BRENT CUTHBERTSON is currently an Assistant Professor at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. His own history of camp counselling, guiding and instructing on backcountry trips, and his personal time spent travelling in and to places of free nature have given him pause for reflecting on the relationship between and among places.MIKE HEINE was born in Germany and throughout his youth was active in issues of social justice. On coming to Canada to take up graduate studies, Mike fell in love with the people and the Land of the Canadian North, eventually ending up at the University of Alberta to do his PhD in the anthropology of northern Native games. His work has produced common ground from which to build guidelines around the games shared by various cultures, proving extremely useful during intercultural events such as the Arctic Games. Mike is currently an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary and consults with northern communities on a number of cultural projects.DAVE WHITSON is a Professor in the Canadian Studies Program, Department of Political Science, University of Alberta. His primary research interests lie in the areas of leisure and Canadian popular culture. However, he has taught courses on the Canadian North, and on the commodification and transformation of recreational space. As often as he can, he likes to get away into special places in the outdoors.
The writings of some of North America's more influential authors who have shaped the way we view the natural world, express a strong sense of attachment and connection to the Land. In mid-nineteenth century America, for example, Henry David Thoreau called on us to live more simply, more authentically, and with greater attention paid to the rhythms of nature. Thoreau's writings describe a life of natural spiritual awareness and frugality that he positively contrasted with the push toward civilization. For him, this push found expression in the adverse consequences of urban life in the town of Concord. The urban population was trapped in a misery of dissociation from nature. Many have followed Thoreau in their own ways and in their own writings about gaining a connection to the Land through this sense of "natural home". In the words of Ronald Rees:
Antiurban sentiment in America has a long history and a distinguished pedigree. The most celebrated minds, in a sequence that runs from Jefferson to Lewis Mumford and includes Emerson, Thoreau, and Frank Lloyd Wright, have registered distrust and disapproval of the American city (1985, p. 26).
It is the idea of rural life, in particular, which has come to be associated with this concept. A number of noted authors, such as Aldo Leopold, Wallace Stegner and Wendell Berry have established their sense of a natural home in this manner. In a similar vein, Edward Abbey wrote reflective prose and fiction about his attachment to the Land of the American Southwest. These authors are representative of an entire genre of writers who have developed their connections to the earth through a sense of home, at the core of which is rootedness. We define the term rootedness as living for a significant amount of time, described in years, in a physically bounded locale and in touch with the cultural geography associated with that locale.
This notion of gaining a deep sense of place through rootedness has been articulated in great detail by Edward Relph (1976). Relph characterized sense of place in a hierarchy of physical and social landscape attachment, which he labels as varied levels of "insideness." The deepest level, existential insideness, "...is home, where your roots are, a centre of safety and security, a field of care and concern, a point of orientation" (p. 142). The next deepest level of place is, for Relph, cultural and communal. As with existential insideness, the communal level is unselfconscious, unreflective, and the examples given by Relph are sacred and holy places. At a shallower level of insideness there is an authentic sense of place. Relph describes the level of authentic insideness as being embodied in an open-minded outsider who is sensitive to and seeks the meaning of the place for those who live there. Authentic insideness is the first of the levels to be characterized by self-consciousness. The shallowest of levels in Relph's structure of place is the superficial level of insideness, one in which the visitor is not "...attending in any sensitive way to its qualities or significances" (p. 142). What we wish to emphasize here is that in Relph's hierarchical model, sense of place is based on distinguishing among different degrees of rootedness. In this regard, he writes in the tradition of Leopold, Berry, Stegner and others of the genre.
