Capítulo 2 Marco teórico
2.1 Antecedentes
2.3.1 Teorías de estilos de aprendizaje
Today, it might seem ridiculous to imagine how a study about Canada’s North West could exclude the Churchill River. But until certain researchers argued for more in- depth analysis about what they called the “Parklands,” such was the case. Given that trend, Île-à-la-Crosse in particular went largely ignored – even by those claiming an interest in Saskatchewan.176 Although some analyses of the North West appeared
175 Image 3 - Parkland space in northwestern Saskatchewan in the autumn. Photo by Karol Dabbs and courtesy the Nature Conservancy of Canada.
at the end of the nineteenth century, undertaken by men such as J. B. Tyrrell,177
years passed before others built upon these investigations to include Saskatchewan or the Churchill River in their findings.178 As if to reinforce this ignorance within
scholarly research, many corporate entities that regularly completed their own investigations about natural resource exploitation also chose to ignore the North West’s conditions.179 Such a lack of research180 has led modern commentators to
argue that the absence of information along with popular and uninformed
generalizations actually reinforced ‘frontierist’ attitudes about the West’s relevance within the rest of Canada.181 It seems geographical efforts did as much to strengthen
177 The annual reports from the Geological Survey of Canada, started in 1888, helped determine general trends in all parts of the country. When examining treatment in these reports of the west, however, it becomes evident that the GSC did not think it as important to get annual information about the West compared to central Canada.J. B. Tyrrell and D.B. Dowling, “Report on the Country Between Athabasca Lake and Churchill River”, in Geological Survey of Canada Annual Report 8 (1896): 1D-120D. For another example of some interest in Île-à-la-Crosse see J. B. Tyrrell, “An Expedition through the Barren Lands of Northern Canada,” 437.
178 As an example of the academy’s slowness to learn about the North West more fully, read the following remarks and notice its date: “To the south of it is an area of 4,000 square miles at present a complete blank on the map, while to the north of it lays a region covering 73,000 square miles, totally unexplored by White men.” F. J. Alcock, “The Churchill River,” American Geological Society2, no. 6 (December 1916): 433. Another effort is in Murray James Frarey,
“Reconnaissance Geology of Ile a la Crosse Area, Saskatchewan, Canada,” (Master’s Thesis, University of Michigan, 1950): 3-10. A. Inglis, Northern Vagabond: The Life and Career of J. B. Tyrrell (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1978), 2 also contains mention. Despite having received visitors for more than fifty years previous, the area’s botanical qualities were not recorded until Franklin did so during his 1825-1827 travels. Soper, “History, Range, and Home Life,” 354.
179 Robert Jarvenpa and Hetty Jo Brumbach, Ethno Archeological and Cultural Frontiers: Athabascan, Algonquian, and European Adaptation in the Central Subarctic (New York: Peter Lang, 1989), 208; F. J. Alcock, “The Churchill River,” 433.
180 For one of the more significant descriptions of the Parklands that subsequently received little attention from later writers, seeRichards, Saskatchewan, 90 and Nevin M. Fenneman,
“Physiograhic Divisions of the United States,” Annals of Association of American Geographers 18, no. 4 (December 1928): 261-353.For an earlier discussion about the debates regarding the Parklands, and how it applies to the North West, see Jim Wright, “Saskatchewan,” 110. Whether ironic or typical, the article’s map shows how Île-à-la-Crosse can be forgotten. The map has a dot where Île-à-la-Crosse is located, but it is the map’s only dot that is not given a name. See Wright, Saskatchewan, the History of a Province, 130-131.
181 J. M. S. Careless, “Frontierism, Metropolitanism and Canadian History,” Canadian Historical Review, 35 (1954): 1. See Kerwin Lee Klein’s observations about how not noticing the complexity of the Parklands is an unsurprising extension of “Frontierist” principles in Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890-1990
Creighton’s Laurentien thesis as Creighton did himself.So while the concept
“Parkland” has acted as a tool to identify complex regions, its very appearance also represents a challenge to many earlier researchers’ fundamental premises because of how it had to be invented as a response to overly simplistic analysis.
