Nature, Technology, and Nation

Abstract

This essay explores the early cold-war attempts of the Radio Physics Laboratory (RPL) to link shortwave radio disruptions to the unique geophysical phenomena of northern regions. Born out of prewar traditions of geophysical research and applied to the communication demands of the Second World War, this approach placed the laboratory in the midst of wider post-war programs to assert territorial and cognitive sovereignty over the Canadian North as a way of empowering and defining the nation. The laboratory’s approach to linking nature and technology, however, required an additional act of sovereignty—a reform of the practices of geophysical research on which those associations depended. The resulting arguments from the laboratory echoed with broader post-war understandings of how the North and technology were intertwined.

Inconification and the nationalized inukshuk

“…Canada also has a long legacy of conducting scientific research and mapping projects in the Arctic, strategies that are explicitly tied to shoring up Canada's claims to the territory (Jones-Imhotep 2004). I show that the inukshuk is implicitly connected to the strategies of technologization and mapping with respect to the North.…”

“…I reverse American President Theodore Roosevelt's famous maxim and suggest that Canada must speak loudly because it carries a small stick. As a relatively militaristically benign middle power, Canada has historically been forced to find innovative, demonstrative or indeed symbolic means to assert its sovereignty in the North (Jones-Imhotep 2004;Fremeth 2003;Humphreys 2005).…”