Just trying to summarize Mina’s life story and her connection with Labrador reminds me forcibly of how invented my version is—I have left out so much, selected what I see as important, and emphasized what interests me. In order to prepare my edition of her book, I found it necessary to recreate, as best I could, her time and her place, to listen to her voice in her expedition diary and in those few letters that survive. But I could not transform myself into an Edwardian woman, and Mina Benson Hubbard should not be viewed exclusively—or uncritically—through my late-20th century/early 21st-century feminist eyes. As I have continued to discover from my work on Mina, my book on Canadian painter Tom Thomson—called Inventing Tom Thomson—and now through my writing of the biography of a contemporary Canadian playwright, Making Theatre: A Life of Sharon Pollock, the very act of narrating a life story, however scholarly and factual, is a re-creation; it is never and cannot be an ur-text, an original, the Truth. Moreover, when a continuous line of such narratives begins to coalesce around a once-living, historical figure, the story becomes more and more sedimented in layers of interpretation, more complicated by the story-tellers’ self-legitimating strategies and truth claims. And the subject of all this narration—the person who motivated or inspired the story in the first place—becomes larger than and other than him- or herself. The person becomes a symbol, or a legend, or a myth, or, as I prefer to think of it—an icon.
As I argued in Canada and the Idea of North, over time and with a critical mass of repetition, a discourse emerges around a particular person or event or place, which thereby becomes invested with crucial meaning for a family, for a group of people, or even for a nation: this one story acquires significance; it comes to stand for something much larger than one life or one accomplishment (or death, or sacrifice, etc). I well remember being challenged about this term “invention” when I used it in a lecture on Tom Thomson. My audience was from Owen Sound, Ontario, Thomson’s home town; we were in the Tom Thomson Memorial Art Gallery (where a very definite investment in his story exists), and my listener felt the term invention sounded pejorative. I think he felt that I was fiddling with the facts, making up stuff, lying, and I know he believed that only one story about the famous painter could be true. But I see nothing pejorative in the term invention; to the contrary, I see much greater ideological, psychological, and possibly even political power residing in the inventing process than in a set of bare facts. What interests me is how this process works, how I can locate and describe it (with what scholarly tools and theoretical concepts), and what meanings a particular iconic invention produces. In the following discussion I describe how and why I think this woman called Mina Benson Hubbard, or Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Jr., or Mrs. Mina Ellis (her second husband’s name) is becoming a Canadian icon through her many, and on-going, inventions. In Canada, and in this case of Mina, there are three critical determinants at work: first, the basic story concerns the North, a vaguely defined, real yet mythical place of enormous symbolic and practical value to the country, and a place very much in the public eye in the early 21st century; second, the central figure in the story is a woman on an expedition into a part of the north that remains foreign, mysterious, even exotic to the great majority of Canadians; and third, the verifiable facts of the story include a tragic death, a love story, and a survivor story. Just summarized like this—mysterious North, dangerous expedition, young woman, tragic death, faithful love, all set in 1905—would make a person eager to know when the film will be made, and it so happens that one film has already appeared and at least two others are underway.1 The inventing of Mina Benson Hubbard is rapidly becoming cultural business.
In 2004 my new edition of Mina’s A Woman’s Way Through Unknown Labrador was published and my publisher, McGill-Queen’s University Press, or rather their designer, captured and capitalized upon many of the discursive elements I have mentioned to market the book (see Illustration 5): there is the romantic, mysterious, beautiful yet overpowering northern landscape; there is the woman stepping out of her canoe, out of another time and place, and into our 21st century sights. Before a reader even opens the book, Mina has already been placed in a set of concentric and overlapping paradigms that resonate for Canadians and for others who love the North. But there is an important caveat to make about this dust jacket image because readers/buyers are being tricked by the woman whose arrival at Ungava appears to be captured on camera. The photograph at the bottom of the dust jacket was staged. When Mina actually arrived at the end of her expedition, on the mudflats of the George River, no one was waiting with a camera. The factor, Mr Ford, and his wife, had heard vague rumours that she might be making this expedition, but they had no positive information—there were no telephones, cell phones, Blackberries, or couriers in 1905, and the interior of Labrador was just that—interior, uncharted (for white people) territory. What’s more, Mina had made excellent time and arrived days before she could have been expected. But she knew that to prove her arrival she would need a record of it; she also knew full well that no man would believe a woman could possibly complete such an expedition, unless there was visual proof of the fact, and that no white man would take a native man’s word on it. Wisely, she arranged this photograph and the people in it so posterity could see her stepping daintily out of her canoe, always already a lady despite her suspicious, salacious time in the wilds.
- “Mina et Hubbard,” the tele-film about Mina, is part of the Canada en Amour series produced for Radio Canada by Vic Pelletier and it was aired in April 2007. This film, part documentary and part dramatic recreation of Mina’s story involves sequences taken when the film crew camped, canoed, and filmed along the George River, and in the evenings the young woman member of the crew is filmed reading Mina’s book. This combination of documentary, interviews, and drama underscores the relevance of Mina’s story and the northern landscape for contemporary audiences. Anne Henderson is making a documentary film about Mina and she was on location in Labrador during the 2005 centennial. Jean Desormeaux of Coolbrook Productions in Ontario has created a script for a film about Mina’s life that promises to be an interesting dramatic reconstruction of her expedition and her relationship to Leonidas and to Labrador. [↩]
