Temagami's Tangled Wild: Race, Gender, and the Making of Canadian Nature

by Jocelyn Thorpe

Canadian wilderness seems a self-evident entity, yet, as this volume shows in vivid historical detail, wilderness is not what it seems. In Temagami’s Tangled Wild , Jocelyn Thorpe traces how struggles over meaning, racialized and gendered identities, and land have made the Temagami area in Ontario into a site emblematic of wild Canadian nature, even though the Teme-Augama Anishnabai have long understood the region as their homeland rather than as a wilderness. Eloquent and accessible, this engaging history challenges readers to acknowledge the embeddedness of colonial relations in our notions of wilderness, and to reconsider our understanding of the wilderness ideal.

Genres: School

220 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2011

Reviews

[Alicia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Oh dear ... I had to read this for a Canadian environmental history class I took at the University of Alberta and then I had to write a book review report on it. The first chapter of this book is torture (for me anyway). It took me almost a month to get through reading it because I dreaded picking up the book. The rest of the book wasn't as bad as Chapter 1, but it didn't really get much better. This is definitely a purely academic book. It's certainly NOT for people simply interested in Canadian history, the Temagami area, or Canada in general.

From an academic standpoint the book makes some interesting arguments and presents some decent evidence, but it's not a peer reviewed article. The irony is that the author was attempting to inform people about an historical situation in the Temagami area, and point out that the "fight" is essentially not over. Yet the only people who are ever going to be informed about it are other academics. The average reader, the people who need to be informed about these sorts of things, would never get through the book. It's written like the author was trying to use all the big words in her thesaurus - rather than write a story that people could understand and sympathize with.

Finally, the one thing that was brought to my attention by the book, which I did not know beforehand, was how the Ontario government treated the Aboriginal people in the Temagami area. Wow - it was, and still is, appalling. The government should be ashamed of themselves - but they'd probably never admit to being the idiots they were.

[Jessica DeWitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enjoyable and brief case study of the way in which conceptions of nature, gender, and race are inextricably intertwined. Thorpe states that her "argument--that the Temagami wilderness is a product of history and relationships of power rather than simply of nature--hinges upon the understanding...that wilderness is a social category that works alongside other social categories such as race and gender, gaining legitimacy through its appearance as self-evident, or natural. The naturalizing forces of wilderness, race, gender disguises the exclusionary practices through which place and subjects are created." (4) Several of the topics discussed in Thorpe's account (use of virgin forest arguments, the supreme court case) will prove invaluable comparatives in my dissertation.

[Pascale · Rating 4 out of 5]

I may be a little biased because Jocelyn has been my prof before but overall I found this pretty well written and well researched. The last chapter and conclusion did drag a bit and were repetitive and didn't really wrap it up - but the struggle is ongoing so there isn't anything really to wrap up. Interesting images presented: virgin land vs. wasted unused land, female-like nature as the place for males to assert their masculinity etc. I'd recommend this to anyone with interests in anthropology, women and gender's studies and Canadian indigenous studies.