Canoe Thieves. Tourism, Migration and Indigenous Identity in Canada

Abstract

This essay investigates the indigenous identity experience in contemporary Canada in the light of the renewed tourist interest that, in recent years, has led many indigenous people to join the promotion circuit of what, in the Western imagination, remains the land of great lakes, immense plains and “postcard” nature. Founded in 2015, the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada aims to improve the socio-economic condition of indigenous peoples, and to promote local representation and dialogue between the communities, and the provincial and federal governments. Regaining possession of a tourism industry defined as “authentically indigenous” also means transforming culture, identity and self-representation into an agency supporting the socio-economic rebirth of poor areas and communities, kept for a long time at the margins of the national industrial and cultural system created, in its backbone, by colonial governments. For the purposes of these initial reflections, it becomes conceptually stimulating to re-read the interest in indigenous tourism also in the light of a complex idea of “migration”. In fact, it becomes enlightening to rethink the idea of “migration” considering the history of indigenous peoples to grasp a more complex idea of “cultural mobility”. Today, this idea is at the center of new identity processes that affect the Canadian nation as a whole and, even more so, the communities of the origins. New artistic and literary Indigenous productions of the twenty-first century are, in fact, turning cultural resilience into new imaginative visions for a different and more inclusive future.