Nationalism from the Margins: Italians in Alberta and British Columbia

Frits Pannekoek is an associate professor of heritage studies, the
director of information resources at the University of Calgary, and the
author of A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance
of 1869–70.

Despite its academic title, this book deserves a wider readership. Wood
uses the case study of the historical Italian communities in Alberta and
British Columbia to explain the complex family, ethnic, and Western
Canadian identities of immigrants. She argues that the Quebec–Canada
struggles and profound anti-Americanism of Canada’s Anglo elite were
largely anathema to new Italians, who contributed to the emergence of a
Canadian identity that was more regional and more community- and
group-focused. She also points out that while the Italian-Canadian
community supported the new multiculturalism that the Anglo and
French-Canadian elite invented to accommodate this changing Canadian
identity, there were divisions. For example, some Italian Canadians
would support the rights of Sikhs to wear turbans as members of the
RCMP, while others would not.

Wood argues that the complex interrelationships that form the new
identity involve the reconciliation and repositioning of Old World roots
and New World relationships. In the New World, the Catholic Church
became a new tool of ethnicity because it was one of the few cultural
points of reference. The new Canadian identity was formed through
geographic and chronological influences whose intersection changed over
time. In the first years of immigration, women were in the minority,
while in later migrations they were in the majority. Since women had a
profound impact on the transmission of culture, its transmission in
Canada was to some degree dependent on this variable as well as on its
point of origin in southern or northern Italy.

Wood’s creation of an Anglo-Canadian straw man with an immutable
Canadian identity that needs to be changed should be questioned. Her
dominant Anglo-Canadian identity of the 1960s is, in fact, made up of
the experience of several generations of immigrants. Canada’s charm,
along with its confusion, owes much to the fact that the Canadian
identity has never been static.