ABSTRACT

Sharing a similar interest in retrieving a community-strengthening model of masculinity is Richard Van Camp’s “Dogrib Midnight Runners”. After Tomson Highway play, Van Camp’s short story depicts three young Dogrib men struggling to find their purpose in a small town in the Northwest Territories. While Van Camp’s story is a very different work than Highway’s play in genre, tone, and resolution, many of the considerations at the center of Dry Lips are reprised in “Dogrib Midnight Runners.” The freedom and self-assuredness that Justin exhibits—running on the highway naked, with his eyes closed—is inscrutable to Grant because such freedom is totally unknown to him. The ease of Justin’s movement across town and along the highway is an exercise of spatial entitlement. A major instrument to the settler-colonial acquisition of territory, the implementation of the highway system in Canada structured very particular ways of seeing the land: as resource for the country’s economic and industrial wealth and as backdrop for masculine enterprise.