Voluntary Detours: Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta 9780228009962

Table of contents :
Cover
VOLUNTARY DETOURS
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Worth the Trip: Travel and the Evaluation of Small-Town and Rural Museums
2 Ghosts in the Museum: Haunted Histories at the Museum of Fear and Wonder
3 Middle of Nowhere: Contesting Rural Heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum
4 Encountering Oil and Water: The Politics of Play at Extraction Museums and Historic Sites
5 Unsettling the Pioneer: Learning from Indigenous Museums and Cultural Centres
Conclusion
Table and Figures
Notes
Index

Citation preview

VOLUNTARY DETOURS

McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation Studies in Art History Martha Langford and Sandra Paikowsky, series editors Recognizing the need for a better understanding of Canada’s artistic culture both at home and abroad, the Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation, through its generous support, makes possible the publication of innovative books that advance our understanding of Canadian art and Canada’s visual and material culture. This series supports and stimulates such scholarship through the publication of original and rigorous peer-reviewed books that make significant contributions to the subject. We welcome submissions from Canadian and international scholars for booklength projects on historical and contemporary Canadian art and visual and material culture, including Native and Inuit art, architecture, photography, craft, design, and museum studies. Studies by Canadian scholars on non-Canadian themes will also be considered. The Practice of Her Profession Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism Susan Butlin Bringing Art to Life A Biography of Alan Jarvis Andrew Horrall Picturing the Land Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 Marylin J. McKay The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada Edited by Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard Newfoundland Modern Architecture in the Smallwood Years, 1949–1972 Robert Mellin The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales Edited and with an Introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, Translation by Nancy Senior, Modernization by Réal Ouellet Museum Pieces Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums Ruth B. Phillips

The Allied Arts Architecture and Craft in Postwar Canada Sandra Alfoldy Rethinking Professionalism Essays on Women and Art in Canada, 1850–1970 Edited by Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson The Official Picture The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 Carol Payne Paul-Émile Borduas A Critical Biography François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Peter Feldstein On Architecture Melvin Charney: A Critical Anthology Edited by Louis Martin Making Toronto Modern Architecture and Design, 1895–1975 Christopher Armstrong Negotiations in a Vacant Lot Studying the Visual in Canada Edited by Lynda Jessup, Erin Morton, and Kirsty Robertson

Visibly Canadian Imaging Collective Identities in the Canadas, 1820–1910 Karen Stanworth Breaking and Entering The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted Edited by Bridget Elliott Family Ties Living History in Canadian House Museums Andrea Terry Picturing Toronto Photography and the Making of a Modern City Sarah Bassnett Architecture on Ice A History of the Hockey Arena Howard Shubert For Folk’s Sake Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia Erin Morton Spaces and Places for Art Making Art Institutions in Western Canada, 1912–1990 Anne Whitelaw Narratives Unfolding National Art Histories in an Unfinished World Edited by Martha Langford Canadian Painters in a Modern World, 1925–1955 Writings and Reconsiderations Lora Senechal Carney Sketches from an Unquiet Country Canadian Graphic Satire, 1840–1940 Edited by Dominic Hardy, Annie Gérin, and Lora Senechal Carney I’m Not Myself at All Women, Art, and Subjectivity in Canada Kristina Huneault The Global Flows of Early Scottish Photography Encounters in Scotland, Canada, and China Anthony W. Lee

Tear Gas Epiphanies Protest, Culture, Museums Kirsty Robertson What Was History Painting and What Is It Now? Edited by Mark Salber Phillips and Jordan Bear Through Post-Atomic Eyes Edited by Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian Jean Paul Riopelle et le mouvement automatiste François-Marc Gagnon Jean Paul Riopelle and the Automatiste Movement François-Marc Gagnon Translated by Donald Winkler I Can Only Paint The Story of Battlefield Artist Mary Riter Hamilton Irene Gammel Object Lives and Global Histories in Northern North America Material Culture in Motion, c. 1780–1980 Edited by Beverly Lemire, Laura Peers, and Anne Whitelaw For the Temporary Accommodation of Settlers Architecture and Immigrant Reception in Canada, 1870–1930 David Monteyne Women at the Helm How Jean Sutherland Boggs, Hsio-yen Shih, and Shirley L. Thomson Changed the National Gallery of Canada Diana Nemiroff Voluntary Detours Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta Lianne McTavish



VOLUNTARY DETOURS



Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta

Lianne McTavish McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 isbn 978-0-2280-0868-2 (cloth) isbn 978-0-2280-0869-9 (paper) isbn 978-0-2280-0996-2 (epdf) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Voluntary detours : small-town and rural museums in Alberta / Lianne McTavish. Names: McTavish, Lianne, 1967- author. Series: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history. Description: Series statement: McGill-Queen’s/Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation studies in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210237708 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210237856 | isbn 9780228008682 (cloth) | isbn 9780228008699 (paper) | isbn 9780228009962 (epdf) Subjects: lcsh: Small museums—Alberta. | lcsh: Museums and community—Alberta. | lcsh: Museum exhibits—Alberta. | lcsh: Heritage tourism—Alberta. | lcsh: Historic sites—Alberta. | lcsh: Alberta—Rural conditions. Classification: lcc am21.a43 m38 2021 | ddc 069.097123—dc23

For my sister, Lorrie Egerter

CONTENTS Acknowledgments xi Introduction 3

1 Worth the Trip: Travel and the Evaluation of Small-Town and Rural Museums 39

2 Ghosts in the Museum: Haunted Histories at the Museum of Fear and Wonder 79

3 Middle of Nowhere: Contesting Rural Heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum 113

4 Encountering Oil and Water: The Politics of Play at Extraction Museums and Historic Sites 139

5 Unsettling the Pioneer: Learning from Indigenous Museums and Cultural Centres 174 Conclusion 212 Table and Figures 217 Notes 221 Index 281

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people supported the creation of this book, including friends, family members, museum workers, archivists, international scholars, colleagues, and editors. I am grateful to them all and apologize in advance to anyone not mentioned here by name. I should start by thanking Dan and Lisa Given, who in 2009 recommended that I visit the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alberta, an experience that inspired my subsequent research on smalltown and rural museums. Ten years later, Dan and Lisa hosted me in Melbourne when I was comparing and contrasting the settler colonial museums in Australia with those in Canada, part of an ongoing project on pioneer museums. My greatest debt is to my partner, Lee Spence, who drove me to the Gopher Hole Museum that first time and then to countless other museums throughout both Alberta and southwestern Ontario. By 2014, our son Sebastian had joined us, sitting in old school desks at small museums and touring conserved grain elevators during summer road trips. Other museum enthusiasts accompanied me to visit sites in Treaty 7 territory in southern Alberta. Special thanks are due to Sjoukje Bouma, Heather Caverhill, Kimberly Johnson, Andrea Korda, and Danielle Siemens. Heather and Andrea significantly shaped my thinking about museums. We discussed critical museum theory and colonial practices of collecting while loading plates onto the barbell in the squat rack at the gym and running the Royal Glenora stairs in Edmonton. Although she lives far from Alberta, my sister, Lorrie Egerter, has explored many museums with me over the years, both during trips to Paris and Montreal and, more recently, in and

xii

Acknowledgments

around London, Ontario. She is a constant source of encouragement, and I dedicate this book to her. This project depended on the assistance of generous staff at many smalltown and rural museums in Alberta, as well as the helpful summer students at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site. Museum workers who agreed to be interviewed include Dianne Kurta at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Judy Carleton at the Wadey Centre in Blackfalds, and Maureen Clarke at the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum in Fort Chipewyan. I am grateful to Laural Kurta and McKinna Elliott for providing me with high-resolution images of the Gopher Hole Museum. I thank Oliver Glanfield for giving me a personalized tour of the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum during my first visit there in 2013. Brendan Griebel and Jude Griebel hosted me numerous times at the Museum of Fear and Wonder, responded to my questions via e-mail, and provided images of their compelling museum for this publication. I am indebted to Nicole Munro, administrative assistant at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, for sending me gorgeous photographs of the site. Christopher Weber of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre graciously provided photographs of the current installations. I thank Brad Stables for supplying high-quality images of Métis Crossing. Japheth Howard gave Heather Caverhill and me a tour of the impressive collections at the Canadian Museum of Making. Luke Grealy, manager of the Museum of the Riverina in Albury, Australia, accompanied me to small-town museums in and around Wagga Wagga while informing me about how museums are funded in Australia. I am equally grateful to Dawn Sperling for opening the Petrolia Discovery site in Petrolia, Ontario, to offer me and my family a private lesson in early oil field technologies. I shared initial research at a number of academic events. My first talk on the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum was at the then/hier conference at the Museum of Vancouver in 2012, and I thank Viviane Gosselin and Phaedra Livingstone for their skilled editing of the resulting anthology, Museums and the Past: Constructing Historical Consciousness (2016). I gave another presentation on the Gopher Hole Museum at the annual conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada in 2013, and I am obliged to the organizers of my panel, as well as to respondent Fred Wilson. Feedback received after a talk at the annual conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies in 2016 refined my analysis of the museum in Torrington, and panel organizer Elizabeth Kryder-Reid subsequently edited my essay for a special issue. My article “Middle of Nowhere: Contesting Rural Heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum” appeared in the International Journal of Heritage Studies 24, no. 7 (2018): 764–80 (doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1300930). I acknowledge the support of

