ABSTRACT
The chapter demonstrates the various ways in which three Canadian texts aimed at young readers – Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's Dance of the Banished (2014), Kassandra Luciuk and Nicole Marie Burton's Enemy Alien: A True Story of Life Behind Barbed Wire (2020), and Pam Clark's Kalyna (2016) – depict the hinterlands of the First World War Internment camps in Kapuskasing, Ontario, and Castle Mountain, Alberta. Hinterland, in the context of this chapter, is understood in two ways: as a distant space where the First World War internment operations took place, and metaphorically, as a silenced – thus marginal – part of collective memory. The hinterlands of the camps – both physical and metaphorical – represent colonial and political violence directed against both immigrants and Canada's First Nations. The author investigates the disparities in the descriptions of Canadian landscapes and argues that while Clark and Skrypuch portray conquering nature as a sacrifice that the immigrants have to pay to eventually be accepted as Canadians, in Luciuk and Burton's graphic novel, the hinterlands of the camp emerge as symbols of disappointment and loss of faith in Canada as the promised land.
