Picturing Canada’s North

by Nicole Findlay

From 1941 to 1984, Canada’s National Film Board maintained a Still Photography Division, a little known agency that created promotional photographs aimed at “showing Canadians to Canadians.” They produced over 200,000 photographs.

Carleton University Art History professor Carol Payne is working on a book-length study of this collection and how it portrays and constructs Canadian national identity.

More specifically, Payne is beginning a project in conjunction with Nunavut Sivuniksavut, an Inuit college in Ottawa. A large number of the NFB photographs depict Canada’s North, and Payne is hiring students from the college to bring images of their villages back home. In these small communities, the students conduct interviews with elders and family members, learning and recording the stories surrounding each photograph. These interviews help contribute to a rich oral history of Nunavut. One student even identified a man in a photo as her own father.

Payne feels that her work is important, because it critiques dominant notions of Canadian identity, from the perspective of our often marginalized aboriginal peoples. Although these photographs are often propagandistic and even offensive, by exploring the personal experiences behind them they can be reclaimed and reshaped to strengthen Inuit knowledge and communities.