Acknowledgments

xiii

managing editor Laurajane Smith, as well as the Taylor & Francis Group (https://www.tandfonline.com/) for permission to include a slightly revised version of that article in this book. My work on the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site was first presented at the Canadian Historical Association’s annual conference in 2016, and I thank fellow panel members James Opp and Misa Nikolic, as well as respondent Kirk Niergarth. In 2017, Alicia Hughes generously invited me to give a master class on my museum research at the Hunterian Collections in Glasgow, with funding provided by the Leverhulme Trust Collections Research Group. And finally, Fiona Candlin asked me to speak about small, community museums at University College London, Birkbeck, in 2019. Fiona’s input was important at a crucial moment in the production of this manuscript, and I am continually inspired by her groundbreaking scholarship on museums. Ruth Phillips offered helpful advice during an early stage of my research, and her masterful publications on museums in Canada have shaped my approach in significant ways. The scholarship of Andrea Whitcomb was equally informative, and I thank her for an unforgettable tour of the Melbourne Museum in 2018. My colleagues at the University of Alberta offered sustained intellectual and emotional support, notably Kathleen Berto, Betsy Boone, Blair Brennan, Sean Caulfield, Lisa Claypool, Beverly Lemire, Natalie Loveless, Dawn McLean, Marilène Oliver, Lisa Prins, and Caitlin Wells. Tanya Harnett guided my research on Indigenous museums and cultural centres, providing much needed readings, conversations, and friendship. Other scholars at the University of Alberta, namely Crystal Gail Fraser, Erin Sutherland, and Sarah Carter, read or commented on chapter 5 of this book, helping me to think more complexly about Indigenous cultures; they are not responsible for any remaining weaknesses. The archival research for chapter 5 was enabled by professional staff at both the City of Edmonton Archives and the Provincial Archives of Alberta. Mary Pinkoski undertook some of this research with me, providing insight about museum practices and pedagogy as we co-wrote an article about the John Walter Museum in Edmonton, published elsewhere. This research would not have succeeded without the cooperation and knowledge of Heather Kerr, curator of the City of Edmonton Artifacts Centre. Crucial funding for my research on small-town and rural museums was provided by the Killam Trusts at the University of Alberta (2013), enabling me to hire Tracey Hilden, then a master’s candidate, to visit and describe the museums in and around Edmonton. An Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2014–19) allowed me to employ doctoral candidate Misa Nikolic for two years to visit and document hundreds of museums throughout the province. His final report on this early phase of research

xiv

Acknowledgments

and a collaborative overview of the museums in Alberta are available on the Alberta Museums Project website, albertamuseumsproject.com, designed by Travis Holmes and launched in 2017. Misa’s work helped to reveal the diversity of museums in Alberta, and his knowledge of Alberta and its people was invaluable to the construction of the website. Finally, I thank editor Jonathan Crago for his patience and advice during the production of this manuscript. The dedicated staff at McGill-Queen’s University Press, especially copy editor Robert Lewis, were always professional and responsive. The manuscript was reviewed by two anonymous referees, and I commend their generosity in helping me to revise and improve this book.

VOLUNTARY DETOURS

0.1 Sign outside the laneway of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

 

I NTRODUCTION

The Museum of Fear and Wonder is unique but in some ways exemplifies small-town and rural museums in Alberta, a province in western Canada.1 Brothers Brendan and Jude Griebel installed their collection of uncomfortable objects – anatomical wax models, worn antique dolls, a rocking horse crafted from the body of a real foal, a chess set carved by a prisoner on death row – in a farm house near the small community of Bergen, Alberta, about an hour north of Calgary. Visitors must make an effort to see these and other intriguing objects, arranged in wooden display cases sourced from defunct regional grocery stores, butcher shops, and pharmacies. After booking a free appointment during the museum’s limited opening hours, visitors drive through the back roads of rural Alberta, looking for a small building nestled within the prairie landscape (figure 0.1). Once there, they are greeted by the Griebel brothers and given a personalized tour of the site, hearing fascinating stories about the creation, transformation, and acquisition of selected items (figures 0.2 and 0.3). Although no other place in Alberta features a comparable collection, most small-town and rural museums similarly encourage visitors to undertake adventurous travel to see compelling exhibitions, meet passionate staff members, and engage in lively conversations. These organizations both employ and evade the strictures of conventional museums, allowing visitors to think in challenging ways about the past and the present as they reflect on what museums were, are, and can become.

0.2 Jude and Brendan Griebel standing on the front porch of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020. 0.3 Opposite Toy rocking horse made from the body of a real foal, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2017.

Deserving of extended study, small-town and rural museums make innovative, provocative, and important contributions to the cultural landscape. In this book, I aspire to understand the small-town and rural museums in Alberta on their own terms by highlighting their distinctive qualities and recognizing their regional and cultural specificity. Although I search for the patterns specific to small-town and rural museums that differentiate them from larger ones, I appreciate that these organizations are diverse, being subject to varying circumstances that depend in part on their location. Instead of generalizing, I examine especially thought-provoking or perplexing sites to understand better the function and influence of small-town and rural museums in the province. I explore

Introduction

5

some of the key themes – place, land, colonization, identity, mobility, heritage, nostalgia, childhood, play, transformation, loss – addressed in and by them. I enrich the ongoing analysis of the history and function of museums by drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from, among other areas, cultural studies, automobility studies, and tourism studies. The selected cases in this book should provide new ways to think about and understand the small-town and rural museums located around the world. Research on small-town and rural museums is necessary because much existing scholarship focuses on large, urban institutions. Scholars such as Amy Levin, Fiona Candlin, and Tammy S. Gordon have examined popular displays, “micromuseums” (or small, independent, single-subject museums), house museums, and private collections, some of them in remote locations.2 I join them by expanding this effort to address the small-town and rural museums in Alberta, paying particular attention to how these museums preserve, celebrate, and create regional heritage, in some instances by subverting rather than adhering to professional museum standards, which are, in any case, subject to ongoing revision within the practice of museology.3 Even without the infrastructure, funding levels, and staffing that might be expected in larger,

6

Voluntary Detours

government-supported museums, small-town and rural museums can engage audiences effectively and convey messages about local knowledge. Far more than miniature or deficient versions of well-known institutions, small-town and rural museums offer stimulating experiences to residents and tourists alike, often with startling, appealing, and absorbing displays that provide a picture of the region not available elsewhere. Researching small-town and rural museums enriches critical museum theory, which entails an active examination of the shifting historical, social, and cultural role of museums. Since the 1960s, scholars in various fields, including art history, sociology, anthropology, history, and museum studies, have questioned the authority and political neutrality of museums. Their work has explored how museums reinforce class distinctions, provide rituals of citizenship, and participate in colonial efforts to contain and control Indigenous cultures.4 Museums can no longer be characterized as places that simply preserve and display collections for educational purposes. Careful archival research on selected museums has revealed that, far from monolithic, they have diverse histories that vary according to, among other issues, the goals of founders, location, and genre; the experiences of visiting an art gallery and a science centre are rather different.5 Subject to continual contestation and change, museums are regularly opened, renovated, and closed. They are increasingly understood not as buildings but as processes that can, among other things, facilitate the exchange of goods or provide strategies for the performance of identity.6 This evolving scholarship challenges traditional conceptions of museums while enhancing their relevance, notably in recent demands that museums redress historical wrongs by exhibiting “difficult knowledge” related to oppression.7 I do not wish, however, to apply the questions now asked of large, urban museums to small-town and rural museums. This method of evaluation would continue to position the smaller organizations as secondary and deficient, potentially portraying them as less inclusive of diversity and less politically aware than large, government-funded institutions. Instead of erasing the specific goals and unique histories of small-town and rural museums, my goal is to consider how they produce knowledge and offer ways both to enhance and to disturb critical museum theory, thus contesting the presumed superiority of larger museums. Such efforts have already been undertaken by Candlin in relation to the small, community museums that she visited throughout the United Kingdom. She argues that micromuseums rarely claim to be inclusive representations of a range of ideas or identities. Instead, they express partisan views in intimate settings that promote debate and critical thinking.8 My encounters with small-

Introduction

7

town and rural museums in Alberta reinforce Candlin’s findings. Like her, I travelled to many small organizations, where I listened to and learned from the often older, rural, and working-class people who sustain the sites. This research encouraged me to rethink how and why these particular museums function and to ask different questions of them. The chapters that follow explore my research process while offering critical revisions of key concepts such as the museum visit and museum visitor. I aim to show how small-town and rural museums can invigorate the practice of critical museum theory and inspire the ongoing transformation of museums, both large and small. This project began in 2012 with unsystematic visits to selected museums in Alberta, including the Museum of Fear and Wonder, which I saw before it officially opened. Long dedicated to critically examining the history of museums, I have published on institutions ranging from the renovated Louvre in Paris to the New Brunswick Museum in Saint John, and I have undertaken field and archival research throughout Europe and North America.9 My work, however, was exclusively concerned with the history of urban art galleries and museums until I moved to Alberta in 2007 and encountered a number of small, grassroots organizations, notably the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, located in the hamlet of Torrington, about 80 kilometres east of the Museum of Fear and Wonder (figures 0.4, 0.5, and 0.6). The clever and intriguing Gopher Hole Museum, which displays taxidermy rodents dressed and posed to enact scenes of rural life, was opened in 1996 by local people to put Torrington “on the map,” encouraging tourists to detour away from the main highway and visit the hamlet. The handmade installations, representations of rural heritage, and rich social exchanges offered on-site led me to conceive of an expansive research project dedicated to such organizations. After applying for a Killam Research Operating Grant (2013) and an Insight Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada as primary investigator (2014–19) to examine the contents, role, staffing, and embodied experience of visiting smalltown and rural museums in Alberta, I was joined by two graduate student researchers, Misa Nikolic and Travis Holmes. From 2014 to 2016, Nikolic and I worked to find, document, and visit as many museums as possible within Alberta – which did not include only small-town and rural museums – with Nikolic creating an extensive database that is available upon request. As a longtime resident of Alberta, Nikolic had a special affinity for small-town and rural museums and for the dedicated workers who staff them. Much of his research has been made public on the Alberta Museums Project website, albertamuseumsproject.com. Designed by Holmes, the website provides educational and

