Unsettling <i>North of Summer</i>: Anxieties of Ownership in the Politics and Poetics of the Canadian North
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canadian writers continue to struggle with their ambivalent settler-colonial inheritances, especially as they relate to Canada’s North. By troubling invaluable but thus far incomplete considerations of Canada’s settler-colonial history, this essay examines why Canada’s relations with its Arctic territories remain unsettled: settler-invader practices of land possession hinge on agricultural-cum-epistemological limits that find resistance in the Canadian North’s environmental conditions. Drawing predominantly from Al Purdy’s 1967 collection North of Summer: Poems from Baffin Island and secondly from CBC Radio’s 2011 feature “Northwords,” this essay demonstrates some of the ways that incompletable practices for colonial land claims, those that could only fail in the face of Arctic environments’ natural resistances, have fostered anxieties of (dis)possession that linger throughout poetic representations and political policies concerning Canada’s northern territories. Behind these anxieties are as yet unanswerable questions that shape Canada’s relationship with the North and with its colonial history: it goes without saying that certain landscapes trouble colonizing practice, so can a landscape, through its physical conditions, also be said to resist an ideology? If so, what are settler-colonialism’s ontic limits? Can we imagine an end to settler-colonial modes of relating to landscape in Canadian literature? This essay contends that resistances to settlercolonialism are not solely conceptual—for example, the failure of colonial language to represent colonized landscapes, the focus of so much critique at the crossroads of postcolonial and ecocritical thought—or even anthropocentric, though the North’s Inuit and Indigenous communities ably demonstrate that colonization is never an uncontested project. In addition to these indisputable embodiments of resistance, there are also physical limits to colonizing ideology, limits rooted in environmental conditions that, without any human agency or intent, deny colonial understandings of nature and the natural. Here, literary works help demonstrate how environmental resistances foster a disconnect between Canada’s southern and northern experiences of colonization.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.043 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".