Western Canadian Studies Conference 2008 - Presentations

Farmers were market responsive business people, and they were surprisingly aware of and adaptable to their environments. This paper examines the commonalities between business and environmental approaches to agricultural settlement, and it argues that both borrow from an outdated discourse of humans engaged in a conquest of nature. It examines township level data from the 1906 Census of the Northwest Provinces which show early expansion by northern farmers and practically no activity in the semi-arid land of Palliser’s Triangle. People quickly realized the limits of low precipitation, and they frequently abandoned newly broken land in dry regions. Flax was considered a sodbusting crop by many farmers and, in 1916, a large concentration of flax cultivation appeared in Saskatchewan on land that was unbroken a decade earlier.

Questioning the concept of settlement challenges not only our understanding of environmental history but our usual practices of public history. Revisiting the meaning of settlement in the historical narrative also means questioning its place in public memory, where ideological preferences and practical constraints have made settlement an ubiquitous motif in historic site designation. Indeed, I suggest we need to draw greater attention to the theme in the West’s popular historical culture, and to colour existing designations with a richer critique of settlement’s transformative quality and historical specificity.

This talk examines the central role played by resource exploitation in the political economy of the Canadian Northwest in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in contrast to the role played by agricultural settlement. The new resource geographies that emerged embraced property regimes and economic relationships that encouraged the sedentarization of aboriginal peoples at the same time that they depended upon a transient, predominantly non-Native population for labour. This led to the segregation of native/non-industrial and non-native/industrial communities and the mis-representation of the former as embodying archaic relationships and a decaying social fabric and the latter as epitomizing the ephemeral dynamism of Canada in the modern age.

In the late nineteenth century, Yale students S.E.S. (Samuel) Allen and Walter Wilcox climbed in the Canadian Rocky Mountains near Lake Louise. For Wilcox the Rockies offered 'exceptional attractions to those who enjoy natural scenery, sport, and camp life' and for Allen the range provided for 'those interested in mountain climbing . . . almost inexhaustible material.' Their journeys 'marked the inauguration of the last great era of Rocky Mountain exploration and discovery' where previously unexplored peaks, valleys, and lakes were 'discovered' in the Canadian Rockies. Upon their return home the men proclaimed their findings in books and articles, presenting themselves as imperial heroes claiming the Canadian Rockies as their own late imperial conquests. The truth though is their climbs were less heroic adventures and more guided tours led by Aboriginal men. Drawing from both published and unpublished material produced by these two authors, this essay proposes to gain a clearer understanding of how mountaineers transformed their complex cultural encounters into distinct imperial identities.

The talk explores the dichotomies between wilderness and culture, desire and reality in the creation and development of Banff National Park. The talk critiques the historical and contemporary rhetoric of 'wilderness experiences' in Canada's National Parks by examining the economic, philosophical, and bureaucratic perspectives that informed the establishment and early history of the park at Banff. The distinctively modern perception of nature in places like Banff is placed in sharp relief through an examination of premodern perspectives upon wilderness.

This essay shines light on a fundamental problem in Canadian history: our tendency to create artificial 'regions' (i.e. the Prairies, the North, the Maritimes] whitewashes the nuance and variety within those regions, draws separations between regions as if they have no points of contact and convergence, but most importantly, renders invisible and unheard the stories of those places 'in between.' The podcast presents a case study of Paddockwood, Saskatchewan, a forest fringe soldier settlement and Depression re-settlement area whose identity is defiantly non-prairie. Local residents erected a commemorative stone to mark the old Montreal Lake trail, an overland freighting trail used in the first half of the twentieth century to take freight into northern communities and draw out forest and lake resources. The stone represents an understanding of Paddockwood's past as a conduit into the north and showcases an example of connection and continuity between the north and the south.

Matt Dyce (mdyce@interchange.ubc.ca) is a Ph.D student in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. He holds a B.A. in Canadian Studies from Trent University and a Master’s in History from Carleton.. His doctoral project considers the relationships between historical environments, spatializations of memory, and practices of colonial governmentality in the administration and re-settlement of the North-West from 1867 to the present.

James Opp (james_opp@carleton.ca) is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carleton University. He is the author of The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada, 1880-1930 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2005) and co-edited with John C. Walsh, Home, Work, and Play: Situating Canadian Social History, 1840-1980 (Oxford, 2006). He has written a variety of articles on public memory, photography, and archives in western Canada.

The presentation examines the careers and works of some noted vernacular historians of Western Canada, including Katherine Hughes, a journalist, Alberta's first provincial archivist and author of the first biography of Father Albert Lacombe; F.G. Roe, a homesteader, railroader, and author of the North American Buffalo; and Roy Ito, a Japanese Canadian war veteran, school teacher and author of several notable works on Japanese Canadian history. Drawing on their own personal experiences as witnesses to history, each of these authors brought commitment, compassion, intelligence, and skill to their respective studies on the past. Their works attest to the dynamism of the vernacular impulse and the importance of recovering and nurturing this strain to the revitalization and future viability of the practice of history in western Canada.