ABSTRACT
My first encounter with Canada occurred during my geography lessons as a young girl. There, in an atlas of physical geography, colored green, pink, and yellow, I came across Canada—a place of trees, lakes, wheat fields, ice caps, and an ancient rock formation cut through with glaciers. I don't remember reading anything of the history of this country in my geography book, but somehow there were faint echoes of people and nature blurring into each other—“red Indians,” “eskimos,” “igloos,” “aurora borealis,” and “reindeer.” From where did these images come if not from my geography book? From literature and scattered visual images perhaps? There were, after all, the books of Fenimore Cooper or Jack London, which irrespective of national boundaries created mythologies of the “North,” the “Indian,” and wove tales of discovery of the Arctic—of Amundsen and others lost in blizzards on their dog sleds. Eventually, on my fourteenth birthday, I received a book called The Scalpel and the Sword, and I decided to be a doctor, like Norman Bethune.
