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Canada's North Trick or Re-treat: Towards a new treasure-seeking ethic in Canada's North Kimberley Ann Clark Sedore A Thesis in The Department of Religion Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (History and Philosophy of Religion) at Concordia University Montreal, Quebec, Canada September 2008 ©Kimberley Ann Clark Sedore, 2008 Library and Bibliotheque et 1*1 Archives Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-45503-6 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-45503-6 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives and Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par Plntemet, prefer, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans loan, distribute and sell theses le monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, worldwide, for commercial or non­ sur support microforme, papier, electronique commercial purposes, in microform, et/ou autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. this thesis. Neither the thesis Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels de nor substantial extracts from it celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement may be printed or otherwise reproduits sans son autorisation. reproduced without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne Privacy Act some supporting sur la protection de la vie privee, forms may have been removed quelques formulaires secondaires from this thesis. ont ete enleves de cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires in the document page count, aient inclus dans la pagination, their removal does not represent il n'y aura aucun contenu manquant. any loss of content from the thesis. Canada ABSTRACT Trick or Re-treat: Towards a new treasure-seeking ethic in Canada's North Kimberley Ann Clark Sedore This project explores the notion that the summer camping community in Dawson City, Yukon, epitomizes the possibility that the retreat and the quest, often considered distinct forms of travel and discovery, are closely related in the contemporary Canadian context. The journey North to Dawson City - a town and region famous for the Klondike Gold Rush and treasure-seeking - is akin to a rite of passage and to the questing patterns that are evident in many myths of heroism. Every hero reckons with a threat and saves the day. While boreal "wilderness" has traditionally been depicted as potentially dangerous and challenging terrain, the location of the threat has shifted significantly over the past three or four decades in North America. Pollution and the rat race are the new raging river and pack of wolves. Framed in this way, the hero's quest for adventure and treasure shares a seat with the weakling's retreat. I believe that what has been referred to as "the Myth of the North" is intact to this day. The symbolic structure of the North is communicated by oral tradition and in text through story, song, slang, and fashion. A limen is a margin and a threshold and discussions of the Canadian North are at home in the field of religious studies when we conceptualize the North as liminal space and place. The North is physically liminal as the end of the road, politically liminal as a colonial state and conceptually liminal as a frontier. The following writing has been largely inspired by the conversations and scenery that I experienced upon my three-time journey to Dawson City. The ideas presented in this paper have developed from a combination of text-based and primary research, largely informed by the theories of anthropologist Victor Turner and by my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in Dawson. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge that the very existence of this project has everything to do with a whole lot of patience and support from my family, my loves, my colleagues, and my advisors. Thank you for being the total best every time. IV TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Shooting the Breeze and Establishing some Ground 3 Dawson City 7 How It Came To Be (alias) A Bit of My Own Story 10 Methodology 14 The Theory Backing the Method 15 CHAPTER 1A. VICTOR TURNER AND THE LIMINAL 20 Introducing Victor Turner 20 Society as a process 20 Arnold van Gennep sad Rites de Passage..:. 22 Communitas - with a little help from Martin Buber 24 Three types 25 Modernity and Volition, liminal and liminoid features 27 Liminality and Reversal 28 a) Tribal rituals of induction, passage, and life-crisis 29 b)The festival, calendrical rituals and rituals of community- wide life-crisis 32 Liminality and the Sacred 35 The Underdog and The Power Of the Weak 36 Liminality and the Revolution 39 Liminality and Transition 39 CHAPTER IB. THE MYTH OF THE NORTH 42 Living On the Edge and In the Corner 42 The Arctic Imperative 45 The Myth of the North 48 Betwixt and Between: Polarity and Paradox Make For Elbow Room 50 (Hybrid lifestyles in Dawson...) 51 CHAPTER 2. COMMUNITAS NORTH OF 60 53 Festive Life in Dawson 53 Camping Life in Dawson 54 The Masking Function 55 Yukon Symbolism 56 Storytelling 58 Info in 59 Info out 60 Multi-vocal Symbols and Root Metaphors 61 Rich-u-all 62 Northern Archetypes 63 The Perfect Indian 64 The Explorer and The Civilizing Hero: Build it and they will come 66 The Treasure-Seeker 69 The Rebel - Anti-Establishment and Scandalous Affairs 73 v The Hermit 76 To camp or not to camp 80 Clutch 82 CHAPTER 3. A QUEST-ION OF IDENTITY 83 The variety of paths and the location of the limen 84 Historical and Archaic Humanity Compared 84 The Nuclear Paradigm 85 Pilgrimage as liminoid 86 Geo-challenge and The Immigrant Mentality 87 Survival 90 Isolation unwanted 91 To We 92 Shift - A change in the location of a threat 93 Communitas of crisis and catastrophe 94 Expiry dates 96 Communitas of Withdrawl and Retreat 97 Danger and Communitas , 98 Shift - Isolation wanted 99 Re-tribalization 101 Meditating on Bill 102 Sacred time 103 Wanderlust 104 Time and space, history and geography, together 104 Virtually friends 106 What works and what doesn't work 107 Neo-Colonialism in Therapeutic Landscape Ill CONCLUSION 118 What just happened? 118 So What? 118 The Frontier is a Rainbow 125 LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1: My drawing of Turner's idea 24 LIST OF SOURCES 129 APPENDICES APPENDFX A: Things to consider when studying a given pilgrimage system 133 APPENDFX B: Earlier History of the Yukon 141 APPENDFX C: History of Colonial Details in the Yukon 143 APPENDIX D: The Spell of the Yukon 149 APPENDFX E: The Dawson Survey 151 APPENDDC F: The Voices 156 VI INTRODUCTION That there is a pull to the North, a sort of mythical magnetism, of which the summer campers speak. This is all about people traveling north to Dawson City, Yukon. Otherwise known as the Town of the City of Dawson, Yukon Territory, Canada - or simply "Dawson" - this place is the destination for many a roving soul each summer. Indeed, some arrive to the Yukon during the winter, but that's crazy and not really what we're interested in here. Just kidding, not crazy. Probably brave and curious about dog sledding and darkness - or ignorant, maybe - but not crazy. It's about people traveling northfrom south. People. Traveling. North. Is it a pilgrimage? Yes, obviously! Great. The End. Just kidding, again. That will, however, be my thesis in a nutshell. I herein suggest that the summer campers are having a liminal experience in and around Dawson City, Yukon. I also explore how the journey towards this liminal experience blurs the distinction between traditional accounts of the hero's quest and the weakling's retreat. Also, I maintain that these groups act as a bridge between North and South, a potentially effective community for addressing and perhaps dismantling, the colonialist patterns of our national heritage. I begin with a discussion of how Dawson City, Yukon Territory, is liminal space by virtue of its location, its polico-economic culture, and its ambiguous representation through paradox and polarity. The second chapter will focus on Dawson City as a site of communitas while individuals and groups display traits of calendrical and life-crisis ritual through their engagement with archetypal structures and patterns. The third chapter will consider how the 1 journey to Dawson is symbolically structured as the hero's quest, the weakling's retreat, the initiand's rite of passage, and the pilgrim's path. The first part of the first chapter will outline how Victor Turner's theory on liminality includes careful consideration of the relationship between social structure and communitas. The second part of the first chapter aims to show that the Yukon is liminal space. The North is a physical margin and the North is a social margin. The North is physically on the edge and has been treated as a frontier. The North is big. It's up there, huge. It's looming. It might be wild and scary and ominous, and it feeds our identity as a northern nation. The North is also politically liminal.
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