Essay

A young girl with a baby on her back stands in a field of wild barley posing for a photograph. The photographer has captured her attention, and she gazes somewhat askew at the camera.  While she likely didn’t know it at the time, millions of Canadian schoolchildren would gaze back at her as they flipped through the pages of their textbook, Canadian Geography for Juniors. The book enjoyed enormous popularity when was first published in 1927 and used well into the 1950s. The purpose of this image was to do the very thing this short essay will attempt to do: teach Arctic environments. As the students read through the text, their teacher was to stop on the image and ask them these associated questions: “What season is it? Is it a level or hilly country? How is the baby fastened on the nurse’s back? Do their clothes differ from those of white children?” Look at the picture and imagine you were asked these same questions today, and how you would reply. Then perform a thought experiment. Considering what you know about the early twentieth century in Canada, what do you think the students from that era would have replied? Perhaps more importantly, can we imagine what the teacher and the school system wanted students to see in this picture. Why did they include it and how did they want schoolchildren to view Arctic environments and the people inhabiting them? The answer may surprise you.

It is very easy to look at this picture and guess what some of the replies might be. Yes, the country appears to be hilly although we could forgive children who protested that the landscape in the foreground is in fact quite level. Which is it? A good geographical debate! Anyone saying the season is winter would clearly be wrong and for those who got it right, depending on their knowledge of agriculture, the ripened barely would indicate it is probably mid to late summer. The instructional target here is plainly the physical environment of the Yukon territory. This is a very familiar type of geography that concerns a scientific description of the surface of the earth concerning the flora and fauna, landforms and hydrology found there, and much teaching held on to this sort of inventorial description of different parts of the country.

A somewhat broader view reveals there is a bigger picture to see as well. The chapter this photograph is part of was titled ‘The Fur Trapper’ and explained this among the other resources projected to be extracted from the north. The trapper’s story explains why furs are located in the north, how they are accessed, and how they are exported as a global commodity. Knowing about the Yukon was an exercise in knowing about its value to the Canadian nation state. Thus, it is not surprising that geography’s critics point out that as a discipline, it marched very much in line with the European imperial conquest of the globe and the subsequent expansion of former colonies like Canada and the United States. The labelling of rivers, taxonomy of plants and animals, was part science, part conquest. Directing students to view the images from this angle was a way of getting them to think: how does this fit into my country and what is valuable there? It was also an important means of cultivating geographical citizenship and reaffirming the economic value of territory.

Why might they ask about the clothing and the difference from white children’s dress? This question reveals this book was made by white authors, was written with a white teacher and students in mind, and required the viewer foreground a white perspective when engaging the photograph. Does this mean the aim was to get the children to see Indigenous northerners as ‘others’ to themselves, focusing on the story their garments told about their racial grouping. The predominant view held that whites sat atop a racial hierarchy extending down through Eastern Europeans and Asians, reaching Africans and Indigenous Americans somewhere near the bottom. But nearly all European Canadians held this (false) view already and did not need to learn it in school. What school taught them was the reason behind these supposed racial differences. 

Many scholars at the time believed in an interpretation of humanity called environmental determinism, which claimed that relative progress and power achieved by different ‘races’ of humankind were due to the plenitude or scarcity of resources in their environment. This theory was heralded as a great insight into why cultures in the world appeared so different from one another: it argued that physical and intellectual differences between humans were in fact determined by landscape and climate. Comparing Europeans, who enjoyed large cities of brick and steel, with Alaskan Inuit living in ice houses seemed to confirm this view. The sequence of questions proposed to the students follows this same logic: what kind of landscape is it? What kind of people do you see? And so, how has the landscape made these people different (and less civilized) than you? The context of the 1920s helps us reach this interpretation, but an equally compelling path exists in another direction. 

The image could very well be intended to correct such mistaken perceptions hanging on from the previous century, like the idea that Indigenous people wore skins and lived in a savage state. Since the image was supplied by F.C.C. Lynch of the Department of the Interior, there is even more weight to the latter. This branch of government was tasked with ‘civilizing’ Indigenous peoples and was therefore deeply invested in representing the work it was doing to modernize the north and bringing changes. It is equally possible that students were supposed to see the nurse-maid as similar to them, evident that First Nations were being civilized. Does this mean that using a fabric blanket to fasten the baby to the nurse-maid’s back, instead of the traditional seal skin pouch, demonstrates the change? Lynch would not have wanted to show images of the people who resisted these changes, or exemplified resistance to Canada’s colonial plan.

