What is "Le Nord"?

Every now and then I label my posts with particular labels that might not necessarily be self-explanatory at first glance.  Whenever I speak about French-Canadians, Canada, or the parts of the United States that pass for Canada (another such label), I usually mark such posts with "Le Nord".  Le Nord is French for "The North", and as with most geographical labels that place culture ahead of actual geography, the designation can be somewhat misleading.  What is "north" to an Ontarian or a Michigander might be a joke to some Cree fellow from far northern Quebec.  What would the opposite of north be?  South?  Would some fellow from Biloxi not consider someone from Louisville to be nearly a "northerner"?  Fortunately for such brazen label lords such as myself, cultural regions are only part of a greater recipe that can make geographical soup.

An area's landscape, its geology, flora, fauna, climate, and all such things conspiring to make the familiar smells and sensations of what is unique to every environment on earth have as much to do with what makes a place a place as its history, culture, and residents.  Le Nord, as such, is a place that combines the rugged majesty of the Canadian Shield, with its black lakes, boreal forests, sandy soils, and cold, dry air with English, French, Cree, and Algonquin speaking people who mostly live in Canada, with a few being found in the United States as well.  I thought about making a map to delineate where such a region would be, but as labels usually fall under the category of several logical fallacies, and since there are exceptions to geographical definitions, a map fell out of the question.  Instead, where you can find the below landscape, you can usually find "Le Nord".

Now, pictured there we have one of those black lakes, a shoreline peppered with granitic boulders, and lovely balsam fir and eastern white pine.  You can find this sort of scenery in the Adirondacks, northern Michigan through Minnesota, Manitoba, Ontario, and points eastward, a pretty diverse set of places.  Yet in nearly each of them you can find little towns that look like this:

That was taken in Mattawa, Ontario, a small town which looks a bit like Munising, Michigan, or Madawaska, Maine.  Sure, two of the four have pretty significant French-Canadian populations, but the cultural association is pretty much just incidental to the fact that most of the boreal parts of the world have long since been passed over as favorable for agriculture, large cities, and the other trappings of modern civilization.  French-Canadian culture has endured because it happened to be concentrated in such environments.  In 1763, Britain had a choice of getting Canada or Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island that at the time was worth more than all of France's North American possessions.  For numerous reasons, Canada was the prize that Britain settled for.  This would have normally meant mass deportations of all the French inhabitants of such lands, but owing to the need to keep the 13 colonies to the south bounded in, and because the land was not exactly a prize in the eyes of colonial settlers, French-Canadian culture remained, except on suitable land in the St. Lawrence valley further upstream where they had not yet settled in large numbers.  Again, Canada is what Britain simply settled for.  The real crowns of the empire were in the 13 colonies, Caribbean, and India.

In the next two centuries, French and First Born alike would be joined by other immigrants looking to reap the riches of an otherwise rugged land.  In keeping with their predecessors, though, these newcomers never really mowed over as much of the landscape as those further south did.  Yes, people farm in Le Nord, but that is only because a farm is one of many choices of a living in this place.  Many harvest the bounty of the land in mineral, timber, and other natural resources.  Large corporations do exploit the land here, but more than often the majority of people in these places are in it for themselves.  Much of the land still looks a bit wild and natural as a result.  That's what Le Nord is, really.  A place where some people live for living, where resources could be exploited by tend to get ignored for easier circumstances elsewhere, and where life continues largely unaffected by a modern pace of consumption and life.  Mattawa has fast food, wifi, and is not entirely off the beaten path away from larger cities with big box stores and huge malls, but it, and places like it, is not dominated by such things as much as it is set in a backdrop of a land where it is easy to remember that environment is more than just the most visible things.