Two issues call into question the privileged position of gaining a deep sense of place through rooted contact with nature, or what we refer to as "natural rootedness." In practical terms, the potential for realizing the goal of attachment through situating one's home on a parcel of relatively natural Land has declined. The world has changed considerably, culturally as well as physically, since the times of Thoreau, Muir, and even since Leopold, Grey Owl and Abbey. Squatting Thoreau-style is beyond the capability of the vast majority in current Western society, and in different ways Land ownership is perhaps more prohibitive. Aside from the simple mathematics involving the ratio of available land to numbers of people, there are social, economic and political constraints that prevent many from acquiring a piece of earth in order to gain the type of connection spoken to so eloquently by the decreasing few who have had the opportunity to experience it. Under present circumstances, then, natural rootedness is at best a romantic notion, one that currently has its place more in the affective domain than in the domain of probabilities to be realized. Yet, the romanticism associated with the classic writings on place persists. The very celebration of the romantic elements of natural rootedness has blinded many to the problems associated with this approach.
What is more, none of this takes into account the arguments of those who would question the significance of rural roots as the sole source of attachment to the Land. We have been made aware by feminist and postmodern authors that familial and smaller community relationships do not necessarily produce feelings of safety and security, concepts that are at the core of natural rootedness and inherent in the associated hierarchies of sense of place. Rootedness and the notion of community too often accompany social structures that privilege some people over others. In her analysis of community life, Young (1990) argues that the "ideal of community" privileges conformity over difference and that we have also failed to recognize, for example, that violence can and does occur in face-to-face relations. Taking a similar approach, Probyn (1992) criticizes early feminist paradigms for exempting the family from social and political critique. According to Probyn, this had the effect of establishing the family as an [ostensible] place of retreat from oppression rather than viewing it as being permeated with ideology. This situation, Probyn argues, maintains social pressure for universalism at the levels of community and family.
What is at issue here for both Probyn and Young is the reproduction of community and family values that push toward conformity and occlude difference. The relevance of this critique to the discussion of sense of place can be expressed in simple terms. That is to say, the potential for oppressive social conditions within the context of community may prove to be an effective barrier to the realization of the deepest and most profound sense of place for those being oppressed. The privileged position of natural rootedness serves to restrict access to experiencing a profound sense of place for those who have (or have had) a mobile lifestyle. Indeed, since the time of Thoreau's assertion regarding the ills of life in urban Concord we have accumulated a vast stock of literature that has taught us, either by intent or merely by way of celebrating its virtues, that natural rootedness is superior in its approach to acquiring a deeply felt sense of place.
In the context of these dominant approaches that associate sense of place with the non-mobility of natural rootedness, we wish to augment the concept of a deeply felt sense of place to include another mode of acquisition, namely, one that is constituted by a lifestyle based on mobility. This we wish do in two steps. First, we will demonstrate the general validity of the argument by considering lifestyles based on mobility in other cultures and under different historical conditions. Specifically at issue here is the traditional lifestyle of the aboriginal hunter and gatherer cultures of northern Canada. Second, and from a perspective of more immediate practical relevance, we will consider the contemporary example of outdoor educators.
The aboriginal hunter-gatherer cultures of subarctic Canada and Alaska provide an instructive example of the specific mode of orientation to the Land brought about and implied by mobility. The context of this orientation can be clarified in two steps. First, we need to consider the economic contingencies which induced Athapaskan hunter/gatherers to continually travel on the Land. The close link between the Athapaskan people and the Land was in the first instance defined by the adaptational pressures of the severe subarctic climate and the reliance on seasonally changing and fluctuating food resources. The reliance by many groups of the Athapaskan on caribou as a dominant food staple in particular, brought about the necessity to travel in accordance with the migratory movements of the caribou herds, throughout the greater part of the year. The people travelled the trails of their country, making a living by following the herds, and by moving to the spaces where the seasonally important resources were to be found. Seasonal mobility, then, was in an important respect adaptionally determined by the availability of food resources.
However in order to understand the cultural valuations placed on mobility, that is to say, travelling, by the Athapaskans, it is not sufficient to consider movement in its ecological determination alone. Culturally and experientially - and this is the second important point to be made - travelling on the Land was highly valued as a mode of orientation towards the Land, in its own right. The people's close connection to the Land, in this experiential sense, was actualized through travelling on and through it. The anthropologist Hugh Brody (1987, p. 103) aptly states: "Northern peoples' commitment to mobility must not be seen simply as a matter of economics. It goes to the very foundations of life, receiving expression in the beliefs and metaphors by which life itself is defined."
