Object Social/Cultural Context

Object Social/Cultural Context, due Feb 9

How has your object or objects like it figured in cultural processes? How is it used? When is it used? How does its use vary with audience? What different meanings does it convey in different cultural contexts, in different spaces, and/or for different audiences?

The Mountains of BC are perhaps more a symbol succinctly summarized as The Canadian Mountain.  I say this because of how they are figured in the cultural process of nationalism. The mountains of BC become The Canadian Mountain through tourism campaigns, advertising Canada as a destination of choice for travelers, exploiting the awe and adventure non-mountain dwellers associate with mountains in general. If you search ‘Canada’ in a search engine set on retrieving only images, the first page will produce pictures of the Canadian flag, the map of Canada, and photos of mountains. Even though mountain terrain currently makes up only a small percentage of the ecosystems enclosed within Canadian borders, somehow, the mountains (for the most part located in BC) have come to mean Canada, more so than any other landscape. On the official tourism website of the Canadian Tourism Commission (an agency of the Government of Canada) http://www.canada.travel/selectCountry.html, the first page is filled with a photo of a skier, snow flying, and yes, mountains and more mountains stretching into the background.

The Canadian Mountain has also been taken up and resymbolized. Actually, it would make sense this process happened first before Canadian tourism picked up on it. North America being metaphorically referred to as Gold Mountain is a process that Chinese migrants started in the mid 1800s. With the onset of several gold rushes within the US and Canadian Rockies, as well as the nation building activities of the time such as the construction of the cross-Canada (and US) railway systems and subsequent logging and mining industries helping support the railway, North America was progressively pictured across the Pacific as a land in which to work and a land in which to prosper. And Gold Mountain was for the most part, a temporary space in which to make one’s fortune and eventually come back across the Pacific to retire and share the wealth with family.

So in both the tourism and early migrant worker context, The Canadian Mountain is used to attract temporary inhabitance to the nation. This message of temporary inhabitance reminds me of the sentiments surrounding Japanese-Canadian (from here on in referred to as Nikkei) incarceration in The Canadian Mountain. Underlying the war-time paranoia and xenophobia was a deeper xenophobic racism that had been nagging at the Nikkei ever since they started settling along the west coast in 1877. Amid anti-Asian riots, and laws barring Nikkei from voting and equal access to industrial fishing equipment (many were employed as fishermen), a racism against them thrived and was determined to squeeze them out of their jobs and their homes. The war was an opportune time to for Canada to achieve goal while maintaining a ‘colorblind’ peaceful image as a nation. Instead of pointing a finger at a particular group and saying, out – we don’t like your face…Canada could cry ‘national security’ and relocate over 90% of the Nikkei population to remote ghost towns (left over from gold rush days) in the mountains of BC (and also on the sugar beet farms of Alberta, working as free labour).