Nuevas ideas

In this Part, Île-à-la-Crosse’s physical state is discussed. Certainly, people have an impact on natural surroundings but just as much (if not more so), a landscape directly influences human activities. As such, those surroundings should be better appreciated so that all the sources of social activities can be recalled but also considered for their complementary or contradictory form to natural non-human processes. In creating this Part about what happened “millions upon millions of years ago,” I hope it acts as what Jonathan Spence called a “memory palace”.124

Before moving into the specific details, 125 _{some preliminary observations are helpful.}

First, the region is a land mass with large numbers of different species determining ways

124 _{The first quoted phrase appears in James Michener’s Hawaii (New York: Random House,} 1959), 1.I thank Michael Lynk, Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Law, for showing this reference to me and discussing the impact such a statement has at the beginning of a study. For remarks about appreciating “a living Earth” first before moving to arguments about history, politics, and law, see John Borrows’ “Living Law on a Living Earth: Aboriginal Religion, Law and the Constitution,” in Law and Religious Pluralism in Canada, ed. Richard Moon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 161. For a scholarly monograph detailing how events far back in time impact modern human times see Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (London, UK: Hutchinson Radius, 1990). 125 _{Some good examples of an introductory chapter appear in John J. Bukowczyk et al, eds.,} Permeable Border: The Great Lakes as Transnational Region, 1650-1990 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire; Samuel Hay, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959); Roderick Nash,

Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967); Hilda Neatby, Quebec: the Revolutionary Age, 1760-1791; Stephen J. Pyne, The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (Ames, Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 1986). The conceptual benefits of having a separate section are explained in Richard White, “American Environmental History: The Development of a New Historical Field,” The Pacific Historical Review 54, no. 3 (August 1985):

to co-exist. Second, the physical features of Île-à-la-Crosse have coincidentally been as understudied as the histories about the region’s residents. How the absence of research about physical geography impacts research about human activities is impossible to confirm in a complete way. Still, knowing that the land is as un-researched as the people seems important to mention. Given that historians such as Simon Schama have argued that linking geographical data and social lives is essential for social history to be accurate,126 _{it seems only reasonable to note this double absence. When we decide to}

learn about “the way the land moved,”127 _{and find that doing so means searching much}

further and wider than expected, it seems even more important to provide commentary about the setting – regardless of how difficult it might be to do so.128

297. In my view, the best example of how to intertwine human endeavours with a region’s

geographical functions remains the first chapter of Arthur J. Ray’s I Have Lived Here Since the World Began (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1996), called “The Land as History Book.” An example which creates a ‘social geography,’ albeit of a different region, and contains the combination of physical features with intercultural interaction is David Meyer’s and Paul C. Thistle’s

“Saskatchewan River Rendezvous Centers and Trading Posts: Continuity in a Cree Social Geography,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 403-444.

126 _{See Schama’s description of “it awaited him somewhere beyond the academy: in the} landscape itself.” Simon Schama, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 50.

127_{On page 11 of The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis calls for more studies to} illustrate this point.

128 _{Said considers these comments especially important if an audience will not visit the region.} See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 49. Olena V. Smyntyna, “The Environmental Approach to Prehistoric Studies: Concepts and Theories,” History and Theory 42, no. 4 (2003): 59: “It has always seemed to me very curious that, although our book-shelves are heavily weighed by histories of countries of the world, it is seldom that we find in them a single chapter on a country as an area of land. That is something that has been forgotten by the historians. Even if they did not forget or overlook it, they did not conceive it as necessary; and yet the history of our countryside is an essential part of our history. Therefore, because of this lapse it has tended to be the work of historical geographers and a definition of their craft might be 'the history of the countryside.'”Richard Muir documented how such a call came out long ago, and it has gone largely unheeded.Richard Muir, “Geography and the History of Landscape: Half a Century of Development as Recorded in the Geographical Journal.” The Geographical Journal164, no. 2 (Jul., 1998): 148. See also W. G. East’s 1951 “The Changing English Landscape: Discussion” Geographical Journal 117, no. 4 (December 1951): 397-8. For examples of recent projects see Elizabeth Furniss, The Burden of History: Colonialisms and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community and W. J. Turkel, The Archive of Place. Sadly, modern studies exist where the authors claim to be concerned with geography but then only

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present a scant amount of detail themselves. As an example, see Margaret Conrad and Alvin Finkel, Canada: A National History (Toronto: Longman, 2003), 2-4.

129 _{Figure 1 - Signa Daum Shanks, “Île-à-la-Crosse and Canada,” 2015. At 55.4500° North} and 107.8833° West, Île-à-la-Crosse’s location is easily understood as located within “northern Canada” or more specifically Canada’s “North West.”

130 _{Figure 2 - Signa Daum Shanks, “Île-à-la-Crosse and western Canada,” 2015. Within western} Canada, Île-à-la-Crosse is located in the province of Saskatchewan. It is 478 kilometres north of the province’s largest city (Saskatoon) and is 735 kilometres north of the provincial capital of Regina.

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