northern vision of Harold Innis, The

Journal of Canadian Studies, Fall 1999 by Matthew Evenden

Harold Innis, Canada's pre-eminent social scientist in the inter-war period, developed a northern vision for Canada in the 1920s. Through field research and study of communications, the fur trade and mineral production, he developed an understanding of the North as an industrial frontier and as a binding agent for national unity. This paper examines Innis's engagement with an imagined North by assessing the various cultural and intellectual impulses that focussed his attention on the region. It re-reads his fieldnotes as cultural texts inscribing a gendered and racialized North, and considers his portrayal of the region to southern audiences.

Harold Innis, le sociologue pr@pond&ant du Canada dans la periode d'inter-guerre, developpe une vision nordique pour le Canada dans les 1920s. Par la recherche de zone et l'etude des transmissions, de la production commerciale et min&ale de la fourrure, il a developpe une comprehension du nord comme frontiere industrielle et comme lieur pour l'unite nationale. Cet article examine l'enclenchement d'Innis avec un nord imagine en evaluant les diverses impulsions culturelles et intellectuelles qui ont concentre son attention sur la region. 11 relit ses notes de zone comme les textes culturels inscrivant a > et > le nord, et considre sa. representation de la region aux assistances meridionales.

In the spring of 1924, the Mackenzie River loomed largely in Harold Innis's thinking. At the end of the academic term, Innis, a junior assistant professor of political economy at the University of Toronto, would travel the river and begin to reorient his career and scholarship in a northern trajectory. The river would become a point of entry into a new northern vision.

Although Harold Innis remains one of Canada's most celebrated and studied social scientists, relatively little is known of his early career or northern scholarship.1 The limited attention granted to Innis's interest in northern Canada invariably centres on his field expeditions conducted in the 1920s to investigate the fur trade, mining, transportation and communications. Innis travelled, with companion John Long, along the Peace, Slave and Mackenzie rivers in 1924; down the Yukon River in 1926 with his former student, W.K. Gibb; to various towns of northern Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes in 1927; and to Hudson Bay in 1929 .2 These four busy summers have been enshrined as mythic instances in the history of Canadian historiography. Donald Creighton's biography of Innis devotes four pages in a slim volume to the Mackenzie voyage alone. He suggests that the trip marked a turning point in Innis's personal development: the limping junior scholar, still showing the marks of war in 1924, returned from the North an invigorated, healthy man, no longer in need of a cane.3 The North served as a context for the redefinition of self: from ill health to vigorous manhood; from uninitiated scholar to renowned field researcher and economist.

Parsing this image of Innis and the North - by inquiring into the constructed nature of the idea of the North and Innis's role in developing it; by asking what Innis sought to learn and earn from his northern experiences; and by considering how Innis's northern research altered his development as a scholar in the 1920s this paper seeks to redraw this mythic instance, to focus the problem of the social creation of nordicity in the context of intellectual biography. Innis imagined the North before arriving there, grafted ambitions onto the region, inscribed ideas in field notes and represented the North to popular audiences in southern Canada on his return. In the process of creating a northern vision that stressed the importance of the North as a frontier for industrialism and a binding agent for national unity, Innis adopted and refashioned popular ideas of Canada's northern regions and remade himself as a public intellectual and nationalist thinker.

Imagining North

In the winter of 1924, Harold Innis began to plan his northern career. Letters fanned north seeking advice about canoe routes along the Mackenzie and the North Saskatchewan. Contacts were made with officials in the Department of the Interior and the Hudson's Bay Company, with missionaries and geographers.4 In a research prospectus written for R.M. MacIver, his department head, Innis outlined his interest in the settlement of the Peace River region, the fur trade and mining development. His research was not solely focussed on the fur trade at this early stage, as is often assumed.5 The ultimate goal, he explained to MacIver, would be a book-length study of the Mackenzie River basin; a knowledge of the fur trade would also help his teaching.6 His interest in the fur trade at this time was intimately bound up with the idea of the importance of rivers in Canadian history. Only months before he had corresponded with H.G. Moulton of the Institute of Economics in Chicago about writing a history of the St Lawrence.7 Since the publication of his thesis on the Canadian Pacific Railway the previous year, he had the uneasy feeling that he had begun the economic history of Canada in medias res.8 While he had analyzed the unification of Canada through the steel rail, he had come to believe that the river networks utilized by the fur trade had established Canada's original political space.

Innis's subject of research was still evolving when he left for the Mackenzie in June 1924. However, two important strands of thought bounded his general approach: one drew on an amorphous sense of nationalism, tinged with northern imagery; another, more narrowly intellectual, was based on Thorstein Veblen's theories of industrialism. Innis's attitudes towards nationalism shifted over his career, but in the 1920s they were largely enthusiastic, a product of recent experience and an envisioned future. During the war, Innis was appalled by the disregard shown to Canada and Canadian soldiers by the British, and lost whatever sentimental affection he may have once felt for Britain and Empire.9 Similarly, while completing graduate school in Chicago, he expressed frustration at the lack of recognition paid to the Allies by the Americans and voiced concern about a growing American arrogance in world affairs.10 By the early 1920s, his disillusionment with Britain and the United States produced a complementary counterpart: an enthusiasm for the growth of Canada as a nation, with the ability to create itself as a dominion through internal territorial conquest.