| Abstract | This paper addresses the issue of how nation-states re-imagine themselves in local and global contexts. In particular, attention will be directed to how Canada has invented itself through strategies that have attempted to integrate a people separated by geography, history, ethnicity, class, and gender in the complex setting of two founding national-cultures, an expansionist neighbour, and a pro-immigration policy. Past strategies have turned to several meta-narratives: the spirit of the land; the cult of the hero; the transformation of wilderness into home and commodity; an ethic of progress; the nurturing of democracy and social justice. This paper will examine approaches to national identity that are self-consciously aware of place. This "geography of identity" is premised on the assumption that peoples' identification with distinctive places is essential for the cultivation of an awareness — an "a-where-ness" — of national identity. That is, nation-states occupy imagined terrains that serve as mnemonic devices. Familiar material worlds become loaded with symbolic sites, dates, and events that provide social continuity, contribute to the collective memory, and establish spatial and temporal reference points for society. That is, the nurturing of a collective memory and putative social cohesion through landscapes and inscapes, myths and memories, monuments and commemorations, quotidian practices and public ritual. When these are "placed" in context, they constitute the geography of identity.
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