Tina Adcock, A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2025. 402 pages. ISBN 9780774870122.
Reviewed by Lianne C. Leddy
What did it mean to be an expert on the North in the twentieth century? For settler Canadians defining northern territories, this depended on membership in a “community of interest” of like-minded southern explorers. Using a vast array of archival and newspaper sources, Tina Adcock uncovers modern exploration in the North and its complicity in establishing settler colonial power in Indigenous homelands.
Adcock is one of the newest contributors to the literature on Canada’s colonization of northern territories and approaches it through an examination of modern exploration. The author focuses on the careers of four explorers active between 1918 and 1965 – George Douglas, Guy Blanchet, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, and Richard Finnie – and their impacts on the North that are still felt today. Douglas was a mining engineer active in exploring the Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake areas and documenting their mineral potential. Blanchet was a Dominion Land Surveyor active in the prairie provinces before charting routes through the Great Slave Lake area and the Mackenzie District. Finnie worked in the Arctic as a wireless operator on arctic patrols, later documenting resource extraction and life in the western arctic as a filmmaker and historian. Stefansson was an ethnologist who Adcock argues, “best fits the prototype of a ‘professional’ explorer” (13) as someone who travelled, mapped, documented Inuit lives, and returned south to publicize that knowledge as an expert.
All four men travelled extensively through the North during a period of Canadian expansion, performing physical and intellectual work that facilitated state reach. As Adcock reveals, their intellectual influence relied on their perceived legitimacy as “northerners” and their possession of knowledge that was important to southern expansion. More than that, however, the author challenges the authenticity of these explorers’ “northern” identities by positioning them as “north-minded” and “north-hearted,” rather than “northerners.” This framing emphasizes the notion that their legitimacy was imagined, despite the very real settler colonial implications of the knowledge transfers for which they were responsible.
In chapter 1, Adcock describes the “community of interest” of these north-minded and -hearted men. This description encapsulates the ways in which relationships and communications amongst explorers functioned as a kind of peer review: people could judge the credibility of one’s knowledge through their membership in these networks. The relative paucity of women explorers prior to 1945 (especially those engaged in independent activities rather than in those of their partners) can be explained by their exclusion from such networks and the barriers they faced in visiting the North more than once or for longer periods of time.
In chapter 2, Adcock turns to the interwar period and the antimodern view some explorers had of new technologies, such as a reliance on airplanes rather than more intimate and time-consuming travel over land. Rooted in nostalgia, these attitudes were at times contradictory – after all, men like Douglas and Blanchet were complicit in the changes they were documenting, regardless of their personal views on development. Chapter 3 documents how some explorers debunked popular assumptions about the North, although in doing so they sometimes paradoxically stretched the truth themselves. Chapter 4 takes readers through the growing reliance on disciplinary knowledge derived from university credentials, which increasingly excluded men with embodied experiential knowledge like Finnie. During wartime, Finnie and Steffanson worked for American interests, finding work more difficult to secure in Canada.
In chapter 5, Adcock describes the Canadian Oil Project (Canol) a short-lived wartime military-industrial megaproject, as one of exploration. Here, Finnie and his wife, Alyce, were the project’s historians and Blanchet faced strict project deadlines that undermined his preference for travelling by land–a more intimate, but time-consuming surveying method. Adcock moves to another form of exploration in chapter 6 – the Encyclopedia Arctica, led by Stefansson and Olive Wilcox, which was contracted (and cancelled) by the US Navy. As this ambitious project was meant to be an intellectual study of the region by mostly southern explorers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous northerners were excluded from this community of experts. Furthermore, women’s work in running the organization and providing research support was largely uncredited. In chapter 7, Adcock describes Blanchet and Douglas’s attempts, in their old age, to preserve the history of their working lives as younger men. Blanchet’s work had mixed success, and Douglas’ collaboration on George Whalley’s biography of ill-fated explorer John Hornby fulfilled a kind of “unwitting act of salvage history” (252), as many of their contemporaries were in advanced age or had already passed away. Thus, the history of this generation of explorers – and Canada’s settler colonial expansion into the North – was preserved in provincial and national archives and publications such as Whalley’s The Legend of John Hornby.
The tentacles of exploration persist and are still deeply felt today. Adcock rejects the notion that exploration activities were benign acts of intellectual curiosity and physical rigour. Her conclusion challenges readers to think anew about exploration – making visible its ties to settler colonialism and the harms it has done and can do in the future. She critiques the present-day persistence of mining, exploration, and tourism as examples of colonial intrusions in the North, and, using Sara Ahmed’s “killjoy” intervention, encourages awareness and action from readers, inviting them to unlearn older paradigms.1
As a reader, I was struck by the gendered nature of these acts of exploration, which Adcock confronts, especially in chapters 1 and 6, where women’s contributions are described in more depth. I would have liked to have read more about the roles of Indigenous guides, which, while mentioned especially in relation to Blanchet’s work on Canol in chapter 5, were no doubt essential to any work done in the North. Indeed, in this chapter, readers see the contrast between settler colonial aims in the North and the intimate knowledge of Dene men that stretches back generations, long before curious southerners sought to chart their homelands. Similarly, Steffanson’s Iñupiat partner, Pannigabluk, is mentioned once in passing, telling the couple’s grandchildren, “Your grandfather thought he was so smart he could live without me or anything. He could’ve died if it wasn’t for me” (51). Readers are left to wonder to what extent these relationships existed and possibly shaped exploration activities in the modern period, as they had done so in centuries past.
Overall, this book is a valuable contribution for scholars in environmental, northern, and Canadian history and geography, as well as anyone interested in seeking to know more about the complexities of modern exploration and its impacts on the North. As current geopolitical tensions fuel a new “Canada First” movement with an eye to the Ring of Fire, A Cold Colonialism is a powerful reminder that northern exploration is an old settler colonial strategy.
1 See Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
Lianne Leddy
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- Review of Adcock, A Cold Colonialism - January 30, 2026