New Book – A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North

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Tina Adcock, A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North, Vancouver: UBC Press, 2025.

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In some way, shape, or form, I’ve been working on this book since the autumn of 2002. I was then eighteen years old, a second-year undergraduate student at the University of Alberta, enrolled in a course entitled “Exploration and Travel in the Canadian North.” We read a number of travelogues and narratives of exploration that semester, including the posthumously published diary of Edgar Christian.1 This was, and remains, one of the most emotionally affecting and haunting texts I’ve ever read. It chronicles the final months of an eighteen-year-old Englishman who died slowly of starvation over the winter of 1926–27, during an expedition to the Thelon River in present-day southwestern Nunavut. Christian never once blamed, or lost faith in, or stopped loving the man responsible for this tragedy: his 46-year-old cousin, the English explorer John Hornby, who lost his life that winter as well. A Cold Colonialism is the culmination of more than 20 years of thinking about and studying John Hornby’s life and death, and what it can tell us about southerners’ fascination with the North, about modern exploration and adventurous travel in this region, and, ultimately, about colonialism in what is currently Canada in the past and present.

The book opens in 1918, at a time when some were predicting (and lamenting) the end of exploration. The world seemed known—in outline, at least. And airplanes augured to help fill in the remaining gaps on Western maps more easily and efficiently than men trudging through jungles, deserts, or icefields could do. I contend that exploration survived, all the same. As a form of work and play, it remained a viable and often valuable way for Canadians and Americans living outside the North to engage with and make sense of continuity and change, in the North and South, well into the twentieth century and beyond.

A Cold Colonialism charts the contours of modern, or post-First World War, exploration. It brings to light some of the ways of thinking, feeling, and being in the world that exploration enacted or encouraged, and how these were informed by specific socio-cultural, economic, and technological phenomena of the early and mid-twentieth century. It focuses on four explorers: the mining engineer George Douglas, the surveyor Guy Blanchet, the journalist/filmmaker Richard Finnie, and the ethnologist/polymath Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Their entangled, transnational lives and careers offer a full, representative portrait of early and mid-twentieth-century exploration as carried out in relation to the Canadian North, a region that comprises 77% of Canada’s land mass and encompasses Inuit Nunangat, Denendeh, and other Indigenous homelands.

Two men sit on a wicker bench against a whitewashed wall of a house and gaze off to the right.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (left) and Richard Finnie (right), two of the protagonists of A Cold Colonialism, at Finnie’s home in Carp, Ontario, June 1945. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Richard Sterling Finnie fonds, MG31 C6, e011504911.

Adrian Howkins has called an earlier version of this book an “environmental history of exploration.”2 Environmental historians haven’t expended a lot of ink on this subject, to date; it’s more often been the province of historical geographers. But, historically, exploration has involved engaging with human, non-human, and more-than-human environments distant from one’s own homeland, collecting different kinds of information about them in different forms, and bringing it home to share with various audiences toward various ends. In other words, much of exploration’s value has traditionally lain in its capacity to create new or improved knowledge about environments, as reckoned by people who do not reside there. In the early and mid-twentieth century, myriad individuals and institutions in southern Canada and the United States needed or wanted to know more about the Canadian North, for profit, for pleasure, or for power over this region and its inhabitants. My book examines the people that helped meet this demand through engaging in exploration, the practices they drew upon to produce knowledge about the North’s environments, and the places—southern as well as northern—in which that work occurred.

Framing exploration as an epistemic enterprise, or one concerned with the production of knowledge about environments, reveals it to be a more diverse and capacious activity than often believed. Although John Hornby isn’t a central figure in A Cold Colonialism, I present him in the book’s introduction as someone who looks like the prototypical arctic explorer. He is a white man who strives against a landscape figured as hostile, who seeks and finds things that are absent from or difficult to access within his home society, and who yields up his life in this pursuit, if necessary. But many people who participated in the exploration of northern Canada in the early- and mid-twentieth century looked nothing like Hornby. They looked like Grey Nuns recording daily temperatures in the middle of the winter at Fort Smith and Fort Providence. They looked like Sahtu Dene men guiding newcomers across the Mackenzie Mountains, using trails their ancestors made, and then picking up waged work on a pipeline survey crew in the southern Yukon during the Second World War. They looked like Radcliffe College-educated women undertaking research into northern Canada in a private library in New York City. A Cold Colonialism, like other recent histories of exploration, casts this activity as inherently collaborative, as reliant on the minds and muscles of individuals who were not themselves explorers. Exploration, in this view, emerges as “a genuinely human story, less about the exceptional qualities of eccentric individuals, more about working relationships and intersecting lives.”3

George Blondin (left) and Edward Blondin (right) in 1943. These Sahtu Dene men, who were son and father, worked in various capacities on the Canol Pipeline Project in northwestern Canada during the Second World War. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Richard Sterling Finnie fonds, MG31 C6, e011504921.

