to become less dependent on these systems. Going “back to basics” forces one to learn invaluable skills – the ability to grow our food, to fell a tree, or to make a beeswax candle – that have been lost. This type of knowledge and the human relationships we develop suddenly become the new measure of wealth. The “things” we have accumulated lose their value and the hold they have on us. My personal journey to connect with the land and get “back to basics” began a year ago, when I started to look in earnest for land to purchase. After much online research and many weekend drives on dusty grid roads, I found a property that had much of what I was looking for. The property is a half quarter (80 acres) of land north of Teulon, Manitoba. The land had been used as cattle pasture in past years. Other than an approach and some fencing, there is no development on the property. To me it is a blank slate with unlimited potential! The land is comprised of open pasture land with an abundance of wild flowers and tall prairie grasses, low wetlands, and Aspen woodlands. At times, I have felt overwhelmed with so much to learn and so much to do. Dealing with government bureaucracy and land use regulations can be daunting at times. However, I am determined to find ways to work with or find a way around these challenges. I quickly came to realize that I needed to start slowly and take my time, to move with the rhythm of nature. I have spent many hours walking and sitting, watching, and listening. I allow myself to be

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Figure 14.1 Back to basics children.

silent and immerse myself in the environment around me. I strive to be a steward of the land. I work to protect and promote native plants and the interconnected ecosystems all around me. Making a connection with the land and getting “back to basics” is a skill set. However, it is also a state of mind. I have embarked on a journey with a spirit of wonder and curiosity and will heed the call of the land and of the past as they whisper in the wind, “Return to me.” (Jeremy Skinner, personal communication, 14 March 2017) Jeremy’s observations about a back-to-basics skill set tie in well with themes of building a self-reliant and sustainable rural future that have taken hold in contemporary popular culture. For example, the tiny-house movement has entered the mainstream and is now the subject of several

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tv series broadcast in both Canada and the United States. Although not exclusively a rural phenomenon, “tiny living” is appealing because it offers an opportunity to spend more time outside and “reconnect with nature.”1 Recently, in Canada, going tiny has gained momentum as property prices soar for conventional homes in many urban centres. Downsizing to a micro house can free up income for other pursuits such as travelling. The Tiny Living movement is an interesting one, in its alignment with environmental concerns and costs. But at the same time, as Ryan Mitchell (2010) points out, living in reduced square footage has raised some concerns about what this means for the next generation – in particular, about the ethics involved in raising children in small spaces.

Theme 4: Rural Migration in the Time of Refugees We began this chapter by drawing attention to the newly imagined rural landscape near many of Canada’s border crossings, and the influx of asylum seekers. Since the beginning of the European refugee crisis in 2014– 15, the number of forcibly displaced people has risen to 68.5 million, the highest figure since the Second World War, and more than half them are children under eighteen (unhcr 2017). People leave their homes for many reasons, including persecution, climate change, and war. Most of today’s refugees are coming from Syria, where violent conflict has placed civilians at risk for murder, rape, torture, and extreme poverty (unicef 2016). As of 29 January 2017, Canada had resettled 40,081 Syrian refugees (Government of Canada 2017). Of the 12 million Syrians who have fled Syria, half are children (isans 2016). In 2015, Alan Kurdi, a three-yearold Syrian boy, drowned while he and his family were attempting to get to Greece from Turkey on a boat. Media images of the boy’s body quickly became emblematic of the failings of the Canadian government, which had previously rejected his family’s application for asylum. Yet the narratives of children themselves are largely absent from accounts of the crisis. Once they have moved or have been resettled, what choices and challenges do they face? What are their processes of adaptation? Children are typically represented as silent victims, in tow with families or other adults. We know little about the agency, perspectives, priorities, expec-

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tations, and aspirations of these children. “For Us by Us: Children’s Picture Books for Solidarity and Acceptance in the Age of Refugees” is a research project developed by Mandrona (this volume) that seeks to address these queries by supporting children with refugee experience in the creation of their own visual media. Around 40 percent of all refugees who migrate to Canada come from rural regions or refugee camps (unhcr 2012). Although the majority of refugees are resettled in metropolitan areas with large populations and greater diversity, small towns and rural areas recognize the importance of attracting and retaining newcomers. Also, people from rural areas can find it difficult to transition to life in an urban centre. Rural employers, such as Dempsey Corner Orchards in Aylesford, Nova Scotia, are desperate for farm workers and are activity seeking out refugees who have experience with farming and with being on the land. One recently arrived man remarked: “I can’t be in the city. I can’t be there. I had a big farm in Syria, I had 40 acres. Now I have a balcony. My body is sick. I can’t be just on a balcony” (Luck 2017, n.p.). What does the opportunity to return, as it were, to rurality, albeit in Canada, mean for how refugee children are raised and for their interactions with place? This story speaks to the importance and power of rurality when it comes to people’s collective and individual well-being. Despite the appeals of the urban, many people still choose the rural as a place to live, work, and learn. This connection to the land does not mean that one rural place can simply be exchanged for another; as was noted in the news item mentioned above, there are significant differences in climate, plant species, and horticultural practices/ Rurality does, however, offer a particular form of engagement with the natural environment. Many rural municipalities and small towns are today developing social media campaigns and YouTube videos to attract potential immigrants, an example being a YouTube video developed by the town of Morden, Manitoba.2 In some ways, strategies to encourage the resettlement of refugees and other immigrant populations in rural areas and in small cities as a way to counter population decline resemble the campaigns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to attract settlers to the rural and underdeveloped areas of western Canada. To

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counter images of the Canadian prairies as a hostile, snow-covered hinterland as perpetuated by the Hudson’s Bay Company, the federal government created the “most extensive advertising campaigns [that] the world had ever witnessed” (Murray 2007, n.p.). Potential immigrants from as many as twelve European countries were targeted through printed advertisements and vibrant posters, and pamphlets were distributed by the thousands. As noted by Murray, words such as “cold” and “snow” were banned from the recruitment materials, and instead, terms like “invigorating” and “bracing” were used (2007, n.p.). Both men and women were targeted with the promise that future generations of farmers would help secure the West’s economic prosperity. Families arrived with their children. According to passenger lists: “[C]hildren between the ages of one and twelve were counted as half an adult; those under age one, not at all” (Wright 2006, n.p.). In the current campaigns such as the one from Morden, Manitoba, noted above, the focus is on the types of support services a newcomer and family members might expect by way of jobs, counselling, mentoring, and so on.

Theme 5: Rural Images and Reimaginings In this final theme we return to the idea of images of rural childhood. In several chapters of this book, the contributors have examined images of rural childhoods in popular culture, the media, and the arts. A new Anne of Green Gables tv series (2017; filmed in Millbrook, Ontario, not Prince Edward Island) invites new readings of Green Gables and its porches and parlours (see Chapter 3). Some might argue that other series, such as Letterkenny (see above), offer highly conservative images of rurality and rural young people. Perhaps the population of young people from rural Ontario interviewed by Cairns (see Chapter 13) would have different things to say about this series and what it means to them. The number of tv series or films that depict aspects of rurality and that are targeted at Canadian children has never been large. Vanderburgh’s (2018) chapter on the 1960s series The Forest Rangers, which was set in remote Northern Ontario, talks about its popularity in other parts of Canada than where it was filmed. Interestingly, the popular film Dog with a Purpose (2017), which was filmed in southwestern Manitoba and launched

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at the Derrick Theatre in Virden, Manitoba, in January 2017, was actually set in the United States. Another rural film, Ballad of Jack and Rose, released in 2005, was filmed on Prince Edward Island. Another approach – one that was perhaps not available to many of the children whose lives are represented in this book (except for George Agnew Reid, who became an artist and could represent his childhood) – is to think about the emergence today of a strong participatory visual feature of children’s culture. Building on our previous participatory work with children (Mandrona 2014; Mitchell 2011; Mitchell, De Lange, and Moletsane 2017), we are interested in how rural reimaginings might be ignited by rural children themselves through PhotoVoice, cellphilming (using cellphones to make videos), digital storytelling, and other participatory visual methodologies. Mitchell and Reid-Walsh (2002) asked the question some years ago, “What can a child do with a camera?,” in their building on the work of Wendy Ewald and others who have been interested in the ways in which children might have a voice through visual representation. Since that time, Claudia has conducted numerous photography and participatory video projects with children and young people around the world, so the idea of bringing this project to explore Canadian children’s rural realities seems particularly relevant. Given the spread of YouTube and other social media platforms, the idea of circulating rural images is both feasible and compelling. One such initiative is the “Networks for Change and Well-Being: Girl-Led ‘From the Ground Up’ Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa,” a study that focuses on the art production and media-making of girls and young women, particularly in the context of high rates of sexual violence.3 As Moletsane and Mitchell (2018) note, the images offer a powerful starting point for community dialogue; as part of a broader girl-led and child-led movement they have the potential to reframe how we view the agency of young people. Considering children’s literature, as Strong-Wilson and Yoder (Chapter 12) and Eilers (Chapter 3) do, is critical. To address the absence of refugee children’s voices regarding what place, home, and belonging might mean to them in Canada, we are developing a project that will involve working with young newcomers and their families. This research will explore how picture-books, created by children for children, offer a

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space for connections across difference through the power of the visual and storytelling. We will explore how war-affected children and/or child refugees might disrupt everyday media representations of asylum seekers by producing their own images and stories. How would children interpret and respond to these mainstream discourses? What alternative narrative structures and creative outputs might children develop? What might it look like if picture books as a literary genre were expanded to include more diverse art forms beyond the two dimensions that reflect particular life experiences and visual competencies? This project will build on the work of contemporary children’s books such as Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey by Margriet Ruurs (2016), which tells the story of a family forced to flee their small village in Syria on foot and walk to Europe. Supporting children as the creators of narratives and visual representations will help illuminate the overlooked ways in which childhood links urban and rural locales, often across international borders. We acknowledge that this is a shifting and dynamic scape and, indeed, that if we had published this book a year earlier it would not have included this extensive consideration of asylum seekers and what border crossings in rural Canada might mean. Perhaps we might not have thought of the urgency of projects such as these. More than anything, what we will be trying to demonstrate through these proposed projects is the viability of and necessity for rural futures.

n otes 1 “Chalets on Wheels ‘Tiny House,’” Domaine Floravier, https://domainefloravie. com/en/chalets-on-wheels-tiny-house.php. 2 Alia Dharssi, “Canada’s Small Cities and Rural Areas Desperate for Immigrants,” Calgary Herald, 26 October 2016, http://calgaryherald.com/news/national/ canadas-small-cities-and-rural-areas-desperate-for-immigrants. 3 Networks for Change and Well-Being: Girl-Led “from the Ground Up” Policy Making to Address Sexual Violence in Canada and South Africa is a sshrc-idrc-funded Partnership Grant (2014–20) led by Claudia Mitchell, McGill University, and Relebohile Moletsane of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. See www.networks4change.org.