0.4 Top Exterior signage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020. 0.5 Bottom Interior of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020. 0.6 Opposite Homesteading diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

Introduction

9

bibliographic information about small-town and rural museums and an interactive map of Alberta that identifies the location and genre of more than 300 museums currently in operation within the province. This resource is designed to enable tourists and residents alike to visit collections of antique dolls and stuffed gophers as well as the Indigenous, transportation, industrial, science, natural history, and heritage museums situated throughout the province, the latter of which tend to highlight idealized and partial histories of their respective regions.10 Voluntary Detours: Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta is distinct from this first phase of research, offering critical studies of selected museums rather than a broad overview. The book does not aim to represent every region of the province or to account for every type of museum, and the themes that I discuss were not predetermined but emerged only after I had visited numerous museums throughout Alberta. In the chapters that follow, a thorough understanding of the history of museums and the literature devoted to critical museum theory is combined with the knowledge gained by engaging with many small-town and rural museums in Alberta to analyze the different places encountered, exhibitions on display, and discussions with staff members, including semi-structured

10

Voluntary Detours

interviews. As a settler scholar originally from southwestern Ontario in central Canada, I take up the position of “outsider” to learn about Alberta and its culture, applying my previous research on the foundation of natural history museums across Canada, the role of women in creating these collections, and longstanding efforts to professionalize Canadian museums in order to consider themes that focus more on the present than on the past. Among other issues, the chapters in this book address how the trip to small-town and rural museums is a crucial part of the visit, how rural museums critically reshape historical understandings of museums, how tourists and local residents understand smalltown and rural museums differently, how such museums negotiate conceptions of the “rural” while representing the colonial settler history of the province, how they convey beliefs about land ownership and the appropriate use of natural resources, and how they celebrate Indigenous cultures while challenging the pioneer narratives rehearsed in many settler heritage museums. My arguments respond to the enlightening, surprising, and often exciting interactions that I had at museums in almost every corner of the province, where I met local residents and engaged with people who have dedicated the better part of their lives to sustaining the museums in Alberta.

Alberta and Its Museums There are currently more than 300 museums operating in Alberta, a landlocked province of about 660,000 square kilometres that is bordered on the west by British Columbia, on the east by Saskatchewan, on the north by the Northwest Territories, and on the south by the American state of Montana (figure 0.7). Traversed by rivers and full of lakes, Alberta is known for its majestic Rocky Mountains, but it primarily consists of boreal forest in the northern half and prairie grassland in the south. Some 81 per cent of Alberta’s population – just over 4 million people, according to the 2016 census – live in urbanized areas, especially those in the fertile corridor running from the capital city of Edmonton in the north to Red Deer and then Calgary in the south. This densely populated section is also where many museums can be found, with a significant number located in villages and hamlets that were agricultural centres during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when they were positioned along railway lines that are now largely inactive or were removed when mixed family farms were consolidated into larger enterprises or displaced by the oil and gas industry. Other small-town and rural museums are in remote areas,

Introduction

11

including the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, established in 1988 (and opened in 1990) to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the foundation of the hamlet. The centre of the fur trade in North America during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries and now surrounded by developments related to the oil sands industry, Fort Chipewyan is a relatively isolated community of Saka-withiniwak (Woodland Cree, including the Mikisew First Nation), Denésoliné (Chipewyan, including the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation), Métis, and the descendants of European settlers.11 Like many small-town and rural museums in Alberta, the Bicentennial Museum insists on the past importance of the region to create identity in the present, responding to economic change and a diminished population while providing both a cultural centre for the community and a tourist attraction. It was difficult to find and describe the small-town and rural museums in Alberta prior to the research undertaken during phase one of the Alberta Museums Project.12 The website of the Alberta Museums Association, a nonprofit society that supports sustainable museums in Alberta and provides accreditation through its Recognized Museum Program, listed 124 recognized museums in 2014, when Nikolic began to create a database, and 115 at the time of this writing in 2020.13 A Wikipedia page featuring over 200 Alberta museums was a more promising source of information during the early stages of research, although it too was limited, as it included museums that had closed and lacked those more recently opened.14 Efforts to search for individual museums online also provided incomplete results. Although some small-town and rural museums are part of regional museum networks, notably the well-organized Central Alberta Regional Museum Network, which has over forty members, others lack official websites or an online presence.15 The Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, for example, is promoted only on fan sites and in travel reviews and does not belong to any museum network or even host its own website.16 Such museums attract audiences primarily by the word-of-mouth recommendations of previous visitors and the advertising signs posted near highways. The initial data-gathering phase of research involved extensive driving throughout the province to look for small-town and rural museums in particular, while asking local residents for advice. Most of this travel had to be done during the summer months, as small-town and rural museums tend to be open only between Victoria Day in late May and Labour Day at the beginning of September, necessitating two summers of research to create a database with the name, location, contents, opening date, and other details of each organization currently in operation. Nikolic drove about 18,000 kilometres, visiting over 200

0.7 Map of Alberta showing cities, towns, and major roadways, 2020.

Introduction

13

of Alberta’s museums, and McTavish travelled as a passenger or flew to over 100 museums in more remote locations, returning to selected sites several times, as described in chapter 1. The research team collectively visited, documented, and photographed 71 per cent of all of the museums in Alberta, providing a substantial basis for understanding when and where they were created, information that is featured in the report written by Nikolic and available on the project’s website.17 Although this work was not motivated by historical questions, Nikolic was also able to chart some aspects of how the museums in Alberta have changed over time, with the report including tables that show their growth by year and by decade. The earliest organization is the Rocky Mountain Park Museum (now the Banff Park Museum), a display of natural history specimens that opened in 1895, before Alberta became a province in 1905, and it continues to thrive.18 The latest in the survey is the Museum of Fear and Wonder, launched in 2017, although a few even more recent museums are addressed in the chapters that follow, if not in the quantitative data available on the website. As indicated in table 0.1, created by Nikolic for the report and reproduced here, the research team classified each museum included in the list by theme. The categorization of these museums was a demanding task, for there are many collections that defy any taxonomy. Characterizing a museum as simply “heritage” or “natural history” was too limiting, as it neglected the wide variety of actual museum content. A heritage museum might also contain a significant natural history display, and a dinosaur museum might also include elements of archaeology. These organizations were therefore identified by broader themes that could be broken down into subthemes for greater accuracy. Some examples were designated multifocus museums, usually larger institutional museums that could afford to split their resources into different research and exhibition streams or else into smaller ones that gave equal weight to more than one theme. Other museums were classified as unique, such as the Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, due to their idiosyncratic nature. Another inclusive theme is natural resources, which accommodates oil, gas, and coal museums but also covers the less obvious resources of forestry, water, and clay. Finally, the category of transportation museums encompasses all organizations that feature modes of travel, whether by rail, road, or air. Table 0.1 reveals a high preponderance of heritage-themed museums, even though “heritage” is a debatable term, discussed more thoroughly in chapter 3. In Alberta, these museums tend to focus on the past 250 years of history, from the presence of European explorers and fur traders in the territory in the 1770s

Table 0.1 Themes and subthemes in Alberta Museums

Art (5) Heritage (238)

5 Agriculture Biographical Cultural Education General

Natural resources (12)

Unique (10)

20 2 184 3

Military

3

Political

2

Ranching

1

Sports

3 10

Avian

3

Botanical

1

General

2

Equine

1

Local

3

Prehistoric

7

Clay

1

Coal

3

Forestry

2

Natural gas

1

Oil

2

Water

3

Science (3) Transportation (17)

12

Health

Multi-focus (10) Natural history (17)

8

3 Air

7

Rail

8

Road

2

Commercial

5

Heritage

1

Private

2

Public service

2

Source: Misa Nikolic, Alberta Museums Project: A Final Report on Phase I of the Research (2017), 6, http://albertamuseumsproject.com/images/AlbertaMuseumsProject_FinalReport.pdf.

Introduction

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to the influx of settlers during the 1870s and ’80s, usually ending with an emphasis on the growth of towns around the 1930s. This time span encompasses a period of intense colonization by Ukrainians and northern and central Europeans, as well as settlers from the United States, Britain, and eastern Canada, who were attracted to what is now Alberta by promises of land and abundant wheat crops, part of the Government of Canada’s efforts to control and claim authority over an area long populated by Indigenous peoples.19 Many of these museums focus on white settlers, producing positive narratives about pioneers to idealize a limited version of the past, a strategy examined in chapter 5. As indicated in table 0.1, heritage museums under the subtheme “General” constitute 58 per cent of those currently operating in Alberta, including a mix of single-building and open-air establishments. A broader understanding of heritage museums embraces grain elevator museums, historic houses, and culture-specific museums, making up 237, or 76.2 per cent, of all museums in the province. Two subthemes are numerically significant: there are 12 heritage homes based on a specific individual or family and 20 that are culturally specific. The culturally specific museums focus mostly on First Nations, such as Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, a complex of sites on the Siksika Nation Reserve in Treaty 7 territory, discussed in chapter 5, or they feature Scandinavian peoples, such as the Norwegian Laft Hus Museum, a replica of an eighteenth-century sod roof farmhouse in Red Deer that preserves and interprets Norwegian culture while celebrating the influence of all Scandinavian immigrants who arrived in the early 1900s, and those museums that highlight Ukrainian content, notably the Ukrainian Canadian Archives and Museum of Alberta in Edmonton. The contributions of visible minorities, including Chinese and African American immigrants, are celebrated in a few small museums, and more recent waves of immigration, notably from Italy, South Asia, and Africa, among other places, are addressed in large provincial museums, such as the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton and the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, both of which are dedicated to representing the entire province, at least in theory, whereas small-town or rural institutions typically make no such claims to coverage.20 Table 0.1 also features seventeen natural history museums, a broad category that includes all those with interpretive elements, even the dinosaur museums for which fossil-rich Alberta is famous, such as the Devil’s Coulee Dinosaur and Heritage Museum, near Warner in southern Alberta. The category of natural history also embraces nature centres like the Kerry Wood Nature Centre, an exhibition site and nature preserve in Red Deer, and bird sanctuaries like the Alberta Birds of Prey Centre in Coaldale, southern Alberta, as well as more

