Finding Directions West: Readings that Locate and Dislocate Western Canada’s Past (The West, 9)

In the past, Western Canada was a place of new directions in human thought and action, migrations of the mind and body, and personal journeys. This book anthology brings together studies exploring the way the west served as a place of constant movement between places of spiritual, subsistence and aesthetic importance. The region, it would seem, gained its very life in the movement of its people. Finding Directions West: Readings that Locate and Dislocate Western Canada's Past, showcases new Western Canadian research on the places found and inhabited by indigenous people and newcomers, as well as their strategies to situate themselves, move on to new homes or change their environments to recreate the West in profoundly different ways. These studies range from the way indigenous people found representation in museum displays, to the archival home newcomers found for themselves: how, for instance, the LGBT community found a place, or not, in the historical record itself. Other studies examine the means by which Métis communities, finding the west transforming around them, turned to grassroots narratives and historical preservation in order to produce what is now appreciated as vernacular histories of inestimable value. In another study, the issues confronted by the Stoney Nakoda who found their home territory rapidly changing in the treaty and reserve era is examined: how Stoney connections to Indian agents and missionaries allowed them to pursue long-distance subsistence strategies into the pioneer era. The anthology includes an analysis of a lengthy travel diary of an English visitor to Depression-era Alberta, revealing how she perceived the region in a short government-sponsored inquiry. Other studies examine the ways women, themselves newcomers in pioneering society, evaluated new immigrants to the region and sought to extend, or not, the vote to them; and the ways early suffrage activists in Alberta and England by World War I developed key ideas when they cooperated in publicity work in Western Canada. Finding Directions West also includes a study on ranchers and how they initially sought to circumscribe their practices around large landholdings in periods of drought, to the architectural designs imported to places such as the Banff Centre that defied the natural geography of the Rocky Mountains. Too often, Western Canadian history is understood as a fixed, precisely mapped and authoritatively documented place. This anthology prompts readers to think differently about a region where ideas, people and communities were in a constant but energetic flux, and how newcomers converged into sometimes impermanent homes or moved on to new experiences to leave a significant legacy for the present-day. Front cover -- Half title page -- Series page -- Full title page -- Copyright page -- Table of Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Migration and Transformation in the Canadian West -- 1: Spatial Deployments to Synchronic Witnessing: Reiterations of Contactin Museum Spaces -- 2: Discombobulated Remnants?: Preserving LGBTTTIQ Histories -- 3: J.Z. LaRocque: A Métis Historian's Account of His Family's Experiences during the North-West Rebellion of 1885 -- 4: Colonizer or Compatriot?: A Reassessment of the Reverend John McDougall -- 5: Exploring the "Thirteenth" Reason for Suffrage: Enfranchising "Mothers of the British Race" on the Canadian Prairies -- 6: "Develop a Great Imperial Race": Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Murphy, and Their Promotion of "Race Betterment" in Western Canadain the 1920s -- "The Country Was Looking Wonderful": Insights on 1930s Alberta from the Travel Diary of Mary Beatrice Rundle -- A Blueprint for Range Management: The Anderson Grazing Rates Report of 1941 -- 9: Mountain Capitalists, Space, and Modernity at the Banff School of Fine Arts -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index -- Back cover Western Canada has figured historically as a focus point for new directions in human thought and action, migrations of the mind and body, and personal journeys of both a substantial and transcendental nature. The essays in Finding Directions West interrogate the meaning of those journeys, their reality, their memory, and their constructed identities within Western Canada itself. The book situates landscapes and peopled places in the West within the larger study of Western Canada and its transborder relationships. It draws scholars from a vareity of disciplines within history, from gender studies, to museum studies, to environmental history, in order to examine afresh Western Canada as a place for finding new directions in the human experience