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referen ce s Agnew, Eleanor. 2004. Back from the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee. Beshiri, Roland, and Jiaosheng He. 2009. “Immigrants in Rural Canada: 2006.” Rural and Small Town Canada Analysis Bulletin 8(2): 1–28. http://www.statcan. gc.ca/pub/21-006-x/21-006-x2008002-eng.pdf (accessed 18 September 2017). Biesenthal, Lorrie, Lynne Dee Sproule, Mary Nelder, Susan Golton, Donna Mann, Denise Podovinnikoff, Inge Roosendaal, Shellie Warman, and Donna Lunn. 2000. “The Ontario Rural Woman Abuse Study (orwas): Final Report.” Department of Justice Canada. Ottawa. http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/cj-jp/victim/ rr00_15/rr00_15.pdf. Brown, Dona. 2011. Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. diy Homesteader Festival. 2017. “The Festival.” https://homesteaderfest.ca (accessed 9 March 2017). Enns, Aiden. 2013. “New Wave of Homesteaders Embody the Spirit.” Canadian Mennonite Magazine, 3 July. http://www.canadianmennonite.org/articles/newwave-homesteaders-embody-spirit (accessed 11 March 2017) Farley, Melissa, Jacqueline Lynne, and Anne Cotton. 2005. “Prostitution in Vancouver: Violence and the Colonization of First Nations Women.” Transcultural Psychiatry 42(2): 242–71. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1363461505052667. Girls Action Foundation (gaf). 2009. “Northern Girls Research Review: A Compilation of Research on Northern, Rural, and Aboriginal Girls’ and Young Women’s Issues.” http://girlsactionfoundation.ca/files/North_Research_ Review_LR.pdf (accessed 18 September 2016). – 2012. “A Compilation of Research on Rural Girls’ and Young Women’s Issues.” http://girlsactionfoundation.ca/files/rural_research_review_online.pdf (accessed 18 September 2016). Girls Action Foundation (gaf), Juniper Glass, and Lee Tunstall. 2013. “Beyond Appearances: Brief on the Main Issues Facing Girls in Canada.” http://girls actionfoundation.ca/files/gaf-13-02_beyond_appearances_english_final.pdf (accessed 18 September 2016). Government of Canada. 2017. “#WelcomeRefugees: Key Figures.” Government of Canada, 27 February. http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/refugees/welcome/mile stones.asp (accessed 23 January 2017). Hall, Barry, Judith Kulig, and Ruth Grant Kalischuk. 2011. “Rural Youth and

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Violence: A Gender Perspective.” Rural and Remote Health 11: 1–9. www.rrh.org. au/journal/article/1716. isans (Immigration Services Association of Nova Scotia). 2016. “Welcoming Refugees: Facts and Statistics.” http://www.isans.ca/welcoming-refugees/-facts (accessed 17 January 2017). Jiwani, Yasmin. 2005. “Walking a Tightrope: The Many Faces of Violence in the Lives of Racialized Immigrant Girls and Young Women.” Violence Against Women 11(7): 846–75. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1077801205276273. Lowman, Emma Battell, and Adam Barker. 2015. Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada. Halifax: Fernwood. Luck, Shaina. 2017. “Syrian Farming Families Get Back to the Land in Nova Scotia.” cbc News, 6 March. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/syrianfamily-farm-u-pick-annapolis-valley-1.4010922 (accessed 13 March 2017). Maticka-Tyndale, Eleanor. 2008. “Commentary: Sexuality and Sexual Health of Canadian Adolescents: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.” Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality 17(3): 85–95. Mandrona, April. 2014. “What Can We Make with This? Creating Relevant Art Education Practices in Rural South Africa.” PhD diss., Concordia University. Matchar, Emily. 2013. “Back to the Land Is Back in Vogue, and It Could Make You Happier.” Alternet, 24 May. http://www.alternet.org/books/back-land-backvogue-and-it-could-make-you-happier (accessed 10 March 2017). Mitchell, Claudia. 2011. “What’s Participation Got to Do with It? Visual Methodologies in ‘Girl-Method’ to Address Gender Based Violence in the Time of aids.” Global Studies of Childhood 1(1): 51–9. https://doi.org/10.2304%2Fgsch. 2011.1.1.51. Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh. 2002. Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood. London: Routledge. Mitchell, Claudia, Naydene De Lange, and Relebohile Moletsane. 2017. Participatory Visual Methodologies: Social Change, Community, and Policy. London: Sense. Mitchell, Ryan. 2010. “Is It Ethical to Raise a Child in a Tiny House?” The Tiny Life, 1 September. http://thetinylife.com/is-it-etical-to-raise-a-child-in-a-tinyhouse (accessed 15 March 2017). Moletsane, Relebohile, and Claudia Mitchell. 2018. “Researching Sexual Violence with Girls in Rural South Africa: Some Methodological Challenges in Using Participatory Visual Methodologies.” In The Wiley Handbook on Violence in

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Education: Forms, Factors, and Preventions, edited by Harvey Shapiro, 433–48. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Murray, Jeffery. 2007. “Printed Advertisements.” Library and Archives Canada. https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/immigrants/021017-1100-e.html (accessed 15 March 2017). Ruurs, Margriet. 2016. Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey. Victoria: Orca Books. Sandler, Wyanne. 2009. “Violence against Women and Girls: A Rural Response: A Preliminary Report on Participatory Action Research with Girls and Young Women in Guysborough and Antigonish Counties.” Antigonish Women’s Resource Centre. http://awrcsasa.ca/archive/pdfs/Rural Girls Research Report 1. pdf (accessed 18 September 2016). Sethi, Anupriya. 2007. “Domestic Sex Trafficking of Aboriginal Girls in Canada: Issues and Implications.” The First Peoples Child and Family Review: A Journal on Innovation and Best Practices in Aboriginal Child Welfare Administration, Research, Policy, and Practice 3(3): 57–71. Shingler, Benjamin. 2017. “Life on the Quebec Border in Trump’s America.” cbc News, 28 February. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-bordercrossing-illegal-asylum-trump-residents-1.3999999 (accessed 13 March 2017). Shivji, Salimah. 2017. “Number of Asylum-Seekers Crossing Illegally into Quebec from U.S. Spikes.” cbc News, 14 December. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ montreal/number-of-asylum-seekers-crossing-illegally-into-quebec-fromu-s-spikes-1.3897213 (accessed 12 March 2017). unhcr. 2012. “The State of the World’s Refugees: In Search of Solidarity.” Office of the un High Commissioner on Refugees. http://www.unhcr.org/4fc5ce ca9.pdf. – 2017. “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2017.” un High Commissioner for Refugees. Geneva: unhcr. http://www.unhcr.org/5b27be547.pdf unicef. 2016. “Syria Crisis: 2016 Humanitarian Results.” Children of Syria, 28 December. http://childrenofsyria.info/2016/12/28/syria-crisis-november-2016humanitarian-results (accessed 17 December 2016). Vanderburgh, Jennifer. 2018. “Nature Lovers as Nation Lovers in Canadian tv’s The Forest Rangers (1963–1965).” In Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods, edited by April Mandrona and Claudia Mitchell, 50–63. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

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Varcoe, Colleen, and Sheila Dick. 2008. “The Intersecting Risks of Violence and hiv for Rural Aboriginal Women in a Neo-Colonial Canadian Context.” Journal of Aboriginal Health 4(1): 42–52. Women’s Earth Alliance and Native Youth Sexual Health Network. 2016. Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies: Building an Indigenous Response to Environmental Violence. http://landbodydefense.org/uploads/files/VLVBReportTool kit2016.pdf?. Wright, Glenn. 2006. “Travel Documents.” Library and Archives Canada. https://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/immigrants/021017-1400-e.html (accessed 15 March 2017). Woodend, Dorothy. 2006. “My Back to the Land Fantasy: And Why It Feels More Real Every Day.” The Tyee, 29 November. https://thetyee.ca/Life/2006/11/29/ BackToTheLand (accessed 15 March 2017). Woods, Alan. 2017. “Is Trump’s Refugee Crackdown Threat Pushing Asylum Seekers into Canada?” Toronto Star, 10 February. https://www.thestar.com /news/canada/2017/02/10/is-trumps-refugee-crackdown-threat-pushingasylum-seekers-into-canada.html (accessed 13 March 2017). f il m o g r a phy Hallström, Lasse. 2017. A Dog’s Purpose. usa: Universal Pictures. Caro, Niki, David Evans, and Amanda Tapping. 2017. Anne. Canada: cbc Television. Smiley, Matthew. 2015. Highway of Tears. Canada: Netflix, Filmoption International. Tierney, Jacob. 2016. Letterkenny. Canada: New Metric Media. Miller, Rebecca. 2005. The Ballad of Jack and Rose. usa: ifc Films. Galloway, Lindsay. 1963. The Forest Rangers. Canada: cbc Television.

