Abstract
In a close reading of Kathleen Winter’s memoir Boundless, Hulan examines the effect Arctic tourism, particularly the proliferation of Arctic cruises made possible by global warming, has had on writing about the Arctic. In 2010, Winter was writer-in-residence on the cruise ship Clipper Adventurer when it went aground in the Northwest Passage. During the excursion, she documents her growing awareness of Indigenous knowledge and her attempts to learn from Aaju Peter and Bernadette Dean, the Inuit women who act as cultural interpreters on the cruise. After her return, Winter continues a journey from tourist to witness to the legacy of colonialism. Because Winter sets out to understand the Arctic world without borders, Boundless offers an example of writing about the Arctic that is less preoccupied with Canadian national and territorial sovereignty.
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Notes
- 1.
The Clipper Adventurer was also used in 2007 by the Students on Ice program that James Raffan describes in Circling the Midnight Sun (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2014).
- 2.
In Tourism Destination Development, Brynhild Granås and Arvid Viken, provide an analysis that is deeply influenced by the work of Doreen Massey on the relational nature of space and the concept of situated knowledge introduced by feminist ethnographers, exploring Arctic destinations through the material conditions of place, including often overlooked elements such as infrastructure and technology (London: Ashgate, 2014, 1–2), and contributing a conceptually rich discussion of destinations as sites for both consumption and production.
- 3.
In Polar Tourism: A Tool for Regional Development Alain Grenier offers several more, ten in total, including: the end of the Cold War; the emancipation of Aboriginal peoples and subsequent devolution of authority to their communities; the identification of new regions like Nunavik; the shift from extraction to a service-based economy; the environmental movement; saturation of the market; the threat to mass tourist destinations posed by violence and terrorism; and, the media representation of a vanishing Arctic (Québec: Université Québec, 2011, 10–11).
- 4.
This argument is developed in “‘Everybody Likes the Inuit’: Inuit Revision and Representations of the North” (Introduction to Indigenous Literary Criticism in Canada. Ed. Heather MacFarlane and Armand Garnet Ruffo. Peterborough: Broadview, 2016).
- 5.
During the 2015 federal election in which Richler ran for the NDP in Toronto-St. Paul’s losing to Liberal candidate Carolyn Bennett by over 23,000 votes (Bennett received 55% of the vote, the Conservative candidate Marnie MacDougall won 27%, and Richler came in third with 15%), he had to retract intemperate remarks on Facebook in which, among other wild accusations, he called then Prime Minister Harper a “psychopath.”
- 6.
In “Unsettling North of Summer,” L. Camille van der Marel critiques Purdy’s attempt to “indigenize” himself by taking on this persona and offers a postcolonial analysis of the collection (Ariel 44, no. 4 [2014]: 13–47).
- 7.
See I.S. MacLaren’s “Arctic Al: Purdy’s Humanist Vision of the North” in The Ivory Thought (University of Ottawa Press, 2008, 128). In the same collection, Janice Fiamengo notes how these poems of “clumsy lament” have a “deliberately unfinished quality” and “foreground their verbal inadequacies before they risk a lyrical flight” (161).
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Hulan, R. (2018). Becoming Boundless: Kathleen Winter’s Arctic Excursion. In: Climate Change and Writing the Canadian Arctic. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69329-3_2
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