Sink the Bastards!!!

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Jun 27, 2011
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Forget Halloween costumes and yoga, thereā€™s a new symbol of cultural appropriationā€”the canoe.

According to Misao Dean, Professor of English at the University of Victoria, the canoe can be a symbol of colonialism, imperialism and genocide due to history. She also accused the canoers of cultural appropriation because they are primarily white men and have a privileged place in society.

In a radio interview for CBC Radio, which wasnā€™t picked by the Internet until several months later, she claimed ā€œwe have a whole set of narratives that make the canoe into a kind of morally untouchable symbol, something that seems natural, that seems ordinary, and seems to promote values that we ascribe to.ā€

ā€œBut I think if you look a little further that narrative obscures or erases another narrativeā€”and that narrative is about, to be blunt, itā€™s about theft and genocideā€, the professor said.
 
It's about a canada's obsession with canoeing and its place in canadian literature

The book opens with a personal memoir of Deanā€™s own inheritance of her fatherā€™s canoe paddle before giving way elsewhere in the introduction to other forms of and ideas about cultural inheritance. This moves into eight chapters, each with a distinctive theme. The first chapter draws on David Bentleyā€™s notion of ā€˜uncannydaā€™, that is, the sense of having a link to the landscape but one that evokes ā€˜the otherā€™ and results in ā€˜kinds of illusion or vertigoā€™ (p. 18). Engaging with a wide range of canoe literature, principally the work of Margaret Atwood, the discussion that follows draws the reader into the underlying postcolonial analysis, oftentimes most effectively. Chapter 2 moves from literature to historiography, this time leaning partially on the ideas of Hayden White. This chapter recalls to mind Ian McKayā€™s great work The Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth Century Nova Scotia (1994) and concludes in a similar kind of way, the ā€˜folkā€™ (in this instance, canoeists) obscuring wider conflicts. Chapters 3 and 4 dissect wilderness canoeing and canoe pageantry. Chapters 5 and 6 tease out the relationship between canoeing, ā€˜the northā€™ and ā€˜northernnessā€™, and provide fulfilling engagement not only with the discrete matter of canoeing in the northern wilderness but also its place in constructing the idea of the north. Chapter 7 turns its critical attention to the Canadian Canoe Museum. This is the weakest chapter of the book. It feels a little out of place and, given the author has sacrificed a full conclusion, could certainly have been left out without harming the overall impact. Finally, chapter 8 turns back to the postcolonial theme that has bubbled under the surface throughout. Here the subject matter is turned on its head: rather than non-indigenous Canadians seeking to become indigenous, we have indigenous Canadians endeavouring to decolonise their own heritage.
Project MUSE - <i>Inheriting a Canoe Paddle: The Canoe in Discourses of English-Canadian Nationalism</i> by Misao Dean (review)

nobody is making fun of your tiny white penis
 

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