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Between 1928 and 1931, a series of 16 Folk music and handicraft festivals were staged across Canada under the auspices of the Canadian Pacific Railway.¹ Largely the conception and design of enterprising CPR publicity agent J. Murray Gibbon, the festivals were structured in such a way as to reflect a deliberate vision of Canada and Canadians. A great believer in the power and primacy of the Folk, Gibbon conceived of the festivals as a means to promote cultural communication among immigrants and French and British “natives” in Canada.² The category “Folk” operated for Gibbon on the level of primary, essential identity—he believed in particular racial groupings, or categories, and contended that the essential expression of any racial category was evident in its Folk culture. In developing the series of festivals, Gibbon was reflecting his growing concern that Canada (as a nation comprised of many racial categories) suffered from a paucity of cultural communication and interconnectivity. What was worse, the essential Folk practices and beliefs of each far-flung racial group were seen to be under sustained and concentrated assault as modern Canada moved away from its agrarian beginnings. The fear was thus two-fold: not only were racial groups failing to interact with one another and engage with a cohesive national identity, but the essential identities, the very meanings of each group, were disintegrating through the relentless process of modernity.

The wide success of the 16 Folk festivals did not entirely quell these immediate fears, but did serve as a foundation for a new understanding of cultural difference and community in Canada. Gibbon, who went on to explore the role of racial groups and essential identities more fully in his enormously influential book Canadian Mosaic (1938), stands as a key figure in the development of Canadian cultural identity.³ As the master mosaicist, Gibbon endeavored to impose order on an otherwise disordered cultural landscape through his various constructions of an inclusive Canada. His books, his countless speeches, his radio addresses, and the succession of CPR Folk festivals discussed below all demonstrate the master mosaicist at his life’s work of developing a participatory vision of Canadian identity and culture.

This ideal of the mosaic, apparently evocative yet ultimately imaginary, appeared to Gibbon in 1938 as “a decorated surface, bright with inlays of separate coloured pieces, not painted in colours blended with brush on palate. The original background in which the inlays are set is still visible, but these inlays cover more space than that background, and so the ensemble may truly be called a mosaic” (Gibbon 1938, viii). As he placed the tiles onto that background, arranging his festivals, his first large-scale experiments at the representation of a pluralist Canada, Gibbon may have been aiming towards just such a goal; but it was a pluralism built upon a stable foundation, an immutable background of [End Page 141] white Anglo-Celt (male) hegemony onto which he could manufacture his mosaic. His vision of the mosaic as an immovable surface bedecked by garlands suggests the inevitable unevenness in the power distribution he would develop.

For Gibbon, the work was imperative and pressing. “While there is still time,” he worried in 1938, “let us make a survey of these racial groups—see where they came from, what relationship, if any, they had with each other in Europe, what culture they enjoyed and how much of that culture they have been able to bring with them” (1938, viii). He believed that the representation of racial categories through primitive, archaic Folk expression would simplify cultural communication by breaking down the balkanizing barriers of foreign language, appearance, and values. In brief, Gibbon surmised that all European Folk cultures, when refined to their primitive, pre-modern essences, looked and sounded very much alike.⁴ The tactic, then, was to celebrate the differences in order to recognize the similarities.

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