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Article Excerpt
This essay investigates primacy as evident in new technologies in Agnes Deans Cameron's 1909 The New North. Cameron uses cameras, typewriter, and map to consolidate and expand upon the traveller's conventional claim to be first, a claim that she enlarges to include gender, geography, ethnography, and nationalism.
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When travellers and explorers write about their journeys, an essential part of their narratives is the claim to be first to discover, explore, or write about a particular area of the world. Feminist geographers Alison Blunt and Jane Wills suggest that the most definite relationship between "imperial power and geographical knowledge" is through "exploration and so-called discovery, charting territory that was often thought to be unknown and mapping and naming apparently 'new' places" (194). As Blunt and Wills's use of the words "so-called" and "apparently" indicates, claims to discovery are often questionable, since discoverers are usually accompanied by others, often of another cultural group, who show them the way, and are often met by others, again of another cultural group, who already occupy the "discovered" area. But even travellers who make no assertion of imperial power through discovery frequently claim to participate in or write about a unique activity. Dennis Porter identifies a "sense of belatedness in a traveler, especially in a traveler who decides to give a written account of his travels," which manifests itself in the need "to add something new and recognizably his own to the accumulated testimony of his predecessors" (12).
Travellers have traditionally enforced claims both to primacy and to uniqueness through technologies of representation and communication that include diaries, maps, and illustrations. Diaries provide apparently unmediated details about topography and ethnography. Maps trace routes and support claims, through charting and naming of geographical features, that the author is the discoverer of unknown lands. Sketches and paintings illustrate landscapes and ethnographies, again as a way of demonstrating previously unknown information.
By the turn of the twentieth century, travellers were using photographs, typewritten journals, and telegraphed reports, along with more traditional avenues of representation such as maps and hand-written diaries, to make their claims. Agnes Deans Cameron's 1909 book, The New North: Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada to the Arctic, demonstrates the use both of older representative modes such as maps, and of illustrations and narratives produced by relatively new technologies such as the portable camera and the typewriter. Cameron illustrated her travels with Kodak cameras introduced in 1888, which made photography relatively easy because they used film rather than plates, and she recorded her travel notes on a front-striking Underwood typewriter introduced commercially in 1895. Through the way that she wrote about and illustrated the process of travel, the communities she visited, and the people she encountered along the way, Cameron challenged prescriptions about women travellers of the early part of the twentieth century, revised conventional descriptions of Inuit and First Nations groups, and carved out a position as a Canadian nationalist. She also used her cameras and her typewriter, along with her map, to consolidate and expand upon the traveller's conventional claim to be first, a claim that she enlarged to include the sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory categories of gender, geography, ethnography, and nationalism.
"Firsts" were not unknown to Cameron, shown in the photograph that served as frontispiece to her book (Illus. 1). She was born in Victoria in 1863 and became famous--and later infamous--as the first woman to teach in a British Columbia high school, the first woman teacher in her area to launch a controversy by strapping a male student, the first woman to serve as a school principal in British Columbia, and the first woman principal in the province to be fired from her job (Pazdro 103, 113). Cameron's teaching certificate was suspended for three years after a 1905 scandal in which students in her school in Victoria were accused of having used rulers to draw straight lines in their art exams. Ostensibly because of the vociferous way she protested penalties levied against her students, but probably because of long-standing conflicts between her and the Victoria school board, Cameron was suspended, even though three other male BC principals whose students had also used rulers kept their jobs (Lampman 10; Pazdro and Latham 113-14). When provincially appointed commissioner P. S. Lampman investigated the controversy, he noted that "considerable friction" had existed for some time between Cameron and the superintendent of education (10), but he upheld her suspension. Left at age forty-two without a means of making her living, Cameron moved to Chicago, where she wrote articles for newspapers and magazines and worked promoting immigration to Canada. In 1908, at the age of forty-four, she embarked on a trip to northern Canada that was to result in The New North. She travelled by rail from Chicago to Edmonton, by stagecoach to Athabasca Landing, and then by scow, steamer, paddlewheeler, and dugout canoe downstream along the Athabasca, Slave, and Mackenzie Rivers to the Arctic and back along the Mackenzie and Peace Rivers. Her stated goals were to observe and promote northern development and to have "fun" along the way (New 26). Her implicit objective was to be the first woman to travel to and write about this area of Canada, which she identified in the title of her book as "new" as though she had invented it.
Throughout her book, Cameron simultaneously inscribes the importance of "firsts" for travellers and critiques such claims to primacy. She refers repeatedly to the "footprints" white male travellers such as Samuel Hearne, Alexander Mackenzie, and Sir John Franklin made on the northern landscape (New 351, 377), implying that because they are white explorers, theirs are the first footsteps that count. She writes that she understands the desire for novelty that inspires so many men to travel north: "The not knowing what is round the next corner, the old heart-hunger for new places and untrod ways" (58). But she also critiques the traveller's easy assumption of primacy by relating the story of a Scottish Presbyterian missionary to Manitoba who thought he was "the first that ever burst into that silent sea" (17). As a result, the missionary interpreted a noise he heard on his approach to the settlement as "the clang of wild-geese," or "the Indian's yell," or "the voice of the North-wind," rather than what it really was: the bell of the Roman Catholic mission.
In the full title of her book, The New North: Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey...
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