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traditional collections of taxidermy, including the Den Wildlife Museum in Jasper, a town located in the Rocky Mountains of western Alberta. There are also seventeen transportation museums in Alberta, which focus mostly on aerospace, notably the Bomber Command Museum of Canada in Nanton, and on railways, such as the Alberta Railway Museum in Edmonton. Finally, there are ten unique museums that defy classification, some of which are privately owned and open only by request, including the Canadian Museum of Making in southwestern Alberta, whereas others are commercial enterprises, like the Fossil World Dinosaur Discovery Centre in the tourist town of Drumheller in the southern Badlands. A few museums in this category address themes that simply do not fit into any other designation, notably the YouthLink Calgary Police Interpretive Centre, a police museum that offers hands-on learning and that features, among other attractions, a forensics lab. More information about this classification and a full list of the museums in Alberta are available on the Alberta Museums Project website, but even this brief discussion indicates the range and thematic diversity of the museums in the province. The process of locating and classifying the museums in Alberta raised another conundrum: how to define the category of “museum” itself. Which organizations should be included and which ones excluded from the list? The question of what constitutes a museum is longstanding, with historians pondering whether or not the medieval treasuries and early modern cabinets of curiosities created by wealthy collectors in Europe from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century should be deemed protomuseums.21 Most scholars agree that the museum label more properly belongs to those comprehensive displays opened to the public during the eighteenth century, especially the British Museum in 1759 and the Louvre in 1793.22 Although these institutions continue to loom large on the world stage as well as in the popular imagination, their traditional model of amassing, preserving, and exhibiting objects within lofty settings for the education and entertainment of the public has been challenged since the 1960s, as indicated above. The practices and policies of many museums, including those of the British Museum and the Louvre, have changed in response to ongoing critiques, and such museums now strive to serve a more varied public while addressing current issues and embracing contemporary technologies.23 Many museum scholars view these changes positively, insisting that we are now in the era of the post-museum, which dematerializes the institution by recognizing oral histories and the online transmission of knowledge.24 A study of the museum in South Asia, published in 2015, offers what is perhaps

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the most discerning and optimistic account of the changing idea of the museum. Its editors argue that the Western and colonizing form of the museum, altered by immigrants and Indigenous peoples within former colonies, has emerged as “a space where new forms of wonder and enchantment reconfigure rational knowledge.”25 This understanding of the transformative potential of museums in local settings coheres with the research team’s experience with small-town and rural museums in Alberta during phase one of the research, yet the team had to determine more practical parameters in attempting to identify and classify all of the museums currently operating in the province. Our working definition of a museum included any site-specific exhibition that displays materials to the public for educational purposes. Despite excluding digital and conceptual museums, this understanding of museums was flexible, as it remained open to challenges based on, among other things, differing views about what should be considered educational. There were indeed numerous borderline cases, including the Fluevog Shoe Museum in Calgary, which displays shoe designs – many of them discontinued – from its own corporate history, along with didactic panels about the founder and the company.26 Although this commercial museum is not a nonprofit organization like many other museums in Alberta, it was included within the general list because it provides an educational display to the public. At the same time, Nikolic struggled over the status of the Big Valley Creation Science Museum in southern Alberta, which is dedicated to young-earth creationism and is blatantly ideological.27 In the end, this museum was added to the list because it fit the broad parameters of our definition, which do not eliminate partisan sites filled with factual inaccuracies or those at odds with our personal evaluations of the content.28 The inclusion of the Creation Science Museum was also based on its recognition within the village of Big Valley, where it is promoted on tourist maps and in pamphlets, if not endorsed by everyone.29 Our respect for local knowledge and practice was reinforced by a resident of Blackfalds, Alberta, during a celebration of the grand opening of the Wadey Centre in 2017, a historic home redesigned to welcome tourists and commemorate the history of the thriving town, discussed in chapter 1: “If the town thinks it is a museum, then it is a museum.” Her statement offers an astute definition of museums, one that both allows for the theoretical nature of museums and privileges local assessments, which might change over time. This approach to defining museums is also in accord with the decisions made by Candlin, whose study of micromuseums in the United Kingdom similarly values the knowledge of local people.30

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This expansive understanding of museums during the first phase of research nevertheless raised the ire of some members of the Alberta Museums Association (ama), an accrediting body that distributes government funds to museums in the province. After the Alberta Museums Project website was launched in February 2017, I received a letter via e-mail from a former executive director of the ama declaring the website “an affront to the professionalization of the sector” – a letter that was copied to a range of other people, including the chair of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta, where I work as a professor.31 The former administrator of the ama, who was made “angry and disappointed” by the website’s discussion of the ongoing reassessment of what constitutes a museum, argued that there is widespread professional agreement about its definition, citing the statement made in 2007 by the International Council of Museums (icom): “A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment.” The icom website acknowledges that, since the inception of the organization in 1946, its definition of a museum has evolved “in accordance with the realities of the global museum community,”32 and in 2017 the icom’s Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials began to reconsider the definition again in order to address “the profoundly dissimilar conditions, values and practices of museums in diverse and rapidly changing societies.”33 The proposed changes, which highlight the political responsibilities of museums, have proven controversial, and they remain subject to debate within the museum community.34 Yet the preference for nonprofit organizations had already been softened in the icom’s Key Concepts of Museology, published in 2009, which acknowledges that museums can pursue profit.35 The Alberta Museums Project website likewise includes a handful of commercial museums and a few that are privately run, such as the Museum of Fear and Wonder, which nevertheless has no interest in profit and offers tours without charging any fee to members of the public. This embrace of commercial and private museums was particularly offensive to another administrator of the ama. In the organization’s spring 2017 newsletter, Tim McShane, vice-president of the board of the ama, declared, As a sector, we sometimes need a jolt to remind us that not everyone appreciates museums for the multifaceted, complex organizations that they are. One came to us in early February this year, with the launch of the Al-

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berta Museums Project website (not affiliated with the Alberta Museums Association). The lead author of the project has declared that she is not concerned with defining what a museum is and is not despite the very specific definition of “museum” the International Council of Museums (icom) has promoted since 1946. Rather, the Alberta Museums Project has adopted a loose definition of a museum which includes a number of commercial shops that happen to feature displays, as well as tourist attractions with minimal educational interpretation.36 McShane does not name the “tourist attractions” that he feels do not merit the label museum, but he is likely invoking the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, a popular and well-known museum in Alberta that has never sought recognition or funding from the ama. The vice-president of the board, clearly displeased that the Alberta Museums Project website did not adhere to the definitions and decisions made by his association, wrote to members of the ama that “[v]ery few people outside the museum community understand the levels of dedication and professionalism needed to attain the ama’s Recognized Museum status.”37 By featuring a wider range of museums, the Alberta Museums Project website unwittingly challenged the authority of the ama and its own website, which exclusively promotes member museums. Rather than taking such reactions to the website personally, I considered them within a broader historical context, keeping in mind that McShane does not speak for the entire museum community in Alberta. After all, many museum workers, including members of the ama, have supported the project’s focus on small-town and rural museums, providing information in discussions and exchanges. More than anything else, the former and current administrators of the ama defended professionalization, a process that, in any practice, rests on the principle of exclusion rather than inclusion, separating a selected group of insiders from “unqualified” outsiders.38 The professionalization of museum workers in North America was a lengthy, uneven, and arguably incomplete process, previously studied by me and other scholars.39 Archival research shows that those who managed Canadian museums and collections throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often self-trained in natural history and undertook a wide range of activities, from collecting specimens in the field to building display cases, selling entry tickets, and sweeping floors.40 Although various patrons and government officials endeavoured to replace these so-called amateurs with specialists equipped with graduate degrees and more exclusively devoted to research – the mandate of the Carnegie Corporation’s Canadian

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Museums Committee between 1933 and 1938 – such efforts were not entirely successful.41 Self-trained curators and staff, both paid and unpaid, continue to run many small-town and rural museums to this day, and these organizations outnumber the urban and comparatively well-funded ones.42 Full-time and salaried museum curators, educators, and administrators in such larger institutions now often have advanced degrees and can choose from an array of practical and theoretical programs that address contemporary aesthetic debates, ethical challenges, public engagement, and collections management, among other topics.43 These programs have enhanced the professional status of some museum workers, but possession of a specialized degree or certificate is not strictly required in order to work in a museum. The professional status of museum staff and, by extension, museums thus remains a contentious issue.44 Twentieth-century attempts to professionalize museum work in North America rejected the early history of self-trained museum builders as well as the kinds of collections that they had managed and the displays that they had created. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historical and natural history societies formed in small towns and cities across Canada accepted into their collections almost all of the donated items offered, presenting to the public a mixture of artworks, natural history specimens, international or ethnographic objects, souvenirs, and novelties, such as gall stones in at least one case.45 Their exhibition spaces featured diversity and encouraged curiosity, mostly without the aid of didactic panels or even labels, based on once dominant theories of the educational value of looking at objects instead of reading about them, as well as on assumptions that displays would be animated by a tour guide.46 Efforts to professionalize museums during the middle and later parts of the twentieth century strove to replace these displays with systematic, coherent, and categorized exhibitions enriched by didactic written texts. This standardization of unruly collections nevertheless remains incomplete in many small-town and rural museums, which can retain strange or contrastingly mundane and “unimportant” objects while sometimes referring to information and family names that are of interest primarily to long-time local residents, not to visitors from outside the region.47 Even many recently founded small-town and rural museums do not have the space or the expansive collections, much less the financial support needed, to provide chronological or thematic exhibitions that convey a consistent narrative with elaborate signage, marking a clear break from past practices. The impressive Barrhead Centennial Museum, for example, which opened in 1967 in a town that was once a major trade centre along the Klondike Trail in northwestern Al-

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berta, displays a wide range of objects carefully arranged in glass cases. Much of the material relates to the pioneering lifestyle of early settlers, but the museum also rather surprisingly contains the third-largest collection of African artifacts in Canada, including a striking display of stuffed animal heads donated by local hunting enthusiasts Albert and Eileen Werner.48 Visitors can look into the glassy eyes of mounted exotic creatures – impala, warthog, zebra, wildebeest – immediately after examining a scratched antique school desk or gazing at a case filled with religious vestments, juxtapositions not usually found in larger, more specialized museums. This image of the town and its residents is nevertheless unforgettable, combining elements of an early natural history museum with those of a modern heritage museum while alluding to other historical forms of exhibition that defy divisions between elite and popular culture. This thrilling combination of objects at the Barrhead Centennial Museum and many other small-town and rural museums links them with early forms of exhibition commonplace before museums were divided into different genres – anthropology, science, history, art – and devoted to the provision of higher education to the public. During the early modern period, cabinets of curiosities were made by wealthy European aristocrats who collected rare and expensive items, including conch shells, engravings, religious paintings, unicorn/narwhal horns, taxidermy crocodiles, and stuffed birds, arranging them in densely packed rooms to overwhelm invited visitors, who were filled with a sense of wonder.49 These displays were nevertheless private rather than public, bestowing prestige on individual owners. Larger public spectacles of diverse objects emerged later in what have been deemed “universal survey museums” because they aimed to be comprehensive, like the British Museum and the Louvre, but they were developed alongside and in conversation with more popular exhibitions of goods and people.50 The international exhibitions, or world’s fairs, held regularly in urban centres from 1851 onward, for example, showcased the industrial, technological, and cultural achievements of nations, aiming to boost international trade and sell products while entertaining visitors.51 The department stores established in urban centres during the late nineteenth century used the same techniques as museums and world’s fairs to display merchandise, distributing valuable goods into categories and arranging them in elaborate glass cases.52 At the same time, early commercial entities that claimed the label “museum” provided entertaining and educational spectacles for a broad public, often within refined settings that resembled department stores. One famous example is the American Museum established by P.T. Barnum in New York City between 1841 and 1865, which amused up to 15,000 visitors per day in a large

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building with an elegant lecture hall, along with a zoo, a freak show, a collection of scientific instruments and other valuable items, taxidermy animals, and a display of waxes.53 Another mixture of art objects with spectacular displays occurred in New York’s Eden Musée (1884–1915), which installed a waxwork Chamber of Horrors in the basement beneath the picture galleries.54 In these and many other museums, a broad public paid to interact with exhibits that were at once entertaining and educational and that did not make rigid distinctions between museums and nonmuseums or between elite and popular culture. The division of museums into specialized genres and their separation from entertaining rather than strictly educational displays occurred gradually during the twentieth century and arguably was never fully accomplished, especially not in the case of small-town and rural museums. The growing differentiation between the spaces of entertainment and education was part of what historian Lawrence Levine has described as the establishment of a new cultural hierarchy during the later nineteenth century, when wealthy North Americans began to separate so-called lowbrow from highbrow culture, associating the former with the physical desires and debased behaviours of the working classes while conflating the latter with taste and civility – and claiming it as their own.55 The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 was remarkable for many reasons, including the subsequent dissemination of anthropological objects to natural history museums throughout North America, as well as the fact that it was the first international exhibition to distinguish the midway or amusement park from the exhibition halls filled with objects and artworks.56 Like these exhibition halls, specialized museums were slowly differentiated from entities dismissively regarded as dime museums, tourist traps, and roadside attractions, and museums deemed to be specialized were positioned as key elements in ongoing efforts to reform the working classes by providing them with civilized spaces and enlightening experiences meant to divert them from more lowly activities and spectacular entertainments.57 Small-town and rural museums are of great interest to historians of museums like me precisely because so many of the entities allude to earlier cabinets of curiosities, international expositions, and dime store museums, sometimes unintentionally. Any museum able to commit fully to the process of professionalization can replace, manage, or enrich uneven or unusual collections with more coherent installations. Other organizations, such as the Barrhead Centennial Museum, retain rather subtle references to past practices of collection and display. At the same time, a select number of small-town and rural muse-

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ums embrace their historical precedents and even deliberately recreate them. The dioramas made by the founders of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, for example, recall early natural history display methods while highlighting a long tradition of taxidermy, as discussed in chapter 3. However, the organization in Alberta that most self-consciously reflects on past practices is the Museum of Fear and Wonder, analyzed in chapter 2, which embraces rather than disavows the sometimes bizarre nature of grassroots collections.58 Brendan and Jude Griebel acknowledge the similar display methods used in commercial shops and museums by deliberately sourcing antique wooden display cases, including an impressive example from the first Hudson’s Bay Company department store in Calgary.59 Among other historic objects, the brothers resurrect a number of high-quality wax heads, purchased from, among other venues, the Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum, in Niagara Falls, Ontario, which closed in 2014 after nearly forty years of operation in the tourist town.60 The creators of the Museum of Fear and Wonder refigure commercial and tourist displays to acknowledge the continuing power of material objects, exploring them during interactive discussions with visitors rather than installing extensive texts or labels. Such efforts to acknowledge and seriously reconsider the diverse roots of small-town and rural museums are compelling, drawing large numbers of the public onto the back roads of Alberta to visit a museum, whether the ama recognizes it or not. The staff of small-town and rural museums decide to pursue or avoid aspects of professionalization for various reasons, including financial ones. Almost all museums in the country currently contend with chronic underfunding, as the federal Museums Assistance Program provides only $7 million for grants to fund projects in nonfederal museums, perhaps another reason for some administrators of the ama to defend limited rather than expansive definitions of museums.61 In Alberta, the 2017 annual budget allotted $57.6 million for heritage, which includes a fiscal focus on the designated historic sites, heritage centres, and museums owned and operated by the province.62 At the time of this writing, the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, which displays natural and human history, had recently undergone an extensive reconstruction that makes it the largest museum in western Canada. Its budget of $375.5 million included $253 million from the Alberta government and $122.5 million from the federal government’s Building Canada Fund, an impressive and unusual expenditure.63 Most museums in the province do not receive such generous funding, drawing instead on the resources provided by the Alberta Historical Resources

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Foundation, an agency of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which in 2017 received $8.2 million to support the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, as well as five provincial heritage organizations, including the ama.64 According to the 2017 annual report of the ama, it awarded just over $870,000 in grants to its members for operational staffing, institutional projects, and professional development.65 This relatively modest sum is largely inaccessible to museums falling outside of the Recognized Museum Program, which tend to be funded on an annual basis by municipal grants, local fundraising campaigns, or independent programs like the Heritage Awareness Grant.66 All small-town and rural museums face fiscal challenges and are officially “small” museums, with an operating budget far below $250,000 per year, a figure often used to classify museums as small rather than medium or large.67 In this book, the museums that I study are defined primarily by location rather than size; they are in small towns and rural areas, categories defined below. They also tend to have smaller exhibition areas than do many urban museums, employ few paid staff, rely on community volunteers, who are often elderly people, and record fewer than 10,000 visitors per year, where such data is collected.68 A significant number of the museums that I visited are vulnerable to economic and other changes, such as the sudden departure or illness of a key staff member, and strive simply to keep their doors open.69 My research process was not designed to analyze the practical issues of government-funding models, provincial museum policy, or collections management procedures. Nevertheless, the arguments made in this book, based on an appreciation of small-town and rural museums and their staff, suggest that strict models of professionalization, which show little consideration of local concerns and specificity, should not be applied to small museums in the same way as they are applied to larger ones. I advocate for increasing government and other forms of support for all museums, especially those that are struggling to survive within small communities, without dictating what their priorities should be. This book attends more to the distinctive nature of small-town and rural museums, showing how their meanings are dependent on, among other things, understandings of place, shifting transportation routes, and sometimes unconventional collections that do not attempt to provide an inclusive survey of the nation or province. The following chapters are meant to position the small-town and rural museums of Alberta within an international scholarly discussion, revealing their significance beyond limited definitions of a museum as well as beyond provincial or national boundaries.

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Agreeing to Detour: Methods, Case Studies, and Arguments Initial phases of research for this project involved locating and visiting as many museums as possible in Alberta, allowing them to direct my path. Many smalltown and rural museums led into unknown territory, requiring me to pull off main highways and drive down back roads or to fly over dense boreal forests. These experiences not only influenced my interpretations of various sites but also had an impact on the case studies chosen for closer analysis. I selected many of the museums or sites examined in this book because they provided me with an especially interesting or challenging detour, both literally and intellectually. Detours generally deviate from a direct or predictable route to take a more roundabout course toward a destination, one that may be less efficient.70 Theorists of the detour argue that when travellers take detours willingly rather than out of obligation, they adopt an open-minded stance, slowing down to accommodate change and to contemplate the unexpected instead of attempting to dominate their surroundings.71 Scholars who examine intellectual and literary detours agree that taking an indirect approach to issues can provide alternative avenues for thinking about them, allowing for the production of new knowledge.72 In keeping with these accounts of the detour, this project involved exploring numerous small-town and rural museums before deciding to learn more about unexpected topics such as the cultural practice of driving, shifting definitions of the “rural,” ways that irrigation technologies can shape regional identities, and the current resurgence of Indigenous museums and cultural centres. I selected the themes addressed in this book to offer timely case studies of potential value to readers who many want to consider the arguments in relation to the small-town and rural museums in their own province, state, or country. Distinct from the Alberta Museums Project website produced during the first phase of research, this book does not aim to provide a survey of the museums in Alberta. The following chapters do not cover every category of museum listed in table 0.1 or consider every ethnic and cultural group on display. Nor do I privilege the most common type of museum in Alberta: the heritage museum dedicated to pioneers.73 Many colonial settler museums portray pioneers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as hard-working individuals who civilized a wild, harsh, and “empty” land, rendering it productive and “modern.” Found in almost every small town in the province, these museums celebrate local settlers while making scant reference to the contributions made by or the suffering imposed on the Indigenous population. Although I visited many pioneer museums during the course of this research, I do not discuss them until

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the final chapter of this book and, even then, only after a lengthy examination of the Indigenous museums and cultural centres in the province. This organization of the content allows me to focus in earlier chapters on unique museums that have received little attention from museum scholars, including the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum and the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. It also enables me to frame pioneer museums within what is arguably one of the most pressing concerns for Canadian museums today: their transformation as part of an ongoing process popularly known as “reconciliation,” which entails acknowledging and taking responsibility for the historical and continuing injustices against Indigenous peoples. In Canada, there is a current resurgence of political attention to the impacts of colonialism on First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. While I was writing parts of this book in 2017, Canada’s 150th birthday was being celebrated. These activities were met with resistance from many Indigenous peoples, who saw little to celebrate in the continued refusal of the Government of Canada to fully recognize their treaty and human rights.74 The events held throughout the year to commemorate a unified Canadian national identity were at odds with the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, launched in 2008 to document the history and lasting impacts of the Indian residential school system. Between 1879 and 1996, approximately 150,000 Indigenous children were removed from their homes and placed in residential schools in an effort to assimilate them, severely compromising their family bonds, cultural traditions, and Indigenous languages.75 In 2015, after former residential school students had shared their experiences during meetings held across Canada, with some of them receiving compensation, the commission released an executive summary of its findings. It issued ninety-four “Calls to Action” to facilitate reconciliation between Canadians and Indigenous peoples, including the repudiation of concepts used to justify European sovereignty over Indigenous lands, as well as the renewal or establishment of treaty relationships based on principles of mutual recognition, mutual respect, and shared responsibility for maintaining these relationships into the future.76 Some of the “Calls to Action” directly address the role of museums and archives in the process of reconciliation, noting the changes necessary for their inclusion of Indigenous peoples, a key issue discussed in the final chapter, which provides an anchor for the book as well as the inspiration for my continuing research. This insistence on “reconciliation” is nevertheless open to debate. Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux artist Dana Claxton argues that “reconciliation” is a “kind of glossy, advertising term” designed to enhance the reputation of the Canadian govern-

Introduction

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ment; others insist that the concept of reconciliation serves to reinforce an image of white civility within Canada, maintaining existing structures that do not recognize Indigenous sovereignty.77 The practice of providing reparations for individuals based on their degree of suffering strives to contain and close the issue, placing it in the past while excluding the theft of land from consideration.78 At the same time, as Siksika artist Adrian Stimson points out, Indigenous people appear to be doing all the work around reconciliation, which should be a means of rethinking and reshaping relationships and structures, not a way to achieve closure.79 Stimson argues that “Truth and Reconciliation is not about following the government process, it is an ongoing process of coming to understand the effects of genocide, knowing our resilience as peoples of the Americas, transcending and becoming more than the Residential School experience, and changing our colonized minds and assisting the colonizer to see that there is another way.”80 As argued in chapter 5, Indigenous museums and cultural centres are important sites for displaying colonial oppression and Indigenous resilience in order to recover Indigenous cultural traditions while enlightening settler audiences. Cultural centres such as Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park on the Siksika Nation Reserve, home of Adrian Stimson, highlight local creation stories, performances, and languages to demonstrate the resolve of the Indigenous peoples who have lived for thousands of years on the land now known as Alberta. These sites portray their interactions with, resistance to, and suffering at the hands of colonial settlers, at odds with the representations of hard-working, friendly, and helpful pioneers in many museums in the province. As sites produced and maintained by Indigenous communities, such organizations question provincial as well as national myths, including the official image of Canada as a humane country devoted to civil rights and peacekeeping.81 Indigenous museums and cultural centres refuse to portray Indigenous peoples as just another colourful part of the Canadian nation, a supposed “land of immigrants” that is founded on Indigenous dispossession.82 Travelling to different towns and reserves in Alberta to visit Indigenous museums and cultural centres forced me out or my settler comfort zone by encouraging me to engage with calls for the recognition of Indigenous experience and knowledge in museums and to question the colonial legacy of these institutions. Many Indigenous people are wary of museums, cognizant of the role that they have played in the systematic collection of traditional and sacred items, sometimes by unethical means. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, archaeologists, anthropologists, and other collectors were fuelled by the

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“salvage paradigm,” which viewed Indigenous cultures as doomed to extinction within modernity and thus in need of “preservation” within colonial museums.83 More recently, in North America and elsewhere, conventional museum practices have been appropriated and adapted by Indigenous peoples to serve their own purposes, even if the term “museum” is often replaced by more flexible designations such as cultural centre or historical park.84 Visiting Indigenous organizations not only contributed to the desirable goal of moving beyond narrow definitions of a museum but also challenged other key terms that structure this project, namely “small-town” and “rural.” These categories are defined in official ways by government administrations, although like the concept of the museum, they can be interpreted differently and change over time. The Government of Alberta currently identifies twelve municipal categories along largely quantitative lines: a town has a population of at least 1,000 people and can be designated as a city once it exceeds 10,000 people, villages have a population of at least 300 people, and hamlets are even smaller, having “five or more dwellings and a generally accepted boundary.”85 In 2017, there were 17 cities, 108 towns, 93 villages, and 395 hamlets in Alberta. Yet Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park is not part of any municipality in Alberta; it is located on the Siksika Nation Reserve, which comprises land recognized by Treaty 7, and its legislative authority is vested in the national parliament, according to the British North America Act of 1867. In Alberta, there are fortyfive First Nations in three treaty areas, as well as 140 reserves covering approximately 812,771 hectares of land. At the same time, there are eight Métis settlements, comprising 512,121 hectares of land, mostly in the east-central and northern areas of the province.86 Although Indigenous reserves are technically not provincial municipalities, much less towns, villages, or hamlets, they were included in this study’s efforts to find, visit, and analyze the small-town and rural museums in Alberta. Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park can be described as a rural museum if the term “rural” is understood to embrace any territory that is not urban. This common-sense definition of the rural relies on a binary structure that privileges cities – areas with a density of 400 or more people per square kilometre – while positioning more sparsely populated areas as outside of modernity, “other,” and marginal, representations of rurality discussed in more detail in chapter 3.87 The government agency Statistics Canada long endorsed this binary way of dividing and quantifying the landscape by designating as rural any area that was outside of a metropolitan area. In 2010, the agency adjusted its classification system to recognize urban-rural gradations by considering factors such as employment

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density along with population density, noting the continuity between urban and rural spaces by distinguishing between small, medium, and large “population centres.” In accord with these and other efforts to avoid simplifying the concept of the rural, I focus in chapter 1 on the differences between small towns and hamlets in various parts of the province, highlighting their relationships with metropolitan areas and with the transportation routes that have changed over time to make these places more or less marginal, depending on the circumstances. Every other chapter in this book follows suit by drawing on theories of place to consider how rural and other spaces become visible and meaningful by means of ongoing and contested processes; museums participate in maintaining or creating a sense of place, sometimes by insisting on the past importance of a small town, hamlet, or rural area, sometimes by rebranding it with a new image, and sometimes by striving to defend the unique heritage of a once delimited community from an encroaching population centre.88 Overall, this approach frames small towns and rural areas as active centres of meaning making rather than as stable or marginal nonurban zones linked more with the past than with the future. This attention to small-town and rural agendas is echoed in the scholarly literature and in some recent forms of popular culture. As discussed in chapter 3, scholars in various disciplines study rurality, focusing on historical, social, cultural, and economic factors while specifying the distinctive and often nationalistic understandings of the rural in the United Kingdom, Australia, and other countries.89 Small-town life has also resurfaced as a fascinating topic in a number of television series, including Escape to the Country (2002–present), which portrays British families looking to relocate “to a more peaceful and rural retreat,” and the Canadian “hybrid comedy/reality” show Still Standing (2015– present).90 In the Canadian program, the actor and comedian Jonny Harris tours the country to learn about small towns in distress, interviewing the people who live there before performing an affectionate comedy routine for them at the end of the visit. As of 2019, this Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series had featured six places in Alberta: Coleman, Rowley, Fort McMurray, Edgerton, the Siksika Nation Reserve, and Vulcan, the Star Trek town discussed on the Alberta Museums Project website. In many ways, the episodes of Still Standing adhere to a familiar pioneer narrative, highlighting the resilience of the town and its steadfast people, who battle circumstances such as mill closures and the removal of train service by fighting back with a frontier mentality. At the same time, this series combats stereotypes by addressing specifically northern and Indigenous issues in some episodes and by portraying rural people as intelligent,

