Many Canadians, Thompsonites included, usually don't stop to think about what makes their lives so uniquely Canadian, and how their experience of the Canadian identity might be quite different from that of someone living in the bustling city of Toronto or the stark tundra of Inuvik.
One student from the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto has launched himself on a tour of Canada in search of what it means to different people in different areas to be Canadian.
Corbin Smith started his travels across Canada in April, conducting research and collecting data for a book he is writing which will be published by January that looks at how different groups of Canadians identify with being Canadian. It will also outline the similarities and differences between each group of people. The end product will be a written book mixed with a photo essay on Canadians.
Smith started his journey in New Brunswick and visited all the Maritime provinces from there. He also journeyed through Quebec to the Gaspé region, went across to Ottawa, backtracked to Montreal and then went through Northern Ontario with stops in Kirkland Lake, Timmins and Thunder Bay. After that he travelled through the prairie provinces along the United States border to British Columbia, where he then went all the way up to Yellowknife and then travelled back through Regina and Edmonton to Fort McMurray. Since then he has travelled through Northern Saskatchewan and finally, on Aug. 20 and 21, got to spend some time in Thompson.
Although Smith says he can't really define what Canadian means to different people yet, he has noticed one thing that ties together people from Northern Manitoba to other Northern provinces - the pride in being from the North.
"Something I was noticing is that people that live in the Northern Prairies identify more as Northerners than they identify with being part of the province," he explains. "So I think that someone in Thompson would be able to relate more or feel like they had more of a connection with someone in Northern Saskatchewan."
Once Smith's journey is complete he will move on to the exhaustive process of sorting all of the information he's collected.
"What happens with these stories is I'll go back and analyze them like crazy and index them and say these are the different themes that people talk aboutand that's kind of step two, phase two of the project," he notes. "The plan is to lock myself up in kind of a cabin in Southern Ontario kind of a farmland area with not a lot around. A friend of mine has a farm house that normally gets shut down in the winter but hopefully I'll be living there and just literally kind of making myself go through thousands and thousands of different interviews and coordinate an index and look at the results."
The journey so far has been an amazing one for Smith, and one which he feels is helping to make him a knowledgable ambassador that will help spread understanding and tolerance for people of different areas and cultures.
"I'm glad that I'm able to do this. I'm really, really glad as a person that I'm able to see and experience all these different people and cultures and the different geography of this country," he enthuses. "It's a wonderful country, and I'm so blessed to have been here and get to live here. I really, really hope I can do justice to the different stories and experiences that people shared with me so that I can hopefully share those stories and experiences with the rest of the world."
You can follow Smith's journey online at at www.mapofcanadian.ca.