The term is considered the label to use for areas including wetlands, and using the label also means realizing that those wetlands’ boundaries themselves must be understood as inherently porous and shifting. With such a tendency within the term’s physical form, “Parklandists” (my term) argue the macro-boundaries of Parklands (or sometimes called “ecotone”) regions – and then its adjacent regions ‒ change at the micro level and in overall form.182 As an effect of determining that the
concept has this quality, Parklandists critique other researchers for their apparently overly-dependent mention of precise borders for any geological, geographical, or even social boundaries.183 Just as Parklands contain creatures and conditions that
shift shape repeatedly and easily, Parklandists argue academics should demonstrate the ability to shift views as well. Because scholars have failed to do so, Parklandists
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 113-115. See also Peter J. Usher,
“Traditional Ecological Knowledge In Environmental Assessment and Management,” Arctic 53, no. 2 (June 2000): 183-193 and Deborah McGregor, “Coming Full Circle: Indigenous Knowledge, Environment and our Future,” American Indian Quarterly 28, nos. 3 and 4, (Summer/Fall 2004): 385-410.
182 Compare this view to the one presented in a map found in Richards, Saskatchewan, 9. 183 A more recent presentation claims to interpret Saskatchewan as having a certain “dividing line” between southern and northern parts of the province. I feel uncomfortable noticing such a line in can appreciate the hope that such a line is aimed at highlighting- that something between the Shield and Plains surely must exist. See Massie, Forest Prairie Edge, 10.
often conclude those not appreciating the Parklands have unfortunately created untrustworthy presentations about many geographical subjects.184
When searching for how the province of Saskatchewan correlates to “Parklands,” the term’s application makes the commonly used Great Plains/Canadian Shield paradigm beyond inadequate. More than half the province becomes Parklands and Saskatchewan is no longer a place considered only full of wheat fields in the south and coniferous trees in the north. 185 When a Parklandist perspective is applied to
Île-à-la-Crosse in particular, the village becomes in the heart of a large Parklands swath. As a result, the issue of having Île-à-la-Crosse in a Plains/Shield setting becomes even more problematic- especially when the use of that technique has placed the village in both categories. 186 As an idea, “Parklands” provides a more
refined understanding of Saskatchewan and the village. But at the same time,
184 Carter, Sea of Destiny (New York, Greenberg, 1940),19; Howell, “Reconnaissance Survey of Ile a la Crosse area, Saskatchewan,” 10.
185 David Carpenter’s Courting Saskatchewan (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 1996), 79 promotes the value of studying the Parklands. In comparison, note J. Lewis Robinson’s contention that noticing “forested interior plains” is sufficient. Robinson, Concepts and Themes in the Regional Geography of Canada (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1990), 190. As Clifford Knight provides great details about the Parklands, and his work appeared in 1965, it is important to critique modern studies for not mentioning Parklands data.Clifford B. Knight, Basic Concepts of Ecology (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1965), 337-347. Some observers have provided remarks about how binaries of any kind, including the issue of only two geographical regions, impair our analysis when searching for the holistic/organic nature of social and cultural relations. See Rita Dhamoon, Identity/Difference Politics: How Difference is Produced and Why It Matters (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 30.
186 For even newer examples that do not introduce relevant data about the location of Parklands see Robert Bones’ The Geography of the Canadian North (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Figure 6-1 in R. Cole Harris’ Reluctant Land: Society, Space and Envirnments in Canada Before Confederation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009). In Harris’ map, Île-À-la-Crosse appears to be located in the Great Plains. See also J.M.S. Careless, Canada: A Story of Challenge (Toronto: Stoddart, 1991), 6-7. J. Howard Richards, Saskatchewan, a geographical appraisal (Saskatoon: Division of Extension and Community Relations, University of
Saskatchewan, 1981) also has a general map with Île-À-la-Crosse in the Great Plains. In comparison, Frarey considers Île-À-la-Crosse part of the Canadian Shield. Frarey,
“Reconnaissance Geology,” 12. See also Ted Regehr, Remembering Saskatchewan, for a more recent study still using the Shield/Plains paradigm.
Parklands discourse illustrates how yet another subfield reinforced Île-à-la-Crosse’s absence or inaccurate place in scholarship over the past century.