Heads-or-Tales

This project is maintained by mslafrenie

The Voyageurs

Unprocessed Photographic View Image

While examining this coin consider the following:

After exploring the unprocessed photographic view of this coin take a look at the RTI default view!

RTI Default View:

Instructions for use: 1) Click on the light bulb icon, 2) Drag cursor across image to move light position, 3) Select the question mark icon for further help.

Now that you have viewed both the unprocessed image and the RTI model, take a look at the background information for this coin and my close reading of the myth identified as part of its banal nationalistic power:

Designer: Sergiy Minenok

Release Date: May 1999

Official Description: This “coin depicts the voyageurs who travelled Canada’s rivers by canoe to explore new lands and develop the fur trade.”

Myth Identified: Myth of the Wilderness via the canoe

My Close Reading:

Excerpt from RTI Investigation:

“With specular enhancement many of the fine details of the coin, only visible when the simulated light source is positioned near the edge, come into focus. We can make out the faces of two paddlers—a strong jaw line, a beard and sideburns, a nose, eyes, and mouth—their clothing, and their accessories. These details become more discernible under this filter, particularly the texture on the canoe, intentional and unintentional, and the symbol on the front of the canoe. Known for their distinctive dress, and described thoroughly in the Royal Canadian Mint press release accompanying the coin launch, the voyageurs are often identified simply by their clothing: “They wore loose fitting shirts (usually red), deerskin leggings, deerskin moccasins without stockings, and breeches that left part of the leg exposed.”[69] While Minenok’s design is not in colour, viewers can still recognize the paddlers’ loose fitting shirt, fur hat, feather headwear indicating their position in the canoe, and what looks like a sash (tied around the first paddler’s waist), an iconic accessory often differing by region.[70] In recognizing the voyageurs’ clothing, viewers can make assumptions about the weather and the time of year imagined by the designer. With these visual details, RTI enables viewers to engage closer and more critically with this design, in this case the size of the canoe requires our attention. The canoe itself is quite small, only carrying three people, which is not an ideal number for portaging or carrying packs: could these figures be symbolic of Métis, First Nations and French communities? If not, what is the purpose of having three people in the canoe? Where might they be going?

[…]

[By] encountering the voyageurs through their iconic canoe backgrounded by the Canadian Shield, we are encouraged to ask more of this coin and its contradictory locale. Where is this canoe exactly? Which part of the Canadian Shield—Ontario, Quebec, Nunavut, Newfoundland,[72] the Northwest Territories, Manitoba, Saskatchewan—is depicted here? And how else could we encounter the voyageurs outside of canoeing or portaging? Could this coin have commemorated voyageurs through Métis communities or trade with Indigenous communities?”

NOTES:

Excerpt from Investigation of Myth:

“The Voyageurs design relies on a romanticized history of the voyageurs and their accomplishments, particularly that of thriving in the unknown and moving through nature by ‘befriending’ Indigenous communities. The trope of landscape as a marker of identity and the obsession with depictions of Canada as vast untouched wilderness are themes that run through both coins [The Log Drive coin and The Voyageurs] and are best described by John O’Brian’s term “wildercentrism”. O’Brian defines this as the inextricable link between Canadian national identity, northern geography, and the climate.[59]

[…]

This imagery and ideology of “exploring” and navigating the “unknown” is tied specifically to the symbol of the canoe in Canada. The Voyageurs coin, then, furthers our reading of the wilderness myth by perpetuating the ideology of the canoe. Although Canadian art and culture is known for its continual appropriation of Indigenous iconography to tell stories of national becoming and development, in this instance the canoe symbolizes the tenuous relationship between Canadian and Indigenous stories and symbols. Daniel Francis explains that in a Canadian context, the canoe, while a tired symbol, “emerges as the mother image of our national dreamlife, the symbol of our oneness with a rugged northern landscape, the vessel in which we are recreated as Canadians.” [62] In a sense, the canoe signifies for many Canadians a transformation of the land and of their identities from British to Canadian, which is entirely colonial, but also tied closely to Canadian experiences, culture and leisure activities. The canoe then functions as a means for settlers to perform rituals such as tourism and sport, as well as a statement of rights to the land and its transformation.[63] This appropriation of Indigenous land and cultural activities is what made many colonists feel that their new identity was distinct from Americans and the British.[64] Indeed, many colonists believed that they could make Indigenous cultural practices and activities Canadian, through the systematic repetition, organization, and “modernization” of activities such as sports, clothing, and travel.[65] By and large, it is this notion of “elevation” that fuels myths of the wilderness and colonial conceptions of development and civilization.”

NOTES: