My favourite place in the United States is undoubtedly New Mexico. It’s difficult to put a finger on it, especially after so long, but it really is the land of enchantment. Perhaps it’s the particular beauty of its desert, or the fusion of Hispanic and American culture. It has a certain aesthetic that’s hard to forget, especially in Old Town Albuquerque.

Whenever my family would visit Old Town, we had a lot of fun. The food, of course, was always stellar. I will never forget, for example, the scrumptious sopapillas we had on the restaurant just off the main square. The square, too, I can’t forget: there was usually a host of people enjoying the warm weather along with the music of a Latin brass band. I’ve been there several times, and each time I would be enchanted by these sorts of things. However, I never expected to once meet a man who might have something to teach me about my home, which then was so many miles (not kilometres) away.

To clarify, I’m not saying that this guy was some sort of expert on Canada. He didn’t lecture me on our history, culture, attitudes, relationship with the US and other countries, or anything else, for that matter. Actually, what he talked about was paradoxically quite American: Canadian football (that is, for my British friends, Canadian “American” football). It turned out he had some very strong opinions about the NFL and consequently preferred to watch the CFL games. Needless to say, I was stunned. The NFL is huge in the United States. I’ve never been a massive football fan, but even I would have to admit that NFL games—live games—are an ecstatic experience. By contrast, the CFL would seem like a downgrade, even if you did prefer the bigger field (or whatever his reasons were). But I think what may have surprised me the most was that an American would have a more positive view of something Canadian than most Canadians themselves would have.

I was surprised, but why should this be so surprising? It seemed natural to me, having grown up in Canada, that the US generally has things that are bigger and better than what we have. They have all the musicians, TV shows, stars, movies, and sports teams!(Hell, I don’t even think there’s been a Canadian hockey team to win the Stanley Cup in the time I’ve been alive, and hockey’s supposed to be our thing! Though I’m not really a fan.) You could say that this surprising turn of events—finding a CFL fan in the desert—led me to think about my home up north, and what it means to say that I’m from there.

Canada, I think, suffers from this sort of “second place” mentality. It has, it often seems to me, settled to think about what lies elsewhere than appreciate what it has here. This is what John Ralston Saul calls the “colonial mind”, and indeed he mentions several individuals in one of his books who, he explains, spent their time trying to pretend that they weren’t where they were. Not Canada, but the British Empire. Not the True North, but north of the United States, the dominant cultural force of our time. How often have we neglected our history, our story, ourselves for some disinterested narrative imported from abroad?

Amidst many of the tragedies that it created, this lasting mindset, I would say, is one of the most unfortunate legacies of colonialism. Empires are, after all, propped up by myths, from the Romans to the British and now to the United States; and these ultimately replace the mythos of whichever place they conquer. What did Canada become, to the British Empire, other than a remote and inconsequential colony? What, then, should Canada think of itself, when the mythos of their conqueror leaves them no true sense of place? Enter our identity crisis, our insecurity complex, our losing colonial mentality. For the colony is, above all, defined and subjugated by an external power; and so now, as a nation, is it not finally time to claim our own history, direction, unique identity, and sense of purpose? Or, to put it another way, why should our instinct be to assume that our football league is only capable of being the second best?

Might we rediscover our own cultural inheritance, not unlike New Mexico, of Indigenous, French, and English identity? Perhaps it’s high time that we asked, bluntly, why we’re not part of the United States or Britain, and how these historical differences have made us unique. It would have been exceedingly easy to have become American in the nineteenth century, for instance, and perhaps it would’ve been easier for us now, had we thrown off the shackles of empire like the United States had done. But why didn’t we? Surely not out of loyalty to Britain, the old Tory myth! No, instead we made something new: first, a “dominion”, and now just “Canada”—whatever that was, is, and should be! Might we, too, see ourselves as a land of enchantment?