The Inside Story: News from The Royal Canadian Geographical Society Prisoners of the forest Rite of passage Fresh meat Third place is a charm Double-digit géographica

But during one such conversation, a student asked Coleridge a question that made him forget all his troubles. "We're getting beat up by the weather," he recalls, "we're not keeping to our schedule, we're getting stressed out because things aren't going according to plan, and this student asks, 'How do you go pee?'" Coleridge laughs. “And you start to chuckle, realizing that the world is much simpler than the complex situations you create on a trip this big."

Ramsay, a geography student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., turned her discovery into the subject of her master’s thesis. With the assistance of a $5,000 Maxwell Studentship in Human Geography, awarded annually by The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, she is studying the role of German POWs in northwestern Ontario lumber camps.

His Summits of Canada Expedition, funded in part by The Royal Canadian Geographical Society, has taken him to the top of Alberta's Mount Columbia, Ontario's Ishpatina Ridge, in Temagami, and will soon see him summit an unnamed peak in the Northwest Territories, which he is hoping to formally name with the help of First Nations and the territorial government.

Between 1,800 and 2,000 German POWs worked as lumberjacks, relieving the forestry industry’s chronic labour shortage caused by the war effort. Ramsay is looking into the prisoners’ impact on the economy, as well as their relationship with the rugged landscape and how they altered it. “I’d like to know how they interacted when they were dropped off in the middle of nowhere in northwestern Ontario,” she says.

The prisoners’ Canadian experience was apparently favourable enough to prompt many of them to return to Canada after they were repatriated to Germany at the end of the war. One study claims that nearly one-quarter of the POWs eventually immigrated to Canada, though Ramsay has not yet confirmed those figures. She is particularly intrigued by the fact that many chose to go back to northwestern Ontario to put down roots. “That, to me, is very interesting and ironic: you’re a POW, yet you opt to return not only to Canada but to the place where you were held against your will.”

Ramsay may gain more insight into this question as she interviews a handful of former POWs still living in the Thunder Bay area and continues her fieldwork in former logging campsites scattered throughout a vast region, from Nipigon, on the north shore of Lake Superior, to Lake of the Woods, near the Manitoba border. She says there is some urgency to her study, since surviving former prisoners are now in their eighties and nineties. She would also like to locate and document as many camps as possible before they are lost completely to the encroaching forest.

Monique Roy-Sole

While aboard a polar expedition ship travelling near the passage this summer, former RCGS president Denis St-Onge and Conrad Grégoire, both of the Geological Survey of Canada, decided to correct a historical wrong. On Aug. 31, they dropped a Canadian flag over the side of the ship (that it happened to be a Russian vessel, operated by a Russian crew, did not escape their attention). Over a champagne toast, the giddy geographers renamed the northern route the "Canadian Arctic Passage.”

“We all know the Northwest Passage belongs to Canada,” says St-Onge, “but we decided to make sure that it remains so for eternity.”

Antonia McGuire