Contributors

kate cairns is assistant professor of childhood studies at Rutgers University–Camden in New Jersey. Her work draws upon feminist, interdisciplinary perspectives to explore how children and youth are constructed as the promise or threat of collective futures. She has investigated this question across multiple realms, including rural schooling, maternal foodwork, and urban agriculture. Kate is the co-author of Food and Femininity with Josée Johnston (Bloomsbury, 2015) and Introducing Sociology Using the Stuff of Everyday Life with Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann (Routledge, 2017). Her work has been published in venues such as Antipode, Children’s Geographies, Ethnography and Education, Gender and Education, Journal of Consumer Culture, and The Canadian Geographer. michael corbett is professor of rural and regional education at the University of Tasmania. His research interrogates contemporary and historical conceptions of the rural, and particularly the ways in which these conceptions have inflected discourses around education, schooling, and literacies. While his work has been principally located in Atlantic Canada, recently, Mike has been working in rural teacher education in regional Australia.

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frederika eilers is a PhD candidate in architecture at McGill University researching the architecture of dollhouses. Her publications include “Nature in the Nursery: The Homemaker and Craftsman, 1890– 1915,” in Children, Nature, Cities (2016, ed. Murnaghan and Shillington) and “Barbie versus Le Modulor: Ideal Bodies, Buildings, and Typical Users” in Girlhood Studies (2012). She has been a research fellow at the National Museum of Play and at the Winterthur Museum, a research assistant on “Re-imagining Long-Term Residential Care: An International Study of Promising Practices,” a sshrc grantee, a teaching assistant at McGill University, and an architectural designer in New York and Maryland specializing in schools and long-term care facilities. captain fred horner is an independent fisherman from southwest Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. He has fished the North Atlantic and particularly the Bay of Fundy for all of his adult life. He still fishes seasonally with his son Justin and now works with the provincial Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal on the Petite Passage and Grand Passage ferries. maureen kendrick is a professor in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines literacy and multimodality as integrated communicative practices, and addresses a range of social and cultural issues in diverse contexts. She has a particular interest in visual communication. Dr Kendrick has authored and co-authored numerous journal articles and book chapters on communicative practices in various geographic locations, including those of marginalized populations in East Africa and Canada. She has also authored books on literacy, multimodality, and play, and has co-edited volumes on youth literacies and family and community literacies. wendy keys teaches screen studies and media and communication and has a background in audience research and government policy specializing in children, young people, and the media. Her doctoral work adopted an approach that integrated industry and cultural analysis and was informed by contemporary debates in political economy, media,

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communication and cultural studies, sociology, and policy studies. Her publications include Sustaining Culture and the Role of Performing Arts Centres: Audiences (with David Ellison, Susan Kukucka, and Ian Woodward; Griffith University, 2011); “Queering Rurality: Reading the Miseducation of Cameron Post Geographically” (with Barbara Pini and Elizabeth Marshall; in Children’s Geographies 2016); and Aestheticising Rural Poverty: An Analysis of the Documentary Film Rich Hill 2014 (with Barbara Pini; 2017). michael krohn is a PhD history student at Concordia University. He received a bachelor’s degree in history and political science from McGill University and a master’s degree in history from Concordia University. His master’s original essay, titled “Listening to the Rhythms of Rural Life, 1920–1940: The Roxham Road Interview Collection and the Re-Use of Qualitative Data in Secondary Analysis,” was based on oral history testimonials found at the archives in Hemmingford, Quebec. Before embarking upon doctoral studies, Michael worked as a management consultant, and he continues to work on the family farm. He is interested in business and rural history. loren lerner is professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal. In 2005, she was curator of Picturing Her: Images of Girl- hood / Salut les filles! La jeune fille en images at the McCord Museum. This exhibition project led to Lerner’s editorship of Depicting Canada’s Children, published in 2009. Journal articles and essays from 2007 to 2012 on images of Canada’s young people appear in Rethinking Professionalism: Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970; Canadian Children’s Literature / Literature canadienne pour la jeunesse; Journal of Canadian Art History; Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth; Girlhood Studies; Historical Studies in Education; Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada / Cahiers de la Societe bibliographique du Canada; and Healing the World’s Children: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Child Health in the Twentieth Century. april mandrona was born in rural New Brunswick and is an assistant professor in the Division of Art History and Contemporary Culture at

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the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Dr Mandrona received a PhD in art education from Concordia University and completed her postdoctoral studies at McGill University. Her community art education research with children and young people focuses on the social roles of artistic production, rurality, ethical practice, and innovative approaches to participation. She has received fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and was recently a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Trust, Peace, and Social Relations at Coventry University, uk. She guest-edited a special issue of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal exploring the relationship between ethics and girlhood studies. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Perspectives in Education; International Journal of Educational Research; Learning Landscapes; and Psychological Record. She is the co-editor (with Claudia Mitchell) of a new book, Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods (Rutgers, 2018). elizabeth marshall is associate professor in the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University, where she teaches courses in children’s and young adult literature. She is co-editor of Rethinking Popular Culture and Media (with Özlem Sensoy) and has published articles on the representation of North American girlhoods in children’s literature, popular culture, and women’s memoir. Her work has been published in Harvard Educational Review; Gender and Education; Reading Research Quarterly; Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy; College English; Children’s Literature Quarterly; and Rethinking Schools. claudia mitchell is a James McGill Professor in the Faculty of Education, McGill University, and the director of the McGill Institute for Human Development and Well-Being. She is also an honorary professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Her research cuts across visual and other participatory methodologies in relation to youth and sexuality, girls’ education, teacher identity, and critical areas of international development linked to gender, sexual violence, and hiv and aids. Much of her work is in rural contexts in Ethiopia and South Africa. She is the editor-in-chief of Girlhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

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sandra owén:nakon deer is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) from Kahnawa:ke, Quebec. A mother, wife, aunt, great-aunt, and grandmother, she has taught elementary and early childhood education for over twenty years. She was an administrator and consultant and has worked on and off as a curriculum writer for the past seven years. She is a graduate of McGill University, with a certificate in Native and northern education, and has an ma and a ba from University of Massachusetts. Currently a PhD student in her fourth year at McGill, Sandra has also published through the online journal “in education” through the University of Regina. barbara pini is a professor in the School of Humanities at Griffith University in Australia. Her research focuses on rurality, gender, social class, and disability. marni stanley teaches English and women’s studies at Vancouver Island University in Nanaimo, British Columbia. Her academic research and publication areas include comics and graphic narrative, sexualities, and autobiography. karen stentaford is an artist and educator working primarily in medium- and large-format photography, often employing toy cameras and alternative processes. Since 2012, her work has been made using the wet-plate collodion process. Recent bodies of work investigate ideas of place, absence, and memory influenced by the Newfoundland landscape of her childhood. Stentaford completed the ma in photography program at the Edinburgh College of Art. She received her bachelor of fine arts from Mount Allison University and her bachelor of education, visual arts specialist, from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and Mount Saint Vincent University. teresa strong-wilson is associate professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, Montreal. Her areas of interest lie in literacy/ies, stories, children’s literature, memory, social justice education, and Indigenous education. She has authored/ co-authored articles in Changing English; Children’s Literature in Education; Educational Theory; and Teachers and Teaching, and authored/

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co-edited various books, such as Bringing Memory Forward: Storied Remembrance in Social Justice Education with Teachers (2008) and the edited volume Productive Remembering and Social Agency (with Mitchell, Allnutt, and Pithouse-Morgan; 2013). She is editor-in-chief of the McGill Journal of Education. amarou yoder is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. Her research interests include curriculum studies, secondary language arts, non/violence, and hermeneutics.

Index

Aboriginal, 9, 81, 187, 211, 220, 247 abuse, 16, 148, 153, 155, 160, 162, 172, 226, 247, 249; abusive relationships, 156, 160, 247, 249 Adams, Annmarie, 42 agency, 102, 114, 137, 257; childhood, 12–13, 62, 65, 73–6, 116, 203, 254; girls’, 13; memory as, 146; of objects, 102; shaped by place, 81 Agnew, Eleanor, 250 agriculture, 20, 26, 30, 99, 170, 172, 175; agrarian, 9, 250; tariffs, 30 Alberta, 13–14, 83, 132, 148, 167–8, 172–3, 177– 9, 182; Alberta Environment, 180; Alberta Tourism, 171; Brazeau County, 172; Calgary, 83, 148, 150, 154–5, 159; Drayton Valley, 168, 170, 172–3, 177, 182–4; Edmonton, 83, 183; Fort McMurray, 3 Alfred, Gerald, 188, 202; Heeding the Voices of Our Ancestors, 188 Allnut, Susan, 200 Alston, Ann, 50 analysis, 42, 149–50; childhood, 76; collective, 150; critical, 65; film, 151–2; focus group, 10, 14; of identity, 201; of interpretations, 47; of interviews, 14, 65, 76, 82; of literature, 150, 152; of memory, 28, 30, 49,

82, 191, 201; of music, 152; of narrative, 226; of object, 47; of painting, 20, 152; of photograph, 82; of sculpture, 152; sociocultural, 100; of space, 47, 152–3; of texts, 12, 148–9, 152; of tools, 226; visual, 150 Appadurai, Arjun, 80 architect, 55; apprentice, 33, 36; landscape, 57. See also Downing, Andrew Jackson; Ward, Colin architecture, 4, 41–2; nature, 56; research, 41; student, 12, 42; studies, 15, 33; typology, 42 archives, 122, 126; living, 12, 65, 67; oral history, 12, 65 art, 15, 24, 26, 33, 101, 103, 140, 256–7, 258; artisan, 251; arts and crafts ethos, 104; community, 34; critic, 26; education, 6, 171; embroidery, 140; galleries, 4; historian, 12; history, 15; labour, 114; paper quilling, 102; production, 15, 140; skills, 21; tatting, 140 artist, 4, 13, 15, 20, 22, 24, 26–8, 34–6, 257; memory, 21; residency, 119 Arts and Crafts Movement, 102, 104 arts-based inquiry, 13; research, 191 asylum, 47; application, 244, 252; in Canada, 62; seekers, 15, 243–4, 254, 258 Atia, Nadia, 210, 213–14, 219

