Category Archives: Northwest Territories

Vintage Picture Map Geography of Canada

February 4, 2017 By in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Yukon Tags: , , 41 Comments

nw-territories

I recently came across a copy of an old school book, “Picture Map Geography of Canada and Alaska” by Vernon Quinn, that includes charming woodcut picture maps by Bruno da Osimo, a then noted Italian illustrator, for each of the Canadian provinces (other than Nunavut, which was then part of the Northwest Territories).  Originally published in 1944 and updated in 1954, it has a light but well-written chapter devoted to individual provinces.  Each map features animals, plants, activities and industries peculiar to the province depicted.  In addition to the maps (scanned in above and below), the book is adorned throughout with other delightful illustrations by da Osima (some of which I’ll compile in a future post).

alberta british-columbia manitoba-saskatchewan newfoundland nova-scotia-new-brunswick-pei ontario-2 quebec yukon

 

Similar Posts on O’Canada Blog:

• 1933 Quebec Tourist Road Map

• Old Maps and Their Hidden Stories

• Songs & Ballads From Nova Scotia

Artist to Appreciate: Michael E. Glover

October 6, 2013 By in Alberta, Art, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Northwest Territories, Ontario, Saskatchewan Tags: , , , , , , , , , 24 Comments
Michael Glover, End of the Line, Hines Creek, Alberta (2010) 2

Michael Glover, End of the Line, Hines Creek, Alberta (2010)

___

Michael Glover’s realist artwork conveys a deep appreciation for the stark and forlorn rural and industrial landscapes that hint at the hardscrabble existence of the hardy folks who settled such remote areas long ago.  His sense of place is strong — even to the point that the titles of his paintings denote the specific towns depicted — and I like that much of his work focuses on the often overlooked Canadian heartland regions of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta.  However, Glover is the rare Canadian painter whose work embraces images of virtually all the country’s provinces, reflecting his wide travels across Canada’s vast expanse.

Michael Glover, In The Heartland, Aneroid, Saskatchewan (2006)

Michael Glover, In The Heartland, Aneroid, Saskatchewan (2006)

___

Michael Glover, On the Crowsnest Line, Pincher Station, Alberta (2012)

Michael Glover, On the Crowsnest Line, Pincher Station, Alberta (2012)

Michael Glover, Forgotten Timber, Wawa, Ontario (2007)

Michael Glover, Forgotten Timber, Wawa, Ontario (2007)

___

Michael Glover, Once Proud, Still Strong, Fredericton, N.B. (2004)

Michael Glover, Once Proud, Still Strong, Fredericton, N.B. (2004)

___

Michael Glover, Standing Proud in the Eleventh Hour, Mossleigh, Alberta (2006)

Michael Glover, Standing Proud in the Eleventh Hour, Mossleigh, Alberta (2006)

___

Michael Glover, The Final Days of Fleming, Fleming, Saskatchewan (2012)

Michael Glover, The Final Days of Fleming, Fleming, Saskatchewan (2012)

___

Michael Glover, Alexandria Falls, Enterprise, NWT (2012)

Michael Glover, Alexandria Falls, Enterprise, NWT (2012)

___

Michael Glover, Nightstop, Grenfell, Saskatchewan (2012)

Michael Glover, Nightstop, Grenfell, Saskatchewan (2012)

___

Glover has a much-deserved exhibition opening in late November 2013 at the Art Gallery of Northumberland (Ontario), appropriately entitled “The Lost and Forgotten: Canada’s Vanishing Landscape.”   More of Glover’s exceptional art may also be viewed at his website here and at the Quinn’s of Tweed (Ontario) gallery.

Image Credits:  Michael E. Glover

The Pride of the Mounties

February 3, 2013 By in Books / Literature, Northwest Territories, Outdoor Adventure, Society Tags: , , , , , , , , 30 Comments

Mountie On the Rapids

Ask most Americans about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — more commonly called the Canadian Mounties — and you’ll frequently hear comments indicating a generally high regard for the Mounties and their association with the frontier derring do.  With their iconic red serge coats and dimpled Stetson hats, the public image of the Mounties has had a warm reception in the American imagination, even if over the years, like many police forces, they have had their ups and downs and share of controversies.