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adaptable, and capable of responding to challenges in responsible, innovative, and environmentally sustainable ways. My approach to studying small-town and rural museums for this book overlaps with some of the methods used to produce Still Standing. Like its affable host, I travelled widely to visit small towns and rural areas, striving to appreciate unfamiliar places. I too depended on the generosity of local people, talking with them to understand their values and to learn about their “insider” views of each town, especially the local museums, cultural centres, and historic sites of particular interest to me. However, I undertook relatively few semi-structured interviews with museum administrators, curators, and volunteers, in part because of the requirements of the ethical protocols of the academy. I also wanted to focus more intensely on the “site of representation” at each museum – that is, the visual and material arguments made in their displays. This scholarly method of visual analysis stems from the practices of art history and visual culture studies, which examine visual and material “texts” like museum installations as primary documents, conveying information not fully determined by the “site of production,” namely the people who made, arranged, or financially supported them.91 Bringing this approach to small-town and rural museums meant spending time at each site discussed in this book during multiple visits and interpreting the organization of the exhibition spaces and narratives that they produce in a way that prioritizes them over any “secondary” verbal and written sources. This privileging of the visual and material elements of various museums, cultural centres, and historic sites draws attention to the embodied experience of visiting them and to the visual stimulation and surprising juxtaposition of delightfully unique objects that many of them provide, as noted above. Another striking connection between my process and Still Standing is the program’s inclusion of Fort McMurray within its survey of small towns that are struggling to survive. Located in the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo in northern Alberta, Fort McMurray is technically an urban service area with a population of just under 70,000 people. Although Fort McMurray is urban in terms of population density, it is convincingly framed as a small town within a rural region in Still Standing, demonstrating the flexibility of the cultural distinctions made between the categories of urban and rural. In an episode that first aired in June 2017, Fort McMurray is portrayed as a small community of neighbours who came together to respond to and recover from a devastating forest fire that destroyed over 2,400 homes and buildings in May 2016, forcing the evacuation of the approximately 90,000 people then living there.92 This traumatic natural disaster occurred in the wake of collapsing oil prices, which

Introduction

31

had depressed an economy that is almost entirely based on excavation of the nearby oil sands reserves. Fort McMurray’s dependence on natural resources, recently declining fortunes, and location in the northern part of Alberta, far from the more populous central and southern areas of the province, worked to place this urban service area within the small-town framework developed by the producers of Still Standing. The resulting episode about the impact of the voracious wildfire, known as the Beast, created an especially flattering picture of the local people as hard-working, determined, and long-suffering, in keeping with the representation of early pioneers.93 I similarly decided to feature one of Fort McMurray’s museums in chapter 4, but I did not do so to reinforce longstanding pioneer narratives. Rather, I undertook a close analysis of the contents of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre to explore the representation of natural resources and land use in the province, an important theme that recurs in many museums in Alberta and resonates with the “Calls to Action” issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. The entrepreneurial practices of resource extraction are central to the identity of the province, and the controversial oil sands industry could hardly be overlooked in my study, especially when resource extraction is addressed, usually in a minor way, in most small-town and rural museums. At the same time, the provincial government is currently lobbying for the construction of the Trans Mountain Pipeline while embroiled in legal actions and debates about the economic benefits and environmental costs of shipping bitumen and synthetic crude oil to international markets.94 Such economic factors are woven throughout this book, for they are crucial to the motivation for the founding and ongoing operations of small-town and rural museums. As mentioned earlier, small-town and rural museums that are “unrecognized” in Alberta face especially difficult financial challenges. In conducting research for her recent master’s thesis on the strategies of community engagement developed in three small museums in Alberta, Kristen McLaughlin found that inadequate and inconsistent funding were the most important concerns of the people working within the organizations, ahead of insufficient staffing.95 Even the impressively large Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park on the Siksika Nation Reserve, a locale also featured in an episode of Still Standing, struggles to cover operating and maintenance costs, with its website noting that “Blackfoot Crossing is not government-owned at all. We are a privately-funded museum that depends solely on our revenue we make each year and the budget we receive every year from the Siksika First Nation as well as gracious donations and approved grants. Faced with a declining budget each year that barely covers

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our fixed costs and employee wages, we are still doing our best with a very small staff who go above and beyond their regular duties to help one another and our guests.”96 This struggle to remain open and to provide programming is a common thread linking the small-town and rural museums analyzed in the chapters that follow, with only two sites receiving comparatively more generous and predictable funding from the provincial government: the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray and the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near the small city of Brooks. Despite recognizing the financial demands placed on small-town and rural museums, this book pays more attention to the themes explored in their exhibitions, insisting that how they engage with, represent, and attempt to reconstruct a sense of “place” is equally important to understanding their distinctive nature. My discussions of the shifting, contested, and sometimes contradictory production of place within small-town and rural museums make a unique contribution to the growing international literature on small, community-based, independent, and privately run museums – whose categorization depends on the country of origin. I attend to how place is experienced differently by tourists and other visitors to small-town and rural museums than by local or otherwise “insider” audiences. I also highlight my personal experiences of each site throughout the book, describing embodied encounters with places that are liable to change over time and to appear differently to others, offering comparative material for scholars to use in their own research. Chapter 1, “Worth the Trip: Travel and the Evaluation of Small-Town and Rural Museums,” contends that the voyage taken to reach small-town and rural museums, whether on back country roads or along banal stretches of highway, is a crucial part of the visitor’s experience. Inspired by literature that explores driving as a cultural event, I analyze the trips taken to visit three museums in Alberta, selected on the basis of their diverse relationships with transportation routes. The drive to the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, located “off the beaten path,” is best described as a voluntary detour, a concept that is more fully theorized in this chapter. The trip to Torrington is usually added to a more standard tourist itinerary, informed by the desire to thwart routines and regulations in search of a strange and memorable adventure. Travelling to the Wadey Centre in Blackfalds, situated along a major thoroughfare in central Alberta, however, is more like a road trip. Visiting the historic house provides a break from driving, and the site is shaped to acknowledge and accommodate its position as a rest stop by featuring a snack bar, washrooms, and

Introduction

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a tourist information centre, along with material and visual exhibitions designed to enrich and lengthen the stay. In contrast, tourists must make a special effort to arrive at the third case study, the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, located in an isolated hamlet in northern Alberta. It is usually reached by plane rather than automobile, for the road there is both dangerous and accessible only during the coldest winter months. This challenge provides visitors with a sense of distinction but ensures that the museum relies almost exclusively on the support of a small, local population. Such “insiders” typically view the museums in their towns quite differently from tourists, informed by a discrete and more historical sense of the place, including where it used to be situated within the province’s cultural geography. Most small-town and rural museums insist on the past centrality of places that are now remote or marginal due to their diminished population and economic activity, issues either caused or exacerbated by the reconfiguration of transportation routes and practices. Chapter 2, “Ghosts in the Museum: Haunted Histories at the Museum of Fear and Wonder,” examines the collection recently opened to the public by Brendan and Jude Griebel, arguing that it is haunted by past museum practices. My analysis of this rural museum includes the trip there, conversations on-site, and encounters with the prairie landscape. I delay my description of the intriguing objects inside the museum to convey the sense of anticipation that is crucial to the experience of the Museum of Fear and Wonder. Once visitors find the rather isolated farm house that now functions as a museum, they meet the Griebel brothers on the front porch before passing through a doorway resembling a monstrous open mouth. The space inside features a startling combination of repurposed wax heads, taxidermy animals, and animatronic dolls, reactivating the display methods of early European and North American museums. The Museum of Fear and Wonder invokes the impact of the early modern cabinets of curiosities described above, both by foregrounding the idiosyncratic interests of the collectors and by providing surprising juxtapositions of the selected objects. The layered installations include such natural specimens as a ponderous stuffed baboon seated inside a wooden case, recalling the natural history museums of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that were created by enthusiasts to promote the admiration as well as exploitation of natural resources. Perhaps most compelling are the wax heads and bodies that the Griebel brothers have sourced from defunct wax museums. Now partly disassembled, the waxes are positioned alongside animatronic figures once used to advertise products in the windows of department stores. This combination renders palpable the

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longstanding imbrication of museums with tourism and commercial interests, an association usually disavowed in modern museums. By drawing on sociological and literary theories of haunting, I insist that the Museum of Fear and Wonder reveals the seething presence of past modes of seeing and knowing, highlighting their enduring value within the often extraordinary collections found in small-town and rural museums. Chapter 3, “Middle of Nowhere: Contesting Rural Heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum,” was previously published in the International Journal of Heritage Studies and is reproduced here by permission. Utilizing methods that stem from critical museum theory, critical rural studies, and critical heritage studies, this chapter analyzes the ways that both local residents and visitors from outside the region understand the Gopher Hole Museum, and it considers why the museum is indeed world-famous, attracting over 6,000 tourists each year. I argue that this small-town museum succeeds in part because its organizers are active agents who take pride in the museum without attempting to refute the sometimes negative responses that it elicits or to control the ways that outsiders interpret it. The museum in Torrington is a complex “open text” that both employs and critiques the conventional methods used in natural history and heritage museums to offer multiple narratives about childhood, heritage, and rural life, addressing local people as well as tourists. Some tourists respond to the open nature of the museum in creative ways by writing articles, producing fan websites, and even, in one case, making a melancholy documentary film about Torrington. Although these forms of free advertising are welcomed, the organizers of the Gopher Hole Museum refute stereotypical representations of rurality by celebrating local knowledge in the museum, offering a rather idealized version of Torrington as a hard-working, cooperative, and hospitable community that endures. Chapter 4, “Encountering Oil and Water: The Politics of Play at Extraction Museums and Historic Sites,” examines different ways of representing natural resources and land use in Alberta, relating them to ongoing political debates about the environmental impact of extraction methods. Moving away from an exclusive focus on small-town and rural museums, this chapter undertakes a close analysis of the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, which features a 3.2-kilometre-long concrete aqueduct built between 1912 and 1914 to bring water from the Bow River to the dry prairies of southeastern Alberta. Long declared structurally unsound, this irrigation technology never functioned at full capacity and is now in ruins. The historic site nevertheless offers a potentially transformative embodied experience of an altered environ-

