Some Canadians warn that Canada's cultural industries, producers of identifying discourses of nation such as television and film will be affected adversely by Free Trade in the long term.1 The Disney ...Corporation's 1995 purchase of exclusive licensing rights to the image of a Canadian icon, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer, fuelled this anxiety and provoked heated discussion about 'Disneyfication', the most recent turn in a long history of an American colonization of the Canadian imaginary chronicled by Pierre Berton in Hollywood's Canada.1 Long before the singing mounties of Rose Marie (United States: 1928, Lucien Hubbard; 1936, W.S. Van Dyke; 1954, Mervyn LeRoy), and the murdering and cocaine-snorting moUntie of David Lynch's Twin Peaks (United States, 1990) imaged Canada for Americans and Canadians, the American writer James Oliver Curwood (1878-1927) was busy imagining highly masculinized adventure stories about Canada and Canadians. The white Anglo-Celtic male is the term of identity in this film, he is the measure, the standard for identification between audience and screen, spectator and nation.12 His is the controlling, objectifying gaze that reads woman's sexual difference as lack, and interprets ethnic and racial difference as inferiority, another type of lack, a lack of'human', read 'white' qualities.13 Canada in Back to God's Country is constructed as an Anglo-Celtic, white, homosocial nation haunted by its others, in this case: the white woman, the Inuit woman, and the Chinese man. "14 The denigration or exclusion of a dominant group's other in social or cultural formations helps to create what Etienne Balibar describes as a '"fictive ethnicity'" that is the ethnicity of the fabricated "community instituted by the nation-state": in the Canadian context, white invader-settler culture.1' There are two empowered white Anglo-Celtic male subjects in the film who signify two modes of nation-building-which for the contemporary setting of the film, 1919-constitutes empire-building, and the displacement and exploitation of the embryonic nation's indigenous peoples. 19 In the epigraph to her excellent analysis of the relationship between soap and empire, Anne McClintock quotes a Unilever company advertising slogan: "Soap is Civilization." see McClintock "Soft-Soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising" in her Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 207-231.