My early introduction to the Mounties included watching as a kid countless Dudley Do Right cartoons, which presented an amiable if bumbling caricature of a Mountie, and educational reels from school about the valor of the Mounties.  Slightly later came Monty Python’s humorous send up of another Canadian icon, the lumberjack, which featured the good-natured Mounties providing a back up chorus.  Probably because of all these sources I almost always thought of the Mounties as a wilderness fighting force, and did not fully understand their broader policing role.

The idea that the Mounties “always got their man” also stuck with me from childhood.  Fittingly, that unofficial motto was attributed to the Mounties by an American publication (at least according to the Wikipedia entry on the RCMP).  The RCMP as we know it today resulted from the merger of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, which first patrolled the Northwest Territories starting in the late 1800s, and the country’s Dominion Police.   As testament to the acclaim enjoyed by the Mounties, they were frequent heroic subjects of popular American books, pulp fiction, magazine stories, radio shows and movies from the 1920s through the 1960s.  A sampling of related pop culture images is collected below.

Peculiar Consensus Way Up North

April 1, 2011 By in Northwest Territories, Nunavut Tags: Leave a comment

 

Interior of NWT Legislative Assembly Building

Election Season Installment 2:  One of the more peculiar features of Canada’s provincial political culture has to be the consensus-type government in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut.  Unlike the party-driven systems that are most typical of representative governments, in a consensus system — at least in those two provinces — all candidates are elected as independents to a legislature and those representatives then select among themselves a premier and cabinet ministers.  The remaining members, who comprise a majority, then act as a de facto loyal opposition by holding the executive leaders accountable.

The consensus system first developed in the Northwest Territories, partly due to the community-based traditions of cooperativeness and consensus decisionmaking  among the Inuit  and other northern peoples.  Consensus governing was naturally adopted by Nunavut shortly after that most-northern province  was split off from NWT.  Continue reading →

Inuksuit

January 31, 2011 By in Books / Literature, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Society Tags: , , , 1 Comment

 

Inuksuit - Silent Messengers of the Arctic

Perhaps because we in the South have been having one of the more intensely cold and icy winters in recent memory, my thoughts have turned of late to the Canadian Arctic.   Of course, my fascination with that region pre-dates the latest cold spell but the current chilliness causes me to contemplate in a more direct way the far north regions and what  difficult living that must be.   So, about a month ago I read through Inuksuit:  Silent Messengers of the North by Norman Hallendy, which clued me into the mysterious man-made rock structures called inuksuk (the plural being inuksuit) and the special role they play in keeping people connected with one another and spiritual forces across the vast and barren — and hauntingly beautiful — landscape.  Hallendy came to understand the intricate language and significations of inuksuit among the Inuit people over the course of his more than 40 years visiting the Canadian Arctic.    His book does a wonderful job allowing us to peek into the lives of the Inuit and their reverence for the natural world.

inukshuk in igloolik by arctic-wl

(Bottom photo credit: arctic-wl’s photostream on flickr:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/wolfwl/collections/)

Regional Reads: Up Here & Yukon, North of Ordinary

October 18, 2010 By in Media, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Yukon Tags: , , 2 Comments

 

I’m a glutton for magazines and, undoubtedly, have way more subscriptions than warranted for any normal person.   Although online media continue to nip at the heels of print media, magazines continue to hold their own, especially where the publication is able to use online multi-media features to enhance its offline offerings.   Just as with the U.S., Canada has a wealth of solid mainstream publications, but the ones that most attract my attention are the regional and niche publications.  With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to take a look periodically at some of the country’s noteworthy smaller magazines, and to do that by starting way up north.