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Atkinson, Ella, 23 Attarian, Hourig, 64, 75, 201 Attfield, Judy, 101–2 audience, 30, 33, 157, 159–60, 207 Austen, Jane, 44 Australia, 10, 81, 149; Anglo-Australian, 151; oral history scholarship, 67; memory collectives, 10; Queensland, 151; society, 81; Sydney, 151–2 autobiography, 8–9, 75, 146; inquiry, 64; narratives, 144, 211; novel, 148; study, 13 autoethnography, 99, 189, 202. See also ethnography baby-boomer, 98 Bachelard, Gaston, 20, 23, 28, 38, 209, 218; The Poetics of Space, 23 back-to-the-land, 6–7, 13, 15, 98–9, 102–4, 107, 245, 250; back-to-the-landers, 6–7, 9, 13, 98–100, 114, 250 Bageant, Joe, 81 Balfour, Robert, 16 Ballad of Jack and Rose, 257 Barker, Adam, 245–6 Barthes, Roland, 120 Bauman, Zygmunt, 80 Beatty, Paul, 94 Beauvais, Johnny, 189 beaver, 140–1 Beckham, Sue Bridewell, 49 Bell, Michael Mayerfeld, 67 belonging, 44, 149, 151, 159, 163, 169–70, 184, 221; childhood, 243; and gender, 158; in a new place, 55; questions, 231; refugee children, 257; struggle, 14, 167. See also unbelonging Benoit, Brian, 11 borders, 15, 62, 76, 159, 243–4, 254, 258. See also Canadian Border Services Agency Bourdieu, Pierre, 80 Boyesen, Hjalmar Hjorth, 27 boyhood, 22, 247 Boym, Svetlana, 213 Boys Don’t Cry, 151. See also Halberstam, Jack; Teena, Brandon Brett, Jan, 213

index

Britain, 16, 34, 67; countryside, 64, 75; literature, 213; oral history scholarship, 67; British settlers, 22; Victorian British middle-class children, 49 British Columbia, 16, 100, 206, 247, 250; Prince George, 247; Prince Rupert, 247; Williams Lake, 206 Brown, Dona, 250 Brymner, William, 27; A Wreath of Flowers, 27; Four Girls in a Meadow, Baie-Saint Paul, 27 bush, 16, 69, 206–8, 216–17 Campbell, Hugh, 67 Campbell, Nicola, 211; Shi-shi-etko, 207, 211, 215–17; Shin-chi’s Canoe, 207, 211–12 Campbell, William Wilfred, 26 camera, 120, 124, 127, 130, 148, 154, 157–62, 199, 257; view camera, 124, 127 Canada, 3, 5, 16, 24, 26, 30, 43–4, 68, 155, 158, 227, 231–2, 245; 150th birthday commemorations, 244; Atlantic, 13, 80–2; east coast, 6, 15, 119, 247; educational policy, 239; energy and resources, 184; federal government, 177; history, 5, 12, 30, 38, 182; immigration, 107, 213; knowledge economy, 239–40; landscape, 14, 231; literature, 207; Maritimes, 6, 45, 51; migration, 255; national identity, 12; nationhood, 153; Prairies, 6, 149, 153–5, 158, 160, 183, 256; rural, 3, 6, 12, 14, 34, 36, 231–2, 234, 239, 245, 251, 255, 258; rural childhoods, 67; rural experiences, 75; urban, 3, 12, 245, 250; west coast, 149; western, 255; wilderness, 232 Canadian, 3, 5, 20, 22, 25–7, 36–7, 39, 179, 229; back-to-the-land community, 107; childhood, 4, 16, 256; childhood studies, 14; children’s literature, 213; collective memories, 12, 20, 37; demographic, 243; documentary, 14, 148; domestic tourists, 3; exceptionalism, 154; experience, 231; fiction, 12, 41; film, 12, 41; gender inequality, 248; generosity, 3; government, 254; historian, 67; identity, 20, 31, 37, 39; Indigenous, 245; like-minded, 37; masculine archetype, 157; nation, 150, 154–5; patriotism, 44; politics,

index

243; popular imagination, 243; pride, 140; quintessence, 235; readers, 26; representations, 34; settler society, 246; social justice literature, 208; society, 243; suburbs, 188; television series, 15, 248; women, 10 Canadian Border Services Agency, 244 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (cbc), 43, 47, 139 Canadian Magazine, 20–1, 23–4, 26–7, 31–2 Canadian Society of Applied Art, 34 Carpenter, Edward, 99 cartoons, 4, 140 Castells, Manuel, 80 Central Ontario School of Art and Design, 33 ceremony, 194–6, 200 Chaffin, Kenny, 167 Challener, Frederick Sproston, 27; Boy Fishing, 27; A Sewing Lesson, 27 childhood innocence, 23, 33, 160, 184 childhood reveries, 23–4, 28, 38, 209, 218. See also memory China, 196, 231 Chivers, Sally, 42 city, 22–3, 28, 49, 119, 137, 151, 230, 233, 255; born, 250–1; child, 114; shopping, 140; commute, 142; crowdedness, 229; dwellers, 3, 20, 25, 139, 146; growing up in, 3, 7; inclusion, 151; industrial, 23; life, 28, 49, 247; modern living, 23; moving to, 13, 33–4, 136; queer life, 152; school, 145; visit, 50, 228 Christmas, 27, 44, 47, 70, 90, 107–8 Clandinin, Jean, 82 class, 76, 136, 146, 225; academic, 91; differences, 232; divisions, 233; and gender, 10, 13, 136, 227, 229, 235; and hygiene, 238; issues, 16, 75, 235; middle-, 9, 99, 103, 136, 146, 250; and mobility, 227; rural uppermiddle-, 65; and sexuality, 151; social class, 14, 167–8; and student identities, 146, 235; under-, 80; Victorian British middle-class children, 49; and whiteness, 99, 224; working-, 13, 24, 81, 83, 94, 136, 151, 173, 184, 224 collodion. See wet plate collodion colonialism, 200; colonial contact, 211; legacies, 14; present-day settler, 246

271

colonization, 55, 135, 246; religion and fur trade, 200; end goal of, 246; impact on land, 245 coming out, 133, 137, 141 community, 21, 53, 56, 74, 92, 119, 122, 135, 142, 179, 200, 225; acceptance, 41; activities, 212; after residential school, 211; alternative lifestyles, 104; art education, 6; arts, 34; close-knit, 46, 193, 208, 232; coastal, 81–2, 94; culture, 53; dialogue, 257; and fishing, 86; history, 187, 189; hunting, 188; ideals, 231; imagined geographies, 231; Indigenous child’s separation from, 214; Indigenous world view, 211; Inuit, 8; jobs, 228; Kanien’kehá:ka practices, 188; loss of, 217; national, 231; and oil industry, 183; private, 37; public school, 228; quintessential, 55; roles, 53; rules, 200; rural, 119, 136, 144, 163, 234, 239; strong, 133; struggle for, 94; and tourism, 46, 48; and trans child, 163; transformation, 86; transplanted, 22; tribal identity, 211–12; voice, 49; and youth, 239 Compton-Lilly, Catherine, 169 Connelly, Michael, 82 consciousness, 31, 39, 129; of childhood innocence, 23; of colonization, 246; critical, 214, 219; of Indigenous peoples, 9; and nostalgia, 213; of one’s environment, 127; of rural upbringing, 28 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 210 Cotton, Anne, 246 counter-urbanism, 105 country life, 20, 23–4, 27, 36–7, 39, 100, 213 covering (sexuality), 141–2 Crawford, June, 65 Crown (Canada), 9; corporation, 178 cultural: background, 249; capital, 48; ceremonies, 195; change, 95–6; construction, 169; conversation, 33; ethos, 99; evolution, 187; expectations, 50; geographer, 203; historian, 35; identities, 146; issues, 187; matrilineal society, 203; memories, 106, 202; models of heterosexuality, 137; narratives, 146, 202; objects, 41, 115; politics, 210; practices, 149, 188; perspectives, 169; roots, 221; phenomena, 100; spaces, 49, 154; texts,

272

152, 160; theorists, 4; traditions, 216; witnesses, 146 culture, 42, 202, 219; carriers of, 67; children’s, 257; counterculture, 98; creation, 203; cultured, 49, 142, 146; in digital age, 126; dominant, 249; engagement, 53; exotic, 249; farms, 248; female, 115; incomers, 8; Indigenous, 16; lack of, 54; landscapes, 35; learning, 95, 221; mainstream, 152; material, 41, 98, 102, 105–6; memory, 188; narratives, 94; nature and, 54, 102; popular, 107, 151, 153, 227, 245, 253, 256; research, 202; settler, 16; shared, 32; subcultures, 135; visual, 4 curation, 7, 65 curriculum, 7, 207, 234; Foundations in Curriculum (course), 191; hidden, 7, 169, 172, 177; Indigenous-informed, 210; and instruction, 215; studies, 191 Dakota, 8; Dakota Tipi, 8; Dakota Plains, 8 Daloz, Kate, 7 dance, 14, 161, 189, 192, 195–6, 198–9, 201 Danforth, Emily, 152; The Miseducation of Cameron Post, 152 Dangerous Minds, 11 Davies, Jeremy, 210, 213–14, 219 daydream, 23, 26 death, 27, 32, 43, 122, 138–9, 192, 202 debt, 32 de Finney, Sandrina, 8 dementia, 42 Dick, Sheila, 247 Dirty Dancing, 11 discourse, 240; of Canada’s educational policy, 239; of Canadian citizen, 229; classed, 238; dominant, 149; of education, 239, 263, 277; of literacies, 263; of schooling, 263; Foucauldian approach, 229; of girl power, 115; of hygiene, 238; mainstream, 258; of middle-class femininity, 229; protective, 235; relational, 235; of rural idyll, 234; of rurality, 231; and subjectivity, 229, 239 do-it-yourself (diy), 13, 98, 102; Homesteaders Festival, 251 dolls, 101, 102, 115; American composition, 103; anti-mass production, 104; Barbie,

index

108; colour of skin, 196–7; commercial, 98, 103, 105; didactic purpose, 103; dollmaking, 13, 99–100, 102, 104–6, 110–12, 116; doll’s world, 109; as pins, 114; European bisque, 103; fashion, 103, 139; German dollmaker Kathe Kruse, 104; handmade, 13, 98–9, 102–4, 106–7, 115–16; history, 102; homemade, 112–13; Indian, 14, 187–8, 193, 196, 198–201; industry, 98; as intimates, 98; mass-produced, 103; meanings, 101; mixed media, 111; pedagogical function, 104; porcelain, 108; poster doll, 115; rag dolls, 104; readymade, 13; sensory properties, 106; store-bought, 99, 106–7; study, 13; stuffed, 105; wooden cradle, 108 domestic: chores, 69; domesticity, 23, 49, 238; space, 104, 149, 163, 237; work, 75 Downing, Andrew Jackson, 57 Drain, Susan, 44 drawings, 4, 63, 143 Eakin, Paul John, 133 education, 8, 11, 43, 94; access, 169; aspirations, 137; Canada’s educational policy, discourse on, 239; career-based program, 224, 227; common school, 26; community art, 6; as disciplinary area, 15; dominant discourses, 227; educational opportunities, 81–2; education-focused society, 81–2; as escape, 95–6; forced into, 93; goals, 175; higher, 55, 176–7; lack in rural communities, 249; and masculinity, 95; neoliberalism and, 227, 239; normative heterosexual, 160; paths, 93, 228; post-first-degree plans, 149; pro-education sensibility, 95–6; qualifications, 229; recommendations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 210; relocation for, 53; sex education programs, 249; tertiary, 94; vocational, 227 Ellis, Julia, 202 Ely, Margot, 5 emotion, 30, 80, 129; accessible, 216; and childhood holidays, 10; and children, 53, 81, 192; and creative work, 103; emotive power of paintings, 28; and gender, 10, 65; and home, 81–2; ignited by poetry, 26; and

index

memory, 106, 118, 126, 129, 192, 208; mixed, 201; and objects, 102; and play, 81; and rural life, 103; and schooling, 81, 95; shared, 202; and social change, 95; trigger, 122; and work, 81; and writing, 202 emotional: allegiances; 219; conditions of home, 149; confusion, 198; connection, 108; entanglement, 144; labour, 115; locations, 82; significance, 215; state, 121; terrorist, 144; tone, 120; turmoil, 193; terrifying father, 157; violence, 248 Empire Children, 16 England, 65–6; cottagers, 21; Plymouth, 65; Suffolk County, 65; Woodbridge, 65 Epperly, Elizabeth, 53 Eribon, Didier, 137 ethics, 105; of animal welfare, 218; do-ityourself, 98; ethical consumption, 103, 217; ethical practice, 266; ethical readers, 214; of food, 218; and girlhood studies, 266; and raising children, 254; work ethic, 69 ethnography, 14, 224, 226, 228 Evans, George Ewart, 67 Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, 139 exhibitions, 6–7, 66 Farley, Melissa, 246 farm, 7, 25, 30, 32–3, 45, 65, 73, 84, 99, 213; animals, 207; children, 52–3, 74, 138; buildings, 45; equipment exhibitions, 66; family farm, 6, 28, 30, 32, 35, 63, 74; farm boy, 26, 31, 137, 140; farmers, 23–4, 30, 33, 70, 136, 170, 180, 182; farmhand, 31; farmhouse, 24, 44–6, 56, 134, 228; farmland, 35, 107, 212; farmyard, 69; hobby farm, 65; labour, 52, 138; life, 22, 35, 66–8; loss of, 30; and senior citizens, 62; work, 24, 33, 63, 72, 75; workers, 35 farming, 53, 66, 68, 100, 188, 228, 255; childhood memories, 75; community, 76; customs, 22; histories, 22, 228; social values, 22; way of life, 22 Fatty Legs, 207, 211. See also Jordan-Fenton, Christy femininities, 16, 135–6, 138, 141, 248; and domestic items, 105; femme, 139, 141; futures

273

of, 238; ideals of domesticity, 238; middleclass discourses, 229; power, 115; respectability, 237; rural, 76; so-called feminine pursuits, 110; style, 141; Western, 105. See also gender feminism, 4, 11, 98, 155 fiction, 12, 23, 41–2, 44–5, 47, 56, 152, 160 Fields, Jessica, 161 film, 4, 12, 41–3, 44, 46, 48, 52, 150–1, 158–62, 256; 35mm, 114; adaptations, 41, 43–4; auto/biographical, 154; documentary, 12, 15, 152–3; long scenic views, 54; feature, 152; filming, 49; filmmaker, 154; interpretations, 56; magic realist, 154; meanings, 151; narration, 148; nostalgia, 53; recurring motif, 157; rural, 257; society, 146; studies, 15; trans, 153 First Nations, 187; children in residential schools, 217; consciousness of, 9; cultural issues, 187; land claims by, 244; in Manitoba, 9; reserve in rural Canada, 14 First World War, 104 fishing village, 6, 13 folktales, 24 Frank, Thomas, 81 Freeman, Mini Aodla, 8; Life among the Qallunaat, 8 Fuss, Diana, 42 games, 4–5, 15, 160, 162, 230 Gammel, Irene, 44, 54 Gee, James, 169 gender, 135, 225; binary, 153, 158; and care, 238; and childhood, 247; choice of expression, 136; and class, 10; and craft, 114; diversity, 153; division, 159; embodiments, 161; and emotion, 10, 65; equality, 138; and farm life, 68; fixed notions, 158; fluidity, 153, 163; and rural selves, 235; heteronormative, 161; identity, 103, 112; inequality, 248; and memory, 76; and morality, 227, 240; normative education, 160; norms, 158; performance, 135, 138, 140, 239–40; policing, 161; and popular culture, 227; prism, 153; and respectability, 227; rituals of youth, 160; roles, 76, 100; and rural life, 66, 135–6, 138, 140; and sexuality, 247; and

274

student identities, 135. See also femininities; masculinities; transgender geography, 81, 145, 203, 228, 234, 237 Georgie Girl, 153. See also Woodward, Suzanne Germany, 10 Giorgio, Grace, 189, 191 girlhood, 5, 44, 105; Indigenous, 244; living on the land, 8; rural, 5, 98–9, 101, 116 Girls Action Foundation, 246–7 Glassie, Henry, 45–6 Gorman-Murray, Andrew, 151–2 Grant, Stan, 81, 94 Grier, Katherine, 49 Grumet, Madeleine, 199–200 guns, 72, 138–9, 162, 236–7, 244 Halberstam, Jack (Judith), 135, 146, 151–3; In a Queer Time and Place, 152 Halbwachs, Maurice, 20, 22, 28, 30, 36, 38; The Collective Memory, 22 Halfacree, Keith, 99 Hallam, Julia, 11 Hampl, Patricia, 10–11, 188, 193, 197 Hampton, Eber, 203 Harris, Robert, 33 Haudenosaunee, 203 Haug, Frigga, 10 Heider, Karl, 64; Rashomon Effect, 64 Heller, Susan, 12, 62–6, 68, 73, 75, 244; Roxham Road Interview Collection (rric), 12, 65–8, 70, 73, 76 Henkel, Linda, 127 High, Steven, 65 Higonnet, Anne, 4 historic site, 41, 46, 49 hockey, 88, 90, 92, 175, 248–9 Holland, Patricia, 4 Holtzman, Jon, 216–17 home, 16, 21, 46, 49, 51, 53, 71–2, 86, 89, 119, 140, 148, 176, 179, 200, 207, 212–13, 228, 231, 254; being at home, 155, 207; building a home, 100, 107; childbirth, 105; childhood, 22–3, 27–8, 33, 106, 137, 156, 160, 170; Christian, 159; coming home, 74, 88, 137; concept of, 41, 149, 160; dominant discourses, 149; dream home, 231; and emotions, 81,

index

149; evangelical, 159; family, 155, 157; and femininity, 238; film depictions, 151; future, 227, 238, 240; geographies of, 148; grandparents’, 159; and heteronormativity, 159; as heterosexual, 149, 152; hiding places, 23; home-coming, 210; homely pleasures, 28; ideal, 224, 240; imagined, 175; inspiring literature, 45; leaving, 141; long-term care, 42; meanings of, 148–9, 151, 163; modern, 193; nation, 159, 163; queering, 152; radical homemaking, 251; as refuge, 9, 155; relationship with, 150, 153; returning, 144; rules, 200; rural, 41, 160, 163, 225, 233; school as home for queer and transgender youth, 161; schooling, 110; sense of, 151–2, 158; site of oppression and abuse, 153, 155– 6; subjectivities, 149; as summer retreat, 36; tension, 195; tourists’ memory of, 48; Victorian, 42, 48, 53; withdraw into, 135 homeless children, 33 homestead, 8–9, 13, 24, 33, 115; homesteaders, 34, 37; homesteading, 100, 251 homosexuality, 137, 145–6. See also coming out; lesbian hooks, bell, 5; Bone Black, 5 Hopkins, J. Castell, 20; Canada: An Encyclopaedia of the Country, 20 humanities, 12 Huyssen, Andreas, 11 Iceland, 119; artist residency, 119; Icelanders, 34 Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Province of Prince Edward Island, 45 imagination, 5, 36, 47–8, 50, 52, 54, 56, 63, 107, 112, 149, 152, 218, 243 immigrant, 34, 44; customs, 34; Doukhobors, 34; English, 45; European, 256; German, 45; Hungarians, 34; Hutterites, 34; Icelanders, 34; Irish, 45; Mennonites, 34; Norwegian, 45; in rural settings, 249, 255; Scottish, 45; sexualization of, 249; social media campaigns for, 255; traditions, 34; Ukrainians, 34; Welsh, 45 immigration, 107, 213, 243 Indian, 200; beaded Indian head, 201; born into politics, 188, 202; Indianness, 187, 196,