Using the Arctic environment to convey these ideas proved to be a useful tool, since the place and its inhabitants were so recognizably distinct from the experience of people in the south. Is this difference, ultimately, what the image and instructions were meant to convey? Probably not. The surprising answer is that the instructors probably didn’t have any such goals in choosing this image. They were not interested in putting something in the students’ heads at all. Instead, they wanted to ask the students questions that would teach them to think for themselves. 

The “pretty little nurse-maid” photograph is part of a broad revolution in education that was rapidly transforming schooling at the beginning of the nineteenth century called ‘progressive reform.’ This was part of a broader political movement to generally move away from older values and systems and find new ways of operating to create better citizens. Going back a couple of decades clearly illustrates the difference. A geography textbook was full of lists of landforms to memorize: capes, bays, coves, hills, mountains, which students dutifully memorized. The ‘dry as dust’ classroom involved the schoolteacher reading off lists as the students repeated them. The progressive reformers sought to break the classroom open. They saw the classroom itself as restrictive, and proposed a method of education called ‘nature study.’ Take the children outside, let them explore the environment, map their school groups, and stimulate curiosity about learning. These confirmed beliefs that only first-hand experience and observing the world made better citizens. In cases where first-hand learning was not possible, photographs were believed to do just as well. Around the same time, new technologies and decreasing costs were just allowing photographs to appear in textbooks. A new teaching method called ‘visual instruction’ grew around their use. Pictures poured into the classroom, in textbooks, slide shows, film displays, workbooks. It followed the same principles as nature study, ask questions and let the students’ curiosity follow them into the scene. Promoters of this method touted the experiential value of this practice. One study says that viewing a slide show of Niagara Falls, students gasp when the image of the falls is placed in front of them, and that they can physically feel the mist of the crashing waterfall, transmuting the all-important experience of the falls into the classroom.

These ideas spread from the Northeastern US and eventually reached Canada, where Cornish’s Canadian Geography for Juniors would probably have been a welcome change from the lists and tables in textbook from the year before. As they reached the nurse-maid image, we know that the thinking behind this was to simulate what life was like in the Yukon, and make the nature of that place available to students and stimulate their various senses. In fact, it was the geography teacher who was tightly constrained in the questions they were meant to ask of the students: visual instruction mavens warned teachers against overwhelming the students with too much detail or unanswerable questions, which could interrupt the process of natural learning. They prescribed a very intentional way of looking in stages that considered the whole image first, then narrowed in on the details, prescribed as the best way to have students view these pictures and “learn to see” properly.

Return to the image with this new knowledge, can you place yourself in the picture? What tells you most about the Yukon – the image as a whole or the particular details you can find in it? How possible is it to really know about places using this method? Nature study, visual instruction, and progressive educational reform are not talked about any longer, but they are an important part of the history of making a website, such as this, using artefacts and objects to teach Arctic environments, and the belief that education should engage the senses and be driven by questioning. 

Photographs and other types of images are interesting objects of research – even though they often lack words, they still can say so much and give so much meaning.  In this teaching example, I focused on how the questions associated with this photograph shaped the way it was supposed to be seen. I used historical context of education and visual history to see how Arctic environments were taught, and can still be taught. However, there are many more ways to consider photographs. 

We can consider the making of the image. What has the photographer left out of frame – there is a question about what the child on the right is looking at. Would locating this exact spot and learning more about what is not shown, change how we view it now? Or can we think of the way the caption effects what we see. What power dynamic is set up when we are told to see her as a ‘nurse maid’? Would we see the image differently if the caption offered the names of the people shown here. Indeed, many First Nations groups have endeavoured to “re-name” colonial era photographs as a way of restoring indigenous identities to their ancestors. In another vein, feminist critics of visual history call on us to consider the way photography reproduces a masculine gaze – even though the woman depicted looks back at the camera, we the viewer know she cannot really return our gaze. We are invited to watch her voyeuristically, from an unequal place of power. In their famous study of photographs in National Geographic, the magazine specializing in images of the ‘other’, Joan Collins and Catherine Lutz observed that across thousands of photos, while Indigenous women meet the camera’s view, Indigenous men were hardly ever shown looking back at the camera. Perhaps because western viewers find such images too challenging and do not enjoy the same pleasures of looking.