Amazingly, the far north is graced with at least two truly terrific general circulation regional magazines, Up Here and Yukon, North of  of Ordinary.   The more broad ranging in scope and literary of the two appears to be the monthly Up Here, which principally focuses on life in the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, although it occasionally touches upon the far northern regions of Canada’s other mainland provinces.   The magazine’s layout conveys a playful, slightly hip aesthetic and its editorial content provides enough variety to satisfy even picky readers.  The latest issue I have (September 2010) features stories on Inuit who have moved south to Ottawa and Toronto, the failed effort in the 1960s and 1970s to develop a modern-day Shangri-La in the far north, a desperate Nunavut survival tale from almost a century ago, and, on a lighter note, the winners of the annual “Write Like Robert Service Poetry Contest.”  From an online perspective, Up Here‘s website makes available selected content from past issues, including entertaining multi-media features.  Not surprisingly, others have also taken note of this nifty little publication with lots of personality — so much so that Up Here received the prestigious 2010 Magazine of the Year Award from the National Magazine Awards Foundation.

Link to website of Up Here:  http://www.uphere.ca/

 

Yukon, North of Ordinary stakes out a narrower geographic niche, emphasizing happenings in the Yukon.  The magazine devotes more attention to business matters in its editorial voice.  However, the quality of its feature writing is quite good.   The Fall 2010 issue profiles spooky haunts in Dawson City, reports on a cultural festival of the local Tr’ondek Hwech’in people, and explores how far flung Yukon families use technology to stay connected across wide distances.  The publication also serves as the official inflight magazine of Whitehorse-based Air North, so several pages cover matters of interest with that airline.  While Yukon‘s website is not as robust as that of Up Here, Yukon‘s site  archive provides better overall access to past issues.  Both these magazines  have a great deal that is useful and entertaining to offer their respective readerships and they each demonstrate why print media continues to retain our interest notwithstanding the pull of the web.

Link to Yukon, North of Ordinary:  http://www.northofordinary.ca/

The Mighty Nahanni River

April 12, 2010 By in Northwest Territories, Outdoor Adventure Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

 

Albert Faille in his Longboat on the Nahanni River

I spent several days last week with my youngest son hiking and camping along a 30-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail, or the AT, as it is commonly called, in Georgia.  Most of the AT in Georgia is full of steep ascents and descents, so each mile takes its toll and leaves a big impression.  Hiking also lends itself to quiet reflection, which alone is sufficient reason to endure the inevitable aches and pains.

So it was that during one extended ascent along our route that I found myself thinking back to a video I had seen some months ago about the arduous life of an itinerant gold prospector named Albert Faille, who lived along the Nahanni River in the Northwest Territories.  The video documented Faille’s eighth unsuccessful attempt in as many years to navigate 400 miles up the magnificent Nahanni River to access a legendary gold mine.   What stood out for me was the tenacity of this fellow.  Among other things, he had to portage around the torrential Virginia Falls — falls that are twice as high as Niagara.  You could feel his effort as he carried the considerable contents of his longboat up a steep hillside and around the falls, which required trip after trip until it was all safely stowed.  He even brought with him extra lumber to build by hand another boat at the top of the falls, which took him about a week to do.  Unfortunately, between the delays in getting up river and the challenges posed by the river itself, Faille was forced to retreat 40 or so miles short of his goal.  Nevertheless, his dauntlessness served as a source of inspiration to me on my own arduous, albeit much milder, trek up a ridge or two of the Appalachians.

A link to the fairly short video (approx. 18 minutes) on the website of the National Film Board of Canada is here:  http://www.nfb.ca/film/Nahanni/.  The video, which is characterized by overly wrought  music and a melodramatic narrator, both typical of the 1960s documentary style, does a nice job highlighting the unmistakable beauty of the region.  I suspect this is an area that not only is not well-traveled due to its remoteness, but is likely also not even very well-known.  Yet, as a testament to its magnificence, Nahanni National Park was the first place designated as a World Heritage Site by the U.N.  I have not had the privilege yet of actually visiting Nahanni National Park but I hope to at some point.

%d bloggers like this: