Becoming native in a foreign land : sport, visual culture, and identity in Montreal, 1840-85

We cite from the COVER:
"The birth of Canadian identity and nationalism is often associated with political and military events in the twentieth century. This incisive, richly illustrated book contends that in Montreal at least a new Canadian identity emerged much earlier, between 1840 and 1885, and in the cultural rather than the political realm."
"How did British colonists in Victorian Montreal come to think of themselves as "native Canadians"? Drawing upon visual images and representations produced in four cultural sites - sports clubs, the William Notman Photographic Studies, winter carnivals, and the Northwest Rebellion - Gillian Poulter traces the construction of national attributes, or visual icons, that came to be recognized at home and abroad as distinctly "Canadian." Poulter reveals that colonists appropriated Aboriginal and French Canadian activities such as hunting, lacrosse, snowshoeing, and tobogganing and made them their own through the imposition of British ideologies of order, discipline, and fair play. The new Canadian nationality mimicked indigenous characteristics but ultimately rejected Indigenous players and championed the interests of white, middle-class, Protestant males who used their newly acquired identity to dominate the political realm."
"Becoming Native in a Foreign Land demonstrates that English Canadian identity was not formed solely by emulating what was British, but gained enormous ground by usurping what was Indigenous in a foreign land."