A Cold Colonialism also foregrounds the emotional dimensions of exploration. I examine how some explorers, as well as other southern visitors to and sojourners in the North, expressed longing for and constructed a sense of belonging in this region, based on their encounters with its distinctive environments. The book traces what I term a community of northern interest: a voluntary collective of people hailing predominantly from the South who had first-hand experience of the North (or north-adjacent spaces) and who engaged in social and intellectual fellowship on that basis. Members of this community retained an affective connection to the North and to their activities there, which they continued to find meaningful and memorable long after they had returned south. Through various acts of sociability—exchanging newsy letters, visiting each other’s homes, attending parties and weddings, becoming godfathers to each other’s children—they maintained “northern” identities and relationships while living outside the region, for years and even decades. They regularly characterized themselves, and each other, as men or women “of the North”—and, sometimes, even as “northerners.”

It was common for such people to say that they knew and loved the North. Their production of environmental knowledge and expressions of environmental attachment derived from the same source—first-hand experience in the region, which I discuss and analyze using the concept of proximity. I go on to argue that, in fact, modern exploration was founded on the illusion of proximity to this region. Despite their identification with the North, explorers and their fellow visitors to and sojourners in the region were, well, southerners. They did not settle permanently in the Arctic or Subarctic, and they lacked experience in and knowledge about it relative to Indigenous peoples and other people who lived there long-term. But the illusions of proximity created through exploration and other colonial activities in high latitudes gave individual southerners confidence and licence to intervene in northern environments and societies. They also supported the central conceit of southern colonial rule over Canada’s territorial North in the twentieth century: that people thousands of kilometres distant from the region could run its affairs or advise on them better than those who lived there full-time.

Guy Blanchet (centre), one of the book’s protagonists, trades information about mineral outcroppings with A.W. Joliffe (left) of the Geological Survey of Canada at the latter’s camp on Great Slave Lake east of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, during the summer of 1935. The trapper Jack Stark (right), who habitually wore a dinner suit in the bush, looks on. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, George Mellis Douglas fonds, 1985-215 NPC, e011504920.

My book aims to puncture this illusion of proximity. I use the adjective “northern” pretty sparingly when referring to explorers and their activities in this book, because I want to avoid perpetuating illusions of proximity that have, in the past, led so naturally to assertions of colonial authority. I offer, instead, concepts such as north-minded and north-hearted, which refer, respectively, to the intellectual and emotional activities undertaken by explorers and other southern visitors to and sojourners in the North. I hope that these and other concepts will be useful and thought-provoking, not merely for scholars of arctic and subarctic Canada, but also those studying similar phenomena in other imperial and colonial settings around the world.

Illusions of northern proximity have survived into the twenty-first century. There continues to be a vein of thought that views the North as co-extensive with the Canadian nation, best encapsulated today in the Toronto Raptors’ slogan “We the North.” To be Canadian, in this view, is to be northern. But, as scholars have chronicled on this blog and elsewhere, this idea has a long lineage in settler colonial Canada, one shot through with environmental and climatic racism as well as white supremacy.4 It further overrides the distinct voices, viewpoints, and visions of Inuit, Dene, Métis, and other Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who actually reside in the Arctic and Subarctic. By way of closing, I’ll simply suggest that if you live in Canada today, you most likely possess a cardinal identity that you have not thought much about, and perhaps have not even recognized, and that perhaps we should talk about more, in the service of decolonization: that of southerner.

Feature image: A car drives along the Canol pipeline service road through the Mackenzie Mountains, c.1944. Credit: Library and Archives Canada, Richard Sterling Finnie fonds, MG31 C6, e011504919.
  1. The best edition is Edgar Christian, Death in the Barren Ground, ed. George Whalley (Ottawa: Oberon, 1980), but see also Edgar Christian, Unflinching: A Diary of Tragic Adventure, ed. B. Dew Roberts (London, John Murray, 1937). ↩︎
  2. Adrian Howkins, The Polar Regions: An Environmental History (Maldon: Polity Press, 2016), 203n2. ↩︎
  3. Felix Driver and Lowri Jones, Hidden Histories of Exploration: Researching the RGS–IBG Collections (London: Royal Holloway, University of London, 2009), 49. ↩︎
  4. The classic analysis of the racial ideology of nordicity in Canada is Carl Berger, “The True North Strong and Free,” in Nationalism in Canada, ed. Peter Russell, 3–26 (Toronto: McGraw Hill, 1966). ↩︎

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Tina Adcock

I'm an assistant professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University, where I research and teach Arctic, Canadian, and environmental history. I'm the author of *A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North* (UBC Press, 2025). I'm also the editor of *Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History* (UBC Press, 2018, co-edited with Edward Jones-Imhotep) and *Landscapes of Science* (NiCHE, 2019).

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