index

203; “kill the Indian, save the child,” 215; narrative, 210; North American, 196, 200; real Indian, 203; reservation, 187, 203; “Sioux Indian look,” 189; village, 15, 188–9, 192–3, 195–6, 198–201. See also dolls Indian Act, 188, 203 Indigenous, 203; child separation, 214; children, 8–9, 16, 207, 218–19, 246; community, 208; culture, 16; family, 208, 219; girls, 246–7; girlhoods, 244; heritage, 172; history, 9; identities, 203, 245; indigeneity, 16; Indigenous-informed curriculum, 210; land, 203, 245–6; land claims, 15; literature, 14; name, 188; peoples, 201–3, 207, 210, 218, 221, 246; women, 246–7; world view, 207, 211; writer, 211; young people, 246; young women, 246–7 Industrial Revolution, 103 industrial, 95; agriculture, 26; economy, 83; environment, 23; fishery, 86; fishing practices, 94; food supply, 217; global system, 250; production, 21, 217; prosperity, 83; sawmill, 47; transformation, 82, 95; work, 93 industrialization, 54, 102, 203 insider, 6 intergenerationality, 9, 179, 217 interpellation, 137 interviews, 5, 7, 13–15, 62–3, 65–8, 73, 75–6, 82, 225, 244, 256 Inuit, 8, 244 invisibilities, 15–16, 141, 150 Ives, Edward, 66; The Tape-Recorded Interview, 66 Jiwani, Yasmin, 249 John Thompson (music book), 11 Johnston, Lynda, 152 Johnston, Rosemary Ross, 46 Jones, Owain, 208 Jordan-Fenton, Christy, 207 Jung, Yoonchun, 41 Kahnawa:ke, 187–9, 203; Kahnawakehró:non (people of Kahnawa:ke), 189 Kandel, Eric R., 120; In Search of Memory, 120

275

Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk people), 188–9, 200, 203. See also Mohawk Keenan, Catherine, 127 Keys, Wendy, 152 Knopp, Larry, 162 Kuhn, Annette, 5, 10, 106; Family Secrets, 5 Kumu Hina, 153. See also Woodward, Suzanne Kurdi, Alan, 254 land, 244–5; access, 100, 233–4; agricultural, 172; awareness, 8; clearing, 24, 119; connection to, 9, 184, 208, 212, 219, 251–3, 255; critical social and legal challenges, 244; development, 100; dispossession, 246; hinterland, 256; living on the, 8, 14, 107, 188, 221, 251, 255; and narratives, 202; peaceful, 35; relationships with, 215, 219; return to native, 213; rural, 9, 116, 187; settlement, 99, 245; shaping childhood self, 11; in settler cultures, 16; steward, 253; unsettled, 20; wetlands, 252; woodlands, 252. See also Indigenous; Violence on the Land landscape, 6, 13–14, 47, 94, 168, 187, 200, 231, 234; abstracted, 36; affective, 163; of Canadian nation, 154; conquering, 154; constructed, 15; country, 27, 39; critical, 209; as culture, 35; demographic, 243; devoid of people, 119; disappeared, 119; discovery, 119; exploration of, 118–19; as feature of growing up, 15–16; image of, 126; imagined, 9, 36, 129, 254; as inspiration, 37, 120; majestic, 121; Maritime 51; memory, 21, 39, 195; natural, 23; Newfoundland, 13, 122; Outback, 149; political, 201, 243; prairie, 15; relation to houses, 42; rural, 11, 34, 36–7, 41–2, 53–4, 56, 129, 160, 202, 225, 227, 231, 254; social, 201, 231, 243, 247–8; spiritual, 201; suburban and urban domestic, 54; suggestive of work, 53; tranquil, 35; transformed by immigration, 34; transformed for tourism, 46 Laurel, Alicia Bay, 104; Living on the Earth, 104 Laurier, Sir Wilfrid, 34 Lerner, Loren, 4; Depicting Canada’s Children, 4

276

Les Bolduns (television series), 11 lesbian, 13, 132, 136, 141–2, 144. See also homosexuality Lesotho, 11 Letterkenny, 248, 256 lgbtq, 152 Lieblich, Amia, 191 Lippard, Lucy, 118, 122; The Lure of the Local, 122 literature, 191, 249; academic, 13; American, 213; British, 213; Canadian social justice, 208; children’s, 50, 160, 207, 213, 257; critical scholarship, 227; English, 207; Indigenous, 14; historian, 42; studies, 15; residential school children’s, 208; on rural masculinities, 248; on rural youth, 95, 151; settler literature, 8 lived experience, 42, 202, 232, 233, 246 living on the land, 8, 221 Lizée, Erik, 183 longhouse, 194, 196 Longhurst, Robyn, 152 longing, 7, 11, 103, 107, 207, 213–14, 216–17 Lowman, 245–6 Loyie, Larry, 14, 16, 207–8, 210–11, 213–21; As Long as the Rivers Flow, 14, 206–7, 215–16 Lynne, Jacqueline, 246 MacEachern, Alan, 7 Mackey, Margaret, 5, 8; One Child Reading, 5 magazines, 25, 50, 52 Maliseet (Wolastoqiyik), 9 Malpas, Jeff, 81 Mandrona, April, 255; “For Us by Us” (research project), 255 Manitoba, 8–9, 15, 182, 244, 251–2, 255–7; Virden, 251, 257 Marchment, Margaret, 11 Marshall, Elizabeth, 152 Martin, Douglas, 182 Marx, Leo, 54 masculinities, 16; bravado, 174; Canadian archetype, 157; in creative industries, 136; disrupting, 95, 173; heteronormative rules, 248; hierarchy, 135; identity, 70, 95; and outdoor adventure, 237; physical strength,

index

136, 236; privilege, 140; protective, 236; range of expression, 141; risk-taking, 236– 7; rural, 13, 63, 76, 81, 135–7, 236–7, 247–8; and schooling, 92, 95; and skills, 136, 237; stories, 81; traditional, 135; and work, 92, 95 Massey, Doreen, 233 material culture, 41, 98, 102, 105–6 Maticka-Tyndale, Eleanor, 249 Matthews, Hugh, 234 Matthews, Marmaduke, 37 Mayes, Robyn, 151 McEvoy, Bernard, 21 McKegney, Sam, 211–12 McMullan, Chelsea, 148, 151, 154, 157–61, 163; My Prairie Home, 14, 148–9, 151, 153 McMurry, Sally, 53 memoir, 10, 207 memory, 47–8, 56, 80, 85, 92, 94, 105, 118, 120, 129, 173, 188, 193, 196, 201, 203; as agency, 146; aid, 127; analysis, 82; approaches to, 38; of an artist, 21; of childhood homes, 28; collectives, 10; collective memories, 12, 21– 3, 36–7, 47, 56, 118; of country landscapes, 38; difficult childhood memories, 28, 34; critical, 189; and emotions, 126; frightening, 162; and gender, 76; historic, 177; intergenerational, 179; layers of, 64; loss of, 42; meaning of, through conversation, 30; memory-scapes, 81; memory-writing, 82; and nostalgia, 63; not-so-distant, 22; of novels, 41; and photography, 119, 126–7; physical, 126; pieces, 10, 187; reverential, 21; rural, 48; sensory, 122; shared memory, 23, 31; so-called true memory, 121; and stories, 83, 189; studies, 38, 47; texts, 4, 106; vivid, 122; youthful, 36 memory-work, 3–5, 25, 189, 191, 202–3, 243; group work, 10; method, 10; and social action, 11; strategic, 15; tools, 9 metaphor, 5, 36, 54 migration, 10, 80–2, 93, 98–9, 245, 250, 254–5 Miller Miner, Muriel, 24; Arabian Nights, 24 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 247 Mitchell, Claudia, 10–11, 16, 50, 52, 105–6,

index

168, 183, 189, 257. See also Researching Children’s Popular Culture Mitchell, Ryan, 254 mobility, 9, 16, 81, 107, 176, 227–8 Mohawk, 14, 187–8; of Kahnawa:ke, 188 Moletsane, Relebohile, 16, 257 Montgomery, Lucy Maud, 12, 42–5, 47, 49– 56; Anne of Green Gables (book), 41–4, 46, 49, 53, 213, 256; Anne of Ingleside, 45; Anne (Shirley), 41, 43, 47; Green Gables, 12, 41–9, 51, 53–6; L.M. Montgomery National Historic Site, 43, 45, 49 Montreal Weekly Witness, 33 Moorosi, Pontso, 191 morality, 50, 52, 227, 238, 240; boundaries of, 236, 239; distinctions, 95, 238; moral outrage, 33 Morris, Deborah, 151 Morris, William, 99 mortgage, 30–3, 99; foreclosures, 30, 32; payments, 33 Munro, Alice, 42; “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” 42 Murnaghan, Ann Marie, 54 Murray, Jeffery, 256 museum, 4, 45, 47, 53 myth, 3, 8, 36, 183; mythic countryside, 231; mythology, 122, 153 Narrative Research: Reading, Analysis, and Interpretation, 191. See also Lieblich, Amia; Tuval-Mashiach, Rivka; Zilber, Tamar Nash, Catherine, 152 National Ballet of Canada, 139 Native: child, 187, 203; education, 267; land, 213; peoples, 187, 196, 203; reservation, 188, 203 Native Youth Sexual Health Network, 246 nature, 53–5, 99, 225, 231–2; appreciation for, 54; and architecture, 56; beauty, 25; being in, 218; and Canadians, 37; and children, 54, 160; connection to nature, 54, 105; connotations, 49; control over, 45, 50; and culture, 54, 102; delight in, 52; exploration, 134; ideals, 231; and identity, 52; and interiors, 42; and literature, 53–5; metaphors, 54;

277

mystical powers, 105; pace, 252; in paintings, 36; reconnecting, 251, 254; reliance, 55; return to, 107; rhythm, 252; and society, 54; spirit of, 252; and spirituality, 105; and technology, 54; and tourists, 48 neighbours, 7, 30, 45–6, 53, 62; neighbourhood, 200–1 neoliberalism, 81, 227, 239–40 Networks for Change and Well-Being (project), 257. See also Mitchell, Claudia; Moletsane, Relebohile New Brunswick: Cap Pélé, 84; rural, 13, 98, 115; southeastern, 107 Newfoundland, 5, 13, 51, 118–20, 122, 129; Confederation with Canada, 5; St John’s, 5, 119, 121; Tilting, 51; Topsail, 13, 118–19, 121– 2; Topsail Beach, 125 New York Times, 182 Noonan, Larry, 49 Nora, Pierre, 47 Norquay, Naomi, 10 Norton, Bonny, 170 nostalgia, 53, 55, 63, 75, 102, 121, 183, 207–10, 213–15, 217–19, 221 No Time to Say Goodbye, 207 Not My Girl, 207. See also Jordan-Fenton, Christy Nova Scotia, 6, 84, 86, 255; Amherst, 84–5; Aylesford, 255; coastal community, 81; Digby, 86, 90; Digby County, 86; rural, 248 objects, 15, 47, 49, 52, 74, 83, 110, 122, 162; analysis of, 47; associated with home, 28; association with identity, 28, 115; as carriers of meaning, 101, 114; and childhood, 98, 160; clocks, 21–3, 32, 52, 120; comforting, 22; crafted, 194; deferred, 211; historical, 106; household, 23, 38; and images, 126, 196; inanimate, 106; living, 106; and memory, 21, 23, 106–7; modified, 52; and narrative, 47; and nostalgia, 214; of rural pasts, 100; sensory, 98, 106; study of, 100–2; talismans, 211; value, 114–15; of youth, 28 off-grid, 107, 250 oil, 7, 171; Alberta oil, 177–8; blowout, 182; boom, 173; boom-and-bust oil town, 15;

278

cheap, 250; companies, 174, 179–80, 182–3; crisis, 177; dependence, 179; derricks, 172; discovery of, 170; executives, 173; and farms, 7; industry, 168, 171, 173, 176–8, 180, 182–4; Mobil Oil, 170; Oil Capital of the World, 173; oilfield, 171, 176, 179; oilfield families, 168, 170–1; oilfield ties, 172; oil patch, 176–7; oil patch family, 175; oil-related matters, 172; oil-rich cities, 83; oil town, 171; oil well firefighter, 179; pipelines, 184; prices, 171, 179; relationship to, 173; rights, 183; rites, 183; rural oil town, 14; sites, 184; wells, 182. See also pumpjack Ontario, 14, 16, 20, 24–5, 36, 42, 170, 224, 228, 239, 248, 256; city dwellers, 25; Department of Education, 36; Fieldsville, 224–6, 228, 231–5, 237, 239–40; Freeport Health Centre, 42; Hamilton, 47; Kitchener, 42; migrant farm labourers, 16; Ontario Society of Artists, 34; Ottawa, 34, 177; rural school, 14; Scarborough, 42; Toronto, 22, 25, 33, 37, 42, 47, 236; Wingham, 20, 24, 33 oral history, 9, 12, 15, 62–3, 65, 67, 73 outsider, 6, 142, 182, 232–4, 236 painting, 12, 15, 20–4, 27, 30–4, 38–9, 46, 152; family, 23; genre, 26, 28, 35; landscape, 23, 35–6; mural, 34; oil, 4 Paris, 34 Parks Canada, 46 participatory action research, 248 participatory visual methodologies, 257 pastoral: Arcadia, 37; environment, 43; farm, 213; forest, 213; ideal, 35, 206–7; imagery, 54, 213; nostalgia, 55; Prince Edward Island, 53; rural, 207; setting, 41; virtues, 23; works, 37 Payne, Elizabethe, 161 pedagogy, 161, 208, 210; function of dolls, 104; role of memory, 11; project, 246; role of story, 219; style, 143; tool, 219 Perac, Georges, 82, 92 Petrik, Paula, 63 Philo, Chris, 208–10, 218–19 photographs, 4, 6, 13, 52, 81–2, 84–5, 118, 120– 2, 124, 126–7, 129–31, 168, 220; and childhood memories, 195; family, 5, 15; in film,

index

157; negative, 124–6; old, 188; on Status cards, 203 photography, 12, 13, 118–19, 126–7, 257 pictures, 4, 21, 30, 35, 52, 118, 173, 192, 195, 214; genre, 26; landscape, 200; memory, 27; painted, 22, 225, 233; pictorial works, 4; role of, in remembering, 20. See also books Pini, Barbara, 151–2 Plummer, Ken, 133; Telling Sexual Stories, 133 poetry, 23, 26 politics, 14, 44, 168, 177, 179, 188, 202, 210 Polley, Sarah, 42; Away from Her, 42 Portelli, Alessandro, 75 portraiture, 191 positioning, 6, 100, 154, 163, 245 Powell, Mary Ann, 208 Prince Edward Island (pei), 7, 15, 44–5, 53, 57, 257; Cavendish, 42–4; Charlottetown Confederation Centre, 6; Park Corner, 44– 5; White Sands, 43, 51 prompt, 4, 219, 234 psychiatric institution, 144–5 psychology, 4; psychological distance, 107; psychological stress, 13 pbs (Public Broadcasting Service), 44 public space, 49 pumpjack, 14–16, 167–8, 170–4 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre, 34 Quebec, 8, 11–12, 15, 172, 188; Chisasibi, 8; Hemmingford, 12; Lachine, 188; LaSalle, 188; Montreal, 47, 62, 70, 188, 208; Old Montreal, 70; Roxham Road, 62–5, 68–71, 73, 75–6, 244; rural life, 65; rural society, 12; St-Bernard-de-Lacolle, 62; tourists, 172 race, 5, 10, 16, 225 Radstone, Susannah, 200, 203, 210 rape, 152, 249, 258 Real Game, The, 14, 224–9, 234, 239 refugees, 9, 62, 155, 159, 244, 251, 254–5; camps, 255; children, 255, 257–8; European refugee crisis, 254; girls and young women, 249; migration to Canada, 255; resettlement, 255; rural, 249; Syrian, 254 Reid, George Agnew, 12, 20–8, 30–8; Adagio, 23, 28; The Apple-Paring Bee, 24; The Ar-

index

rival of the Pioneers, 25; Ave Canada, 34–6; The Berry-Pickers, 27–8; Black Spruces, 36; The Call to Dinner, 34–6; Canada Receiving the Homage of Her Children, 34; Carrying Sod, 24; Cloud Shadows, 36; The Dark Canyon, 36; Drawing Lots, 27–8; family paintings, 23; Family Prayer, 33; Forbidden Fruit, 23–4, 28; The Foreclosure of the Mortgage, 32; Going to Church, 24; Gossip, 23, 28; Landscape and Memory, 35; Logging, 24; Lullaby, 23, 28; Making Straw Hats, 24; Maple Sugar Making, 24; Milking, 24; Mortgaging the Homestead, 28, 30–3; Mowing, 24; murals, 25, 34; painting, 20–1, 23–4, 26–8, 32–6, 38–9; pictures, 28; ShingleMaking, 24; sketches, 24; Sowing, 24; Spinning, 24; Staking a Pioneer Farm, 25; The Story, 27–8; studies, 24; Sugar-Making, 25; teaching, 33–4; Threshing with a Flail, 24; Trout Brook, 36; The Visit of the Clockmaker, 21–2, 28 Reid-Walsh, Jacqueline, 10, 50, 52, 105–6. See also Researching Children’s Popular Culture relocation, 9, 53 religion, 52; colonized by, 200; prayer, 33, 155 religious: beliefs, 188; norms of cities and suburbs, 100; parents, 160; practices, 158; salvation, 32; upbringing, 159 remote: Canada, 3; Canadians living in remote areas, 3; communities, 234; mining town, 151; Northern Ontario, 256 Researching Children’s Popular Culture, 4 resettlement, 245, 254–5 residential schools, 206–8, 210–12, 214–21 resilience, 170, 173, 212 Riley, Mark, 67, 75 roots, 99; Aboriginal, 81; cultural, 221; ideological, 99; small town, 3, 177; rural, 5, 65 Rose, Gillian, 149; Visual Methodologies, 149 Roy, Wendy, 44 Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 34 rural: ideal, 208; idyll, 64, 66, 75, 234–5; studies, 9 Ruurs, Margriet, 258; Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family’s Journey, 258 Ryan, Joelle, 153

