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Yvonne Berg for The Globe and Mail

Germaine Warkentin, professor emerita of English at University of Toronto, has described definitively Canadians' difficulty with proclaiming who they are.

"Searchers for a Canadian identity," she wrote, "have failed to realize that you can only have an identification with something you can see or recognize. You need, if nothing else, an image in a mirror."

But no other country cares enough about us to give us back an image of ourselves that we can even resent, said Prof. Warkentin. "And apparently we can't do it for ourselves, because so far our attempts to do so have resembled those of the three blind men trying to describe the elephant. Some of the descriptions have been worth something, but what they add up to is fragmented, indecipherable. With what are we to identify ourselves?"

The canoe, fortunately, is still with us, much as we trivialize it with saccharine accounts of embracing national character through weekend park paddlings. Far from being hot-wired to the great outdoors, as Margaret Atwood (and, before her, Stephen Leacock) has pointed out, most Canadians see the wilderness as hostile and frightening.

Yet the canoe is indeed our reflection in the mirror. It is, as British Columbia historian Daniel Francis says, "the mother image of our national dream life."

The canoe draws together our founding aboriginal and settler cultures, which is why Bill Reid's magnificent sculpture of Spirit of Haida Gwaii - humanity in a canoe - outside the Canadian embassy in Washington is so appropriate. Champlain understood the canoe the moment he got off the boat at Quebec City in 1608.

The canoe is why our southern border with the United States is where it is, because it marks the canoe routes along rivers that flow east, west and north. The canoe routes explain our social and economic development. The canoe routes led the great Canadian scholar Harold Innis to his theories that became globally the fundamental understanding of how communications work.

The canoe permitted what historian W.L. Morton termed the "alternate penetration of the wilderness and return to civilization [which]is the basic rhythm of Canadian life and forms the basic elements of Canadian character."

Yes, penetration. Pierre Berton wrote, "A Canadian is someone who knows how to have sex in a canoe."

No Canadian journalist understood better than the late Mr. Berton that the primary purpose of newspapers is not news but ritual communication - the maintenance of society by the projection of community ideals. "Mythology" in a word.

And for a mythology to remain authoritative, it must, as political scientist Peter Russell says, be "a call for action" and "inspire its adherents with a belief in historical destiny."

In short, we need to know how precisely to have sex in a canoe.

A woman I know from B.C.'s Interior, a woman accomplished at everything to which she has ever set her hand, the canoe included, once explained.

Removing the thwarts is what Americans would do. "It's the wrong paradigm," she said. "You've got to think out of the box. Let the thwarts work for you."

She recommends that one partner be draped over the centre thwart, grasping either the gunwales or the forward thwart to stabilize the canoe, while the other partner, "crouching low," approaches from the stern and assumes the spoon position.

That's it. So us.

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