Primacy, Technology, and Nationalism in Agnes Deans Cameron's the New North

This essay investigates primacy as evident in new technologies in Agnes Deans Cameron's 1909 The New North. Cameron uses cameras, typewriter, and map consolidate and expand upon the traveller's conventional claim be first, a claim that she enlarges include gender, geography, ethnography, and nationalism. ********** When travellers and explorers write about their journeys, an essential part of their narratives is the claim be first discover, explore, or write about a particular area of the world. Feminist geographers Alison Blunt and Jane Wills suggest that the most definite relationship between power and geographical knowledge is through exploration and discovery, charting territory that was often thought be unknown and mapping and naming 'new' places (194). As Blunt and Wills's use of the words so-called and apparently indicates, claims discovery are often questionable, since discoverers are usually accompanied by others, often of another cultural group, who show them the way, and are often met by others, again of another cultural group, who already occupy the discovered area. But even travellers who make no assertion of imperial power through discovery frequently claim participate in or write about a unique activity. Dennis Porter identifies a sense of belatedness in a traveler, especially in a traveler who decides give a written account of his travels, which manifests itself in the need to add something new and recognizably his own the accumulated testimony of his predecessors (12). Travellers have traditionally enforced claims both primacy and uniqueness through technologies of representation and communication that include diaries, maps, and illustrations. Diaries provide unmediated details about topography and ethnography. Maps trace routes and support claims, through charting and naming of geographical features, that the author is the discoverer of unknown lands. Sketches and paintings illustrate landscapes and ethnographies, again as a way of demonstrating previously unknown information. By the turn of the twentieth century, travellers were using photographs, typewritten journals, and telegraphed reports, along with more traditional avenues of representation such as maps and hand-written diaries, make their claims. Agnes Deans Cameron's 1909 book, The New North: Being Some Account of a Woman's Journey through Canada the Arctic, demonstrates the use both of older representative modes such as maps, and of illustrations and narratives produced by relatively new technologies such as the portable camera and the typewriter. Cameron illustrated her travels with Kodak cameras introduced in 1888, which made photography relatively easy because they used film rather than plates, and she recorded her travel notes on a front-striking Underwood typewriter introduced commercially in 1895. Through the way that she wrote about and illustrated the process of travel, the communities she visited, and the people she encountered along the way, Cameron challenged prescriptions about women travellers of the early part of the twentieth century, revised conventional descriptions of Inuit and First Nations groups, and carved out a position as a Canadian nationalist. She also used her cameras and her typewriter, along with her map, consolidate and expand upon the traveller's conventional claim be first, a claim that she enlarged include the sometimes complementary and sometimes contradictory categories of gender, geography, ethnography, and nationalism. Firsts were not unknown Cameron, shown in the photograph that served as frontispiece her book (Illus. 1). She was born in Victoria in 1863 and became famous--and later infamous--as the first woman teach in a British Columbia high school, the first woman teacher in her area launch a controversy by strapping a male student, the first woman serve as a school principal in British Columbia, and the first woman principal in the province be fired from her job (Pazdro 103, 113). …

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