Recent archaeological discoveries in the polar region have reanimated stock images of the intrepid explorer who braves the elements to bring modernity to a frigid northern wasteland. The Iconic North reveals that ideological assumptions, economic priorities, and a shift in government strategy in the postwar era all influenced how northern culture was represented in popular Canadian imagery. Whether it was film, television, or women’s autobiographies, the “primitive” North was often portrayed as the mirror opposite to the “modern” South.

In crisp and elegant prose, Joan Sangster redirects current debates about the geopolitical prospects of the North by addressing how women and gender relations have played a key role in the history of northern development.Drawing on archival and cultural sources, Sangster shows how gender, race, and colonialism shape our understanding of northern peoples, economies, and government policy. This work reveals how assumptions about both Indigenous and non-Indigenous women shaped gender, class, and political relationships in the circumpolar north – a region now commanding more of the world’s attention.

Joan Sangster is a professor of women's studies and history at Trent University, where she also teaches at the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Native Studies. Her most recent books are Girl Trouble: Female 'Delinquency' in English Canada and Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada.

Joan Sangster's profile page

• Winner, CLIO Prize for The North, Canadian Historical Association

“Sangster … is not the first to focus on the North and its place in the Canadian identity, but her effort must be celebrated because it is so candid.” Summing Up: Highly recommended. Graduate students and up.

CHOICE

Few authors possess the skill to take an everyday image and turn it just slightly, in Twilight Zone fashion, to reveal a startling and intriguing truth. Professor Joan Sangster of Trent University does just that in The Iconic North. To read Sangster’s account is to question every common media depiction of the Arctic.

Blacklock’s Reporter

What makes Joan Sangster’s The Iconic North stand out is the way she links so many cultural forms – television and film, novels, periodicals, report and travel writing – with the political economy of northern development in post-war Canada. Though Sangster’s reading of these works is skillful, this is not a study in discourse analysis. Rather it is a richly contextualized interpretation that makes clear how cultural constructions of the North served to legitimate, justify, and explain internal colonialism.

Canadian Journal of History

This book fills an important gap in the field of Canadian cultural history.

British Journal of Canadian Studies

The Iconic North brings fresh insight and evidence of what these images tell us about how post-war Canada saw the North: as its own colonial other.

Canadian Historical Review