The quotations found in Appendix A, taken from various interviews on Athapaskan traditional life carried out with native elders, express much the same valorizations. It is important to note that most of these interviews did not focus on our theme of mobility or travelling, at all. The old-timers nonetheless often invoked descriptions of the importance of travelling on the Land as the measure of authenticity of the traditional culture. For Athapaskan elders, the authenticity of their cultural experience, and the close connection to the Land effected by travelling on and through it, are inseparably linked.
The English explorer Samuel Hearne experienced the paramount importance of travelling and mobility in traditional Athapaskan culture from close range. In 1771, after having travelled across the barren grounds of northern Canada with a group of Chipewyan (a subgroup of the Athapaskan living east of Great Slave Lake) for more than two years, he became convinced that they were "the greatest travellers in the known world." He went on to note that, "For them to become so weak as to be incapable of travelling ... is the most deplorable state to which a human being can possibly be brought." (Glover, 1958)
The traditional way of life of the hunter/gatherer cultures of northern Canada, then, was closely connected to the Land in every respect, but it was only through mobility, through travelling on the Land, that this close connection found its true expression. In a deep sense, the people travelled on the Land not simply in order to reach certain destinations, but rather in order to be home.
A great number of outdoor educators also exist in what might be termed a state of consistent migration, moving with the seasons to make a living instructing and guiding in their fields of expertise. Many of these people have also managed to pull together a patchwork quilt of connections to the environments they have worked in and travelled through. Yet, under a hierarchical structure of sense of place based on natural rootedness, they have been relegated to shallower forms of insideness. The most that even ecologically oriented travellers can hope to achieve, according to models such as Relph's, is that of open-minded outsiders who seek the meaning of places for, and are sensitive to, those who live there. Presumably, they are never destined to reach the deeper levels of sense of place unless they make a commitment to becoming rooted. If this were true, it would imply a sad fate for the spiritual quest of many outdoor educators.
It is, at best, extremely difficult to judge the relative values of two senses of place (with respect to their contributions to the Earth), one derived from rootedness and the other from mobility. While it may be that the former promotes a strong connection to a specific place, it is quite possible that the latter promotes an equally emphatic connection to a larger whole. One distinct advantage which travelling eco-cultures may have over their rooted siblings is the enhanced possibility that the process of connecting to multiple landscapes may contribute to a more holistic sense of place. This, in turn, encourages greater empathy for the integrity of places where others live.
It should be made clear, of course, that mobility on its own cannot develop the depth of place connection to which we refer. It is incumbent upon the traveller to seek a multiplicity of meanings that exist beyond an individual (passive or consumptive) utilitarian perspective. Being attentive to the meanings of existing in the everyday for those who live in the places visited and travelled through is necessary for reaching an understanding of place that can then be connected to a web of other place understandings and affectations.
Such senses of place can also reach profound depths. The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, for example, has written about a process in which the smaller, more individuated sense of self comes to recognize another, deeply connected Self, a concept he calls Self-realization. It is important to note that Self-realization is not a rejection of individual worth. Rather, it is an attempt to articulate the interconnectedness among individuals and across groupings, be it groupings of people and other beings. The movement from a localized sense of place to a more holistic version means that culturally and ecologically sensitive outdoor educators have begun developing a concept of Place that parallels the relationship between the self and Self. In the holistic context of Place, some outdoor educators may possess a deeply felt and profoundly experienced sense of the inescapable interconnectedness among places.
What remains is the need to continue the development and articulation of Place in order to secure its social acceptance on the same level as natural rootedness. The acceptance of Place generated through mobile lifestyles as important and valuable carries with it the benefit of support for the integrity of places of others, that is to say, extending the ethic of care beyond "one's own back yard." Rather than diminishing the value of mobility in the discourse on sense of place, its potential contribution to harmonious existence should be recognized and celebrated. Downplaying the role of travelling in the development of a deep sense of place is, at best, ignoring the cultural and political issues at hand, and at worst, destructive to attempts at building positive relationships among places. Considerable effort is required in exploring how ecologically and culturally sensitive travel can enhance the depth of connection to Place, and by extension, our commitment to ecological and cultural dignity.