279

Sandler, Wyanne, 248–9 Schama, Simon, 21, 35, 37–8 Schreiber, Charlotte, 33 Scotland, 24 Second World War, 13, 62, 68, 104, 254 self-determination, 9, 105 self-study, 11, 14, 168, 191 self-worth, 31 Sellars, Bev, 206 semiotics, 4 sense of place, 13, 211 Sethi, Anupriya, 247 settler: British, 22; Canadian society, 246; colonialism, 246; cultures, 16; identities, 8, 245; literature, 8; memories of rural childhoods, 245; to rural areas, 255; stories; 14; white, 217 sex, 9, 136, 138; education, 249; sexed binaries, 153; unprotected, 247; unwanted, 247 sexual abuse, 247, 249; aggression, 144; assaults, 247; diversities and possibilities, 153; exploitation, 246; harassment, 249; health, 249; innuendo, 141; invisibility, 141; nonnormative lives, 151; and reproductive beings, 247; violence, 246–7, 249, 257 sexuality, 9, 11, 16, 151–2, 161, 245, 247; and childhood, 150; education, 160–1; embodiments, 161; heteronormative, 161; policing, 161; politics, 210; and rural youth, 151 sexualization, 10, 249 shelter, 217; services, 248 Sheppard, Edmund E., 25; Saturday Night, 25 Sherwood, W.A., 26 Shillington, Laura, 54 Shopes, Linda, 73 Sioli, Angeliki, 41 Skeggs, Beverley, 233 small town, 3; bars, 157; Canadians living in, 3; compulsory heterosexuality, 136; context, 172; difficult to escape, 137; Drayton Valley, 168; education-focused, 82; Falls City, Nebraska, 152; growing up in, 14, 228; high school, 176; life, 151, 170; newcomers, 255; roots in, 3; in rural Alberta, 182; social media campaigns, 255; in southeastern Ontario, 228; upbringing, 81

280

Smiley, Matthew, 247; Highway of Tears, 247 Smith, Anne, 208 Smith, H.M. Scott, 45 Smith, Sidonie, 144, 146 snapshot, 4, 12, 121, 127, 132 social criticism, 104 socialization, 9, 49, 76, 103, 203 social sciences, 12, 100, 226 social space, 42, 94 sociology, 15 solitude, 23–4 South Africa, 6, 257; KwaZulu-Natal, 6 sovereignty, 9, 246 spatiality, 14, 226–7, 230, 234 Spigel, Lynn, 109, 114 Spoon, Rae, 14, 153, 158; belonging, 149, 151, 158, 163; childhood, 14, 148–51, 153, 155–6, 158–60, 163; family, 148, 156–7, 159–60, 162; gender, 160, 163; heterosexism, 154, 160, 163; home, 150–1, 153, 156–7, 159–60; lyrics, 156, 159–60, 162; memories, 151, 156–7, 160; move across Canada, 158–9; My Prairie Home, 14; oppression at home, 153, 157; performance, 148, 157; Prairies, 149, 153–5, 158, 160; pronoun, 159; school, 150, 160–1, 163; singer/songwriter, 14, 148, 156, 161; transgender, 14, 148, 151, 161. See also McMullan, Chelsea Steedman, Carolyn, 200 stereotypes, 8, 189, 197, 200, 215, 248 Sterling, Shirley, 207, 212; My Name Is Seepeetza, 207, 212 Stewart, Susan, 102 stigma, 16 Stranger at Home, 207, 212. See also JordanFenton, Christy Strong-Wilson, Teresa, 11, 14–16, 257 subjectivity, 80, 226–7, 229, 230, 237, 239–40 suburbs, 49; Canadian, 188; distant, 119; and religious norms, 100; suburban Calgary, 150; suburban domestic landscapes, 54; suburban houses, 49 Sullivan, Kevin, 43, 46–9, 52; Anne of Green Gables (film), 44, 49 survival: and loss, 212; material, 102; and residential schools, 212; rural skills, 250; self-survival, 196

index

Sutherland, Neil, 5, 67, 74; Growing Up: Childhood in English Canada, 67 Sweden, 5; Stockholm, 5 symbol(ism), 9, 23, 178, 220, 234, 238; of Canadian exceptionalism, 154; of life, 14, 168 symbolic: displays of individualism and resilience, 173; image, 34; knowledge work, 95; meaning, 23 Taylor, Nicola, 208 Teena, Brandon, 151–3 television, 12; Canadian series, 15, 248; commercials, 226; as hallmarks of popular culture, 107; locations, 240; series, 5, 11, 213, 254, 256; shows, 4, 8; temporal orientations, 210; temporality, 14, 226–7, 230, 234; temporally situated, 227; texts, 11 Terry, Andrea, 47 texts, 12, 101, 148–50, 153, 210, 216; cinematic, 11; cultural, 152, 160; in education, 11; and focus group discussion, 217; and images, 217; memory, 4, 12, 20, 106, 216; representing rurality, 153; teaching, 11; television, 11. See also analysis textuality, 98, 100; textual components, 63; textual details, 41 Thomas, George, 6; Doing Our Own Thing, 6 Thompson, Jerry, 124 tiny-house movement, 253 Toronto Guild of Civic Art, 33 To Sir with Love, 11 tourism: Alberta Tourism, 171; literary, 43 tourist, 43; American, 3; attraction, 14, 46, 188–9; Canadian domestic, 3; and crafts, 189, 194, 200; destination, 46; European, 189; Indian village tourist site, 196; memories, 48; overseas, 3; from Quebec, 171; services, 46 Trace, 13, 118–19, 121–2, 127, 129 transgender: adult, 160; childhood, 149, 155; experiences, 152; gaze, 152; invisibility and exclusion, 154; in mainstream culture, 152; political space, 163; in popular culture, 151, 153; rural childhood, 14, 148, 163; rural lives, 151; studies, 152; trans documen-

281

index

taries, 153; trans-friendly space, 163; trans life as other, 153; trans subjectivities, 153; troubled childhood, 14, 148; visibility, 153; in visual media, 153; youth, 148, 161; young trans man, 152 travel, 73, 234; alone, 118; books, 24; by bus, 228; through Iceland, 119; of light, 124; long distances, 228, 248; memories, 16, 209; pursuits, 254; time-travel, 120–1; traveller, 10; travelling library, 24; United States, 189; writing, 10 treaty, 245; Numbered Treaties, 9; Treaty People, 245–6 Trudeau, Pierre Elliott, 177–8; Trudeau government, 177 Trump, Donald, 81, 243 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc), 207, 210, 220–1 Tuval-Mashiach, Rivka, 191 Tyler, May Elaine, 63 unbelonging, 135 United States, 15, 30, 44, 67, 81, 107, 149, 254, 257; California, 44, 107; Catskills, 36; Champlain, 68; Falls City, 152; Hudson River School, 36; Nebraska, 152; New England, 44; New York State, 36, 62, 69; Onteora, 36; Perry Mills, 62; Vermont, 7 urban: appeal, 255; areas, 250; centres, 7, 151, 254–5; childhood, 258; children, 114, 134, 139, 212–13; classroom, 208; counterparts, 76, 248; counter-urbanism, 105; danger, 237; domestic landscapes, 54; dominant imaginaries, 163; dweller, 252; food production, 216; lives, 53, 100, 115, 217; living, 12, 20; marginal space, 81; non-Indigenous children in, 221; non-urban, 243; opposition to, 103; pathologize, 160; residents in Edmonton, 183; rural to, 146; rural versus, takedown, 139; saved by, 145; school, 145; social protocols, 104; Stockholm, 5; to rural, 99, 104; urban-to-rural exodus, 99; urban-to-rural migrants, 99; visitors, 139; women, 136 urbanites: anti-, 99; baby-boomer, 98; young, 9 urbanization, 3, 12, 82

utopia, 6, 99, 152 values, 30–1; 1890s, 31; conservative, 178; family, 32, 49; of Indigenous family, 208; of love, freedom, and respect, 99; rural living, 20, 33; shaped by children’s experiences, 169 Vanderburgh, Jennifer, 256 Varcoe, Colleen, 247 video games, 4, 162 Vietnam War, 83, 104, 107 violence, 249; against Indigenous girls and women, 247; against self-determination and sovereignty, 9; against women and young people, 146, 248, 250; emotional, 248; environmental, 246; father’s, 157; gender-based, 248; ordinary, 137, physical, 248; relationship, 249; in rural communities, 248; sexual, 246–7, 249, 257; to suffer, 137; verbal, 248; vulnerability to, 248. See also Networks for Change and Well-Being; Violence on the Land Violence on the Land, Violence on Our Bodies, 246 Virden Story, 9 Visual Encounters in the Study of Rural Childhoods, 4 visual methods, 14, 168 Waitt, Gordon, 151–52 Walkerdine, Valerie, 5; Schoolgirl Fictions, 5 war, 254; correspondent, 81; postwar, 13, 80, 107; war-affected children, 258. See also First World War; Second World War; Vietnam War Ward, Colin, 55; The Child in the Country, 55 Waterson, Elizabeth, 43–4 Watson, Julia, 144, 146 Weaver, Sharon, 7 Weber, Sandra, 11, 168, 196 West, Elliott, 63 wet plate collodion, 13, 118, 124, 126, 129; wet plate process, 127 When I Was Eight, 207. See also JordanFenton, Christy white (whiteness), 198; baby, 9; babyboomers, 98–9; back-to-the-landers, 9; European tourists, 189; males, 249;

282

index

population, 172; settler, 217; working-class rural, 224 Wilbur, Andrew, 99 wild, 8, 91, 220; animals, 8; berries, 175; cherry tree, 55; flowers, 252; Wild West, 189; wilderness, 100, 217, 232; wildlife, 232 Wilder, Laura Ingalls, 213 Winterson, Jeanette, 11; Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 11 Women’s Earth Alliance, 246 Woodward, Suzanne, 153

Yoshino, Kenji, 141–2 young people, 246; agency of, 257; aspirations of, 6; counter-narrative of, 146, 248; finding tolerance, 146; futures, 226–9, 231, 234, 239–40; moving to cities, 20, 146; new generations of, 250; in participatory video projects, 257; in photography projects, 257; place-based subjectivities, 233; rural, 3, 14, 74, 224, 227, 234, 239–40, 256; sense of self, 228, 239; stewardship, 184; study of, 229. See also Indigenous

yearning, 109–10, 216 Yoder, Amarou, 215

Zandy, Janet, 10 Zilber, Tamar, 191