"Key words and phrases: canoe, kilometres, Bella Coola, Lake Winnipeg, Avoch, Ottawa River, La Loche, Saskatchewan, Buffalo Narrows, Grease Trail, Thunder Bay, North West Company, Hudson Bay Company, Williston Lake, Mackenzie River, Terrace Bay, Beaufort Sea, Ojibwa, Seaforth Highlanders, metres"--GoogleBooks.

More than an ancient means of transportation and trade, the canoe has come to be a symbol of Canada itself. In Canoe Nation, Bruce Erickson chronicles the story of the canoe in the Canadian imagination. He argues that the canoe’s sentimental power has come about through a set of narratives that attempt to legitimize a particular vision of Canada and explores how the canoe went from being an industrial-economic vehicle to a purely recreational vessel. From Alexander Mackenzie to Grey Owl to Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the canoe has been overvalued as a connection to the “nature” of Canada. Examining voyageur re-enactments, turn-of-the-century sportsman stories, and the subsequent “greening” of the canoe, this book shows how this symbol authenticates Canada’s reputation as a tolerant, environmentalist nation, even when there is abundant evidence to the contrary. Ultimately, the stories we tell about the canoe need to be understood as moments in the ever-contested field of cultural politics.

One of our favourite chroniclers of all things Canadian presents a rollicking, personal, photo-filled history of the relationship between a country and its canoes. From the earliest explorers on the Columbia River in BC or the Mattawa in Ontario to a doomed expedition of voyageurs up the Nile to rescue Khartoum; from the author's family roots deep in the Algonquin wilderness to modern families who have canoed across the country (kids and dogs included): Canoe Country is Roy MacGregor's celebration of the essential and enduring love affair Canadians have with our first and still favourite means of getting around. Famous paddlers have been so enchanted with the canoe that one swore God made Canada as the perfect country in which to paddle it. Drawing on MacGregor's own decades spent whenever possible with a paddle in his hand, this is a story of high adventure on white water and the sweetest peace in nature's quietest corners, from the author best able (and most eager) to tell it.

Expanding on his landmark Globe and Mail series in which he documented his travels down sixteen of Canada's great rivers, Roy MacGregor tells the story of our country through the stories of its original highways, and how they sustain our spirit, identity and economy—past, present and future. No country is more blessed with fresh water than Canada. From the mouth of the Fraser River in BC, to the Bow in Alberta, the Red in Manitoba, the Gatineau, the Saint John and the most historic of all Canada's rivers, the St. Lawrence, our beloved chronicler of Canadian life, Roy MacGregor, has paddled, sailed and traversed their lengths, learned their stories and secrets, and the tales of centuries lived on their rapids and riverbanks. He raises lost tales, like that of the Great Tax Revolt of the Gatineau River, and reconsiders histories like that of the Irish would-be settlers who died on Grosse Ile and the incredible resilience of settlers in the Red River Valley. Along the Grand, the Ottawa and others, he meets the successful conservationists behind the resuscitation of polluted wetlands, including Toronto's Don, the most abused river in Canada. In the Mackenzie River Valley he witnesses the Dehcho First Nation's effort to block a pipeline they worry endangers the region's lifeblood. Long before our national railroad was built, rivers held Canada together; in these sixteen portraits, filled with yesterday's adventures and tomorrow's promise, MacGregor weaves together a story of Canada and its ongoing relationship with its most precious resource.

How political regimes have responded when certain modes of transportation—from carrier pigeons to canal boats—have been associated with politically subversive activities. During World War I, German soldiers shot down carrier pigeons for fear the birds were carrying enemy communiqués; in Mexico, the United States, and other countries, mules were used for smuggling and secret travel in mountainous areas; in the British Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British feared that supplies for anti-imperialist rebellion were being transported by canal. In this book, Jacob Shell argues that many political regimes have historically associated certain modes of transportation with revolt or with subversive activities—and have responded by acting to destroy or curtail those modes of transportation. Constructing a conceptual framework linking physical geography with the politics of mobility, Shell presents historical examples of the secret, subversive mobilization of people and cargo across watery spaces and harsh terrain, carried by watercraft and transport animals including pigeons, mules, camels, elephants, and sled dogs. Efforts to suppress such clandestine mobilities ranged from the violent (the shooting of pigeons) to the indirect—curtailing financial support, certain kinds of social knowledge, or schemes for infrastructural development. To show how such efforts at immobilization could affect cities and urban transportation, Shell looks at the Port of New York in the early twentieth century, where potentially transformative plans for inner-city freight transportation were rejected—likely, Shell argues, due to fears of anarchist activities. The innovative argument advanced by Shell in Transportation and Revolt challenges conventional wisdom about the supposed obsolescence of transport methods that have become marginalized in the modern era.

A small canoe carved by an Indian boy makes a journey from Lake Superior all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.