1.In this text we use the capitalized term "Land" to mean not only the physical world, but also those who inhabit this world, including human and non-human life. It is an attempt to convey a more holistic way of conceptualizing human/nature interrelatedness. Of equal importance, it is also an attempt to remain consistent with the theme developed in this paper regarding the expansion of a sense of self. In other words, if we wish to promote such an expansion, it seems only proper to address the rather narrow, physically bounded meanings attached to our more commonly used lower-case version of the term.
2.For purposes of illustration, two examples are provided. First, sea kayak instructors who work on the coast of Alaska and northern British Columbia in the summer months may often find themselves instructing and guiding trips in Baja, Mexico or even South America during the northern hemisphere's winter. Second, a canoe tripping leader on the Canadian Shield may opt for teaching ice climbing in the winter. This seasonal change in activity may involve a smaller adjustment in geography, but is necessarily accompanied by a difference in how we interact with the Land. The winter landscape is not merely blanketed with snow, but is stood on end and given a relief that requires such an outdoor educator to frequent physical and mental spaces that can create a dramatically different sense of place from the horizontal orientation of summer.
3.Naess' conceptualization of the relationship between self and Self is used here in order to create a similar imagery for developing a sense of Place. Naess developed the concept of Self-realization in explaining how humans can, without suppressing or abandoning our need for individuality, connect to other life forms and gain a sense of the interrelatedness of all life. In the same vein, individual places do and should take on special meaning for each of us. However, in the larger context of life to which Self-realization speaks, individual places should not be seen to be isolated, disconnected and in competition. The capitalized use of "Place" is our attempt to encourage a similar understanding in how the relationships of places may be conceptualized.
Brody, Hugh (1987). Living Arctic. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre.
Glover, Richard (ed.). (1958). . Journey to the Northern Ocean. Samuel Hearne (1795). Toronto: MacMillan.
Naess, Arne (1989). Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Probyn, Elspeth (1992). Travels in the Postmodern: Making Sense of the Local. In Linda Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge.
Rees, Ronald (1985). Reconsidering Antiurban Sentiment. Landscape, 28(3), 26 -29.
Relph, Edward (1976). Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
Young, Iris (1990). The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference. In Linda Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism. New York and London: Routledge.
Quotations taken from The Living Arctic, Hugh Brody.
"When a person loves his country, he always has to return to his country to make a living. When a person loves his country he has to keep moving and make a living."
Sarah Peters, Fort McPherson
"I have travelled far, across the rivers in the mountains and down river - life in the bush made me very happy. The Land is so beautiful and you can see so far."
Jimmy Bonnetrouge, Fort Providence
"The people ... had to go a long ways and had to do travelling. in the spring, it was nice and clean ground through the mountains. The country looked so beautiful."
Roddy Peters, Fort McPherson
"There was no hurry to get anywhere; they travelled all over the Land, so every place was home. That was how it was to travel on Sahtu De every summer."
George Blondin, Fort Franklin
"We were lucky, we got plenty of meat, but we never settled down, we were forever moving from one camp to another."
Ronnie Pascal, Aklavik
"In those days, people travelled all over the country, they were moving all the time. The people enjoyed living on the Land, going where there was game, always moving."
George Blondin, Fort Franklin
"People never stayed one place as they were forever moving, even in the summer. In the summer they moved around with dog packs and this is the way the people used to live."
Ronnie Pascal, Aklavik
"People never stayed in one place too long ... In those days, it was really hard. The people were forever moving."
Christie Thompson, Fort McPherson
"We travelled anywhere and everywhere. It was such a
beautiful life."
Annie B. Robert, Fort McPherson
"People never stayed quiet. Their arm was their kicker and their engine."
Joan Nazon, Arctic Red River
Copyright retained by author(s)