Authors: Dr. J. Felcia Pushpalatha
Abstract: Land occupies a central position in the construction of cultural identity and ecological consciousness in contemporary Canadian literature. While earlier Canadian literary traditions frequently represented nature through wilderness, exploration, and national identity, contemporary writers increasingly portray land as a living, historical, cultural, and ethical presence. This paper examines the relationship between land, identity, ecological memory, and environmental ethics in selected contemporary Canadian literary works. Particular attention is given to Thomas King's The Back of the Turtle (2014), Lee Maracle's Celia's Song (2014), Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves (2017), Waubgeshig Rice's Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), and Ed O'Loughlin's Minds of Winter (2017). Through an ecocritical and environmental-humanities approach, the study explores how land functions not merely as geographical setting but as a repository of memory, identity, cultural knowledge, ecological relationships, and ethical responsibility. Recent scholarship on Canadian literature demonstrates that Indigenous-authored and environmentally engaged texts increasingly challenge colonial and anthropocentric understandings of land. Eppley, Wood, and Stagg-Peterson (2024), for example, demonstrate that land and place are represented as constitutive of Indigenous identity rather than as passive backgrounds. Similarly, Šlapkauskaitė (2023) develops the concept of “eco-memory” to examine how memory can function as an ethical mode of ecological relationality in contemporary Canadian fiction. The study argues that contemporary Canadian literature reimagines environmental ethics through relationships among people, land, water, animals, memory, and community. Land consequently becomes not only a physical territory but also a cultural archive and an ethical relationship through which human identity is formed and ecological responsibility is negotiated.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23096988
