The first thing the English did when they got here was plant English gardens. Then they named this, the furthest reach of their empire, “British Columbia.” They named the capitol after their Queen, Victoria. All over the place is found their imprimatur. There is, in The Republic of East Vancouver alone, the “Britannia Community Centre,” just down “Kitchener” Street from “Lord Nelson” school. Parallel to Kitchener runs “Charles” and then “William” streets, more English kings, and then there’s “Hastings Street.” On the west side of town, there is Trafalgar, Alma, and Waterloo Streets, and so on, one after the other, celebrating important English military battles.

It’s as though they knew implicitly that geography determines culture, that geography is what, above all else, makes us what we are. They were determined to force geography to be more English than the England they left behind. But of course: they founded this province and city in the last part of the map of the world to be coloured in. This is the place where typically the map label went. They were terribly dislocated from home.

The English more than anyone overlaid the strange geography they encountered here with a familiar geography filled with reminders of home. But the urge was not theirs alone. Vancouver is notable for its strongly ethnically-identified neighbourhoods, from Little Italy to Little India to Little Japan to Chinatown and so on, where Sicilian cafés, barfi shops, seaweed and raw fish shops and huge dim sum restaurants proliferate.

Meanwhile, the culture that originally arose in the geography was pushed out, though it has made a startling reclamation of some places, like at Hastings Street East around Main Street, what we might accurately start calling Indian-town, were that not too confusing because of that Italian, sailing under Portuguese commission, who fraudulently claimed to have found a sea route to India, when he landed in North America. Phew, talk about dislocation!

Two books just out and on first glance widely unrelated to each other act as a sort of call and response around the theme of cultural dislocation. John Ralston Saul has published A Fair Country: Telling truths about Canada (Penguin, 2008), a complete and total re-jigged version of the history of Canada, and Bruce Alexander has published Globalization of Addiction: A study in the poverty of the spirit (Oxford University Press, 2008), also a complete and total re-consideration of that most intractable and widespread human problem—addiction.

Where these two disparate works unexpectedly cross paths is in their prescriptions for what we ought to start doing now. Both call for, first of all, a big re-think about who we are, where we live, and what we’re trying to do here. They both emphatically re-locate a culture tragically dislocated back into the basic geography that is here.

Saul’s big point is that Canada is and always was a Métis nation, by which he means the geography (which includes climate) imposes on anyone who ends up here a certain way of approaching the usual human social puzzles. Endless negotiation and re-negotiation, that which so frustrates Canadians trying to re-create a European or American model of conflict resolution—where written-in-stone legal documents are meant to end negotiations once and for all—is actually a positive and worthwhile process passed from indigenous people to the European settlers, and arises from the only practical way to get along both independently and cooperatively in this climate and land. He calls for recognition and acceptance of endless negotiation, among other aspects of Métis culture, to “solve” the ongoing problems that have so bedeviled Canada.

The larger frame he draws is one in which Canadians need to recognize that they are all a product, now, of this geography, and they only frustrate themselves when they persist in thinking and behaving as though they are a product of some other geography—European, or increasingly, American. Moreover, he says, since the geography is of course common to us all who are here, we are naturally united in a profound way we haven’t fully appreciated as yet. Once we understand that we are all culturally produced by the common land, we can move forward, having achieved grounded re-location. He reminds his readers that Canada is now a very old country. The BNA Act of 1867, usually taken to be the beginning of Canada, is actually a mere bureaucratic date that comes along far into an already long history of a nation. Furthermore, if we understand ourselves as a Métis nation arising from the geography, the arrival of the Europeans is much less a disruption to a process that predates 1492 by an unaccountably long stretch of time. Canada, since forever, has been a land that accommodates new arrivals in a special way, by expanding the circle, and it will always be so because the geography insists upon those who live here that particular way of managing things.

Bruce Alexander comes to a surprisingly complimentary conclusion. Dislocation, he asserts, is the cause of addiction, as socially displaced people use work, sex, drugs, TV, video games, gambling, whatever, to substitute for the missing social fabric in their lives. In this view, it is not the drug, be it meth, heroin or crack, that causes addiction, but rather these substances are the most readily available means of substituting for an absent social association. (Perhaps social association is itself an addiction.) Alexander goes wide around the world and deep into history to find a convincing correlation between strong social fabric and no destructive addiction, and weak or shattered social fabric and high rates of addiction. Addiction in society contributes to, if not directly creates, poverty, homelessness, theft, fear, abuse and all manner of other social ills. It so happens that the social dissociation that creates addiction also creates high sales at shopping malls, bars and most other activities key to the success of capitalist economy.

The connection is so strong and reinforced that capitalism, Alexander is able to claim, reproduces social dissociation wherever possible to generate the profits that flow from the resulting addictive behavior, which usually involves spending a lot of money. Therefore, Alexander says, the solution is to re-establish social fabric—to reconnect one with another in more meaningful ways, and to combat as strenuously as possible capitalism’s intentionally corrosive ways.

If Saul is right and we’ve been ignoring our shared and unique geography at the price of feeling profoundly dislocated, and if Alexander is right and we’ve been falling into all manner of destructive addictive behavior for want of social association, the two can possibly be put together to create a new and potentially very worthwhile agenda: to create social association through rediscovery of our common history and culture and our shared geography that determines far more about what and who we are than documents from foreign and far-off lands where we’ve always been told we’re born from.