The Iconic North

Explores how the “modern” South crafted cultural images of a “primitive” North that reflected its own preconceived notions and social, political, and economic interests.

Joan Sangster is a historian who teaches gender and women’s studies at the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies at Trent University. A fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, she has held visiting fellowships at McGill, Duke, and Princeton universities. She is the author of Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada; Girl Trouble: Female Delinquency in English Canada; Regulating Girls and Women: Sexuality, Family, and the Law, Ontario 1920–60; Earning Respect: The Lives of Working Women in Small-Town Ontario, 1920–1960; and Dreams of Equality: Women on the Canadian Left, 1920–60. A retrospective collection of her essays, Through Feminist Eyes: Essays in Canadian Women’s History, was published in 2012.

Few authors possess the skill to take an everyday image and turn it just slightly, in Twilight Zone fashion, to reveal a startling and intriguing truth. Professor Joan Sangster of Trent University does just that in The Iconic North. To read Sangster’s account is to question every common media depiction of the Arctic.

Mary-Ellen Kelm, Simon Fraser University:
What makes Joan Sangster’s The Iconic North stand out is the way she links so many cultural forms – television and film, novels, periodicals, report and travel writing – with the political economy of northern development in post-war Canada. Though Sangster’s reading of these works is skillful, this is not a study in discourse analysis. Rather it is a richly contextualized interpretation that makes clear how cultural constructions of the North served to legitimate, justify, and explain internal colonialism.

Robyn Schwarz, Western University:

This book fills an important gap in the field of Canadian cultural history.

J. S. Krysiek, Gettysburg College:
“Sangster … is not the first to focus on the North and its place in the Canadian identity, but her effort must be celebrated because it is so candid.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and up.

Renee Hulan:
The Iconic North brings fresh insight and evidence of what these images tell us about how post-war Canada saw the North: as its own colonial other.

Sherrill Grace, OC, author of Canada and the Idea of North:

The Iconic North is essential reading for anyone interested in the Canadian North. Broad in scope and focusing on an understudied period of our cultural history, the discussion is elegantly written and meticulously researched … Sangster, one of our pre-eminent feminist historians, has given us a must-read book to savour.

Shelagh D. Grant, author of The Polar Imperative: A History of Arctic Sovereignty in North America:

A thoughtful, innovative, and insightful study of southern perceptions about the Canadian North and its Indigenous peoples in the decades following the Second World War. Exceptionally well-researched, this book is a “must read” for Arctic scholars in both the social sciences and the humanities.

Nancy Janovicek, author of Feminist History in Canada: New Essays on Women, Gender, Work, and Nation:

The Iconic North is a fascinating examination of the ideological construction of the Indigenous North in postwar Canada. I highly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand the history – and future – of the circumpolar region.

Sarah Carter, author of Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West:

Given the current geopolitical struggles over the future of the North, this is a timely sophisticated intervention in debates in the field of Aboriginal and colonial history in Canada and internationally.