Reconsidering the Canadian “Hinterland”: Visual Culture, the English-Wabigoon River, and the Mercury Collection of Marion Lamm 1945–1980

• Main Author: Watson, Sarah Jane
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: anishina*
• Online Access: https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/992784/; https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/992784/1/Watson_MA_F2023.pdf

This thesis examines select visual culture produced and gathered in response to one of Canada’s worst environmental disasters: the mercury poisoning of the English-Wabigoon River in Northwestern Ontario. This catastrophic event is the contextual and historical point of entry to explore two related visual records first, the dominant settler-colonial place image produced by industry and government stakeholders; second, a more complex image world discernable in a locally gathered archive created by citizen archivist Marion Lamm (1918–1997). These representations and narratives are examined at the intersection of Anishinaabe and settler-colonial histories and contexts that formed around the mercury case. I employ discourse analysis located in late capitalist visual culture and archival histories to examine ephemera, periodicals, photographic publications, and a film within broader cultural and environmental histories surrounding the English-Wabigoon River. The primary questions guiding this thesis are: Who and what defines a Canadian hinterland? From what positions are its stories told? Here I trace how the dominant, settler-colonial place image of industrial success and a tourist paradise is complicated and challenged by a record of locally gathered materials. Through transtemporal readings of a catastrophic event, I identify gaps between the local and translocal tellings. In doing so, I hypothesize that the visual record produced and disseminated by government and industry stakeholders presents a settler-colonial “hinterland” visuality that was incoherent with local realities.