Introduction

35

ment, portraying the human interaction with nature as unstable and interdependent, in contrast to the celebration of technological innovation at many heritage museums and science centres. The Brooks Aqueduct site stands in stark contrast to another museum discussed in chapter 4, the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray, which enjoys substantial corporate support, avoids images of environmental decay, and features children as its primary audience, in keeping with the conventions of a science centre. Overall, the Discovery Centre is meant to reassure visitors about the oil sands industry concentrated in the northern regions of Alberta, using the methods and materials of science to create colourful, interactive, and enjoyable displays. Despite its use of modern technologies, the Oil Sands Discovery Centre is founded on the same understanding of nature as an early natural history museum, portraying human mastery over a landscape that is visibly associated with economic ambitions while encouraging children to combine play with the pursuit of profit. This approach to seeing and possessing land brings the Discovery Centre in line with the goals that motivated the construction of the Brooks Aqueduct during the early twentieth century, revealing the continuing relevance of these essentially colonial ideals. This chapter draws on scholarly accounts of petrocultures to make sense of the contradictory Discovery Centre and to consider why it has resisted critical analysis, a pressing issue during the current period of economic instability in Alberta, when any negative comment about the oil industry is perceived as a treasonous act worthy of punishment.97 Chapter 5, “Unsettling the Pioneer: Learning from Indigenous Museums and Cultural Centres,” highlights the small-town and rural museums in Alberta that feature Indigenous content, especially those created and run by Indigenous peoples. I begin by analyzing my visit to Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, which was opened in 2007 to interpret, celebrate, and preserve Siksika culture. Attending to the sacred nature of this place and the land surrounding it, I consider how the historical park both employs and subverts conventional museum practices. Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park and the other Indigenous museums and cultural centres described in this chapter also challenge the positive images of settler colonialism promoted by the pioneer museums established in many small towns and rural areas in Alberta. By demonstrating the resilience of Indigenous peoples in the face of oppressive settler colonial structures and policies, Indigenous organizations disrupt the heroic images of early settlers at pioneer museums while revealing how their pioneer narratives devalue the continuing social, cultural, and economic activities of Indigenous peoples. In response to these messages, I strove to think more critically about the category of

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the pioneer, undertaking archival research to see how the term has changed over time. Far from unified during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the shifting concept of the pioneer was articulated both in relation and in opposition to Indigenous peoples. My analysis focuses on the arguments made by the Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association, an influential group that included Indigenous members, notably those of the Fraser family. I consider how the association’s early pioneer collection sent mixed messages about Indigenous peoples while consistently featuring Indigenous members and their material culture. This research encouraged me to return to selected pioneer museums and look for signs of Indigenous peoples and cultures within them, finding contradictions that revealed the instability of dominant pioneer narratives. My final chapter is thus rather different from the preceding ones, for instead of performing sustained analyses of particular sites, it develops a method for examining the rich complexity of pioneer museums. Yet in keeping with my overall approach, I developed this chapter by responding to the demands made of me at key sites – in this case, by learning from Indigenous museums and cultural centres. This chapter was the most difficult and time-consuming to write, but it was also the most rewarding one, establishing the direction of my ongoing research on the pioneer museums in Alberta. Voluntary Detours: Small-Town and Rural Museums in Alberta is meant to inspire increasing research on the museums, cultural centres, and historic sites analyzed in the chapters that follow, as well as those featured on the Alberta Museums Project website. The case studies and themes examined in this book should appeal to a wide range of readers, including interested laypeople, museum scholars, and museum workers both within and outside of the Canadian context. I address such pressing concerns as mobility, constructions of heritage, land use, the changing environment, and Indigenous museums and cultural centres to consider how small-town and rural museums communicate and engage with diverse issues. I recognize the specific challenges that these entities face, as well as the efforts by their staff members to serve the particular needs of local communities. It is my hope that this book contributes to the increasing attention paid within critical museum studies and museology to the unique and important social, cultural, and economic roles played by small-town and rural museums. I want to end this introduction, however, by highlighting the teaching role that I envision for the book. Drawing on over twenty-five years of experience as a university professor devoted to teaching undergraduate students while communicating with broad audiences in various formats, I have written Vol-

Introduction

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untary Detours as an alternative textbook, one that advances key ideas rather than covering material chronologically. I have tried to write in an engaging way about compelling museums and the issues that they raise, providing material that learners will enjoy reading. This book can be adapted to address any number of topics, including the history of museums (especially the introduction and chapter 2) and the methods used to study them. My chapters focus on the research process, discussing challenges while demonstrating the results of analyzing exhibition spaces carefully, interviewing museum workers, and undertaking work in archives. This book also introduces theories that can be used to think about the interdisciplinary nature of museums, including concepts related to automobilities, hauntology, critical heritage studies, petrocultures, and Indigenous knowledge, among others. I have designed Voluntary Detours to spark discussion while allowing learners to test its arguments in relation to other museums, ideally those in their region, whether urban, rural, or somewhere in between. This book thus highlights the value of small-town and rural museums as sites of knowledge production, offering multiple ways to engage with and learn from them.

1.1 Roadside image near Torrington, Alberta, while driving to the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, 2016.

 T  1

WORTH THE

RIP

Travel and the Evaluation of Small-Town and Rural Museums

I took the photograph in figure 1.1 with my cellphone while being driven to the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington. Located in central Alberta, Torrington is a hamlet with fewer than 200 residents. It is not on a main highway or part of a standard tourist route. Nevertheless, around 6,000 people from Canada and abroad visit the small museum in Torrington every year, known for its dioramas featuring taxidermy rodents dressed in dolls’ clothing that are arranged to enact scenes of local heritage. These dioramas are both appealing and surprisingly complex, deserving of the extended analysis that they receive in chapter 3. The photograph alludes, however, to the experience that I had before reaching the museum, namely the drive toward Torrington. It was filled with anticipation and a sense of adventure, which increased once the roadside sign advertising the museum came into view. During my return trips to this museum and to many other small-town and rural museums in Alberta, southwestern Ontario, and eastern Australia, I realized that the process of travelling to visit these sites, usually by car but sometimes by bus, train, or airplane, was an important part of their meaning. The significance of such voyages is worth exploring in an effort to understand how small-town and rural museums diverge from the urban institutions that have received the lion’s share of attention from museum scholars. Visiting urban museums usually involves shorter trips through city traffic, whether on public transportation systems or on foot, differing from the more lengthy excursions on back roads or through the countryside to reach small-town and rural museums.1

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The photograph in question might seem banal, but it introduces the issues addressed in this chapter, including the perception of travel to small-town and rural museums, representations of the roads taken to get there, and the ways that the experience of the “outsiders” or tourists who visit these places differs from that of the “insiders” or residents who are more familiar with the region. The image of a passenger side mirror indicates that the photographer is inside a car, reaching out with a camera phone to frame the scene. This person is a dynamic spectator, who finds visual interest and value in the passing landscape. The vicissitudes of the act of looking are highlighted by the text on the mirror, which states that “objects in mirror are closer than they appear,” a warning that the convex surface alters the reflected view outside, making things seem smaller and more distant. Although the mirror shows the side door of the photographer’s car, its legible message suggests that the phone held outside the moving car may also cause unintended distortions. The resulting photograph both creates and appears to stabilize a fleeting image of place, one that is dominated by an expansive grassy shoulder topped by fenced fields, trees, and a red barn-like structure. The apparent emptiness of the place is belied by more distant signs of human habitation as well as by the electrical wires that slice through the top of the image. The pictured landscape is not natural or uncultivated, nor is it densely populated and intricately managed like urban terrain. It is other than the space occupied by the viewer inside the car, a point made clear by the barbed wire and wooden fences that separate the passenger from the unseen and unknown people who may live and work on the farm. This mysteriously “rural” land nevertheless recognizes the passerby with a sign promoting the Gopher Hole Museum, encouraging all travellers to visit the nearby site.2 The museum is positioned as a destination for tourists, yet it is absent from the photograph, represented only by the sign advertising it. The small-town museum remains a promise, imagined by outsiders who travel in order to capture an experience of an unknown location that simultaneously invites and limits their access. In the first section of this chapter, I consider the meanings associated with the trip to small-town and rural museums, paying particular attention to the experience of driving, for most of these sites, especially those in Alberta, are reached by means of a motor vehicle. In addition to studies of tourism as a cultural practice, I draw on scholarly discussions of “automobility,” which explore the historically and culturally diverse understandings of mobility, highways, and cars, machines that not only have a practical function but are also linked with identity and emotion.3 My focus is on the trip to small-town and rural museums, typically undertaken by tourists in pursuit of pleasures found outside

Worth the Trip

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of everyday life and “off the beaten path,” including even me as a researcher of such entities. Unlike large, urban museums such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, small-town and rural museums are rarely the primary destination of a voyage, with secondary activities planned around it.4 A popular site, like the Gopher Hole Museum, is visited briefly as a side trip or detour taken by travellers on their way somewhere else, a point recognized by local supporters of such museums and by tourists in online evaluations of these sites.5 This deliberate turn away from a more standard path can be analyzed in relation to theoretical writing about the detour, a mobile activity sometimes thought to enable a lively experience of space and encounter with new knowledge.6 Yet those embarking on detours to visit small-town and rural museums in Alberta have expectations and will subsequently assess whether or not their visits were “worth the drive,” as if the investment that they made in travel had to be repaid in the experience of the museum’s contents. Tourists tend to judge the trip to the museum and the museum visit in relation to each other, not as discrete events. This emphasis on travelling to small-town and rural museums reinforces understandings of museums as relational – as processes or dynamic organizations that generate relationships between people, places, and things.7 Museums are not stable entities; they emerge within a web of connections, including modes of transportation. This aspect of small-town and rural museums is alluded to in the photograph that opens this chapter, for it invokes the Gopher Hole Museum beside the roadway, and thus as part of the experience of driving, long before the building in Torrington comes into view. Travel contributes to the production of “place” in small-town and rural museums, a concept explored by scholars eager to understand how spaces are transformed into meaningful places by various historical and cultural processes.8 In this chapter, the act of creating place at small-town and rural museums is analyzed in terms of the routes taken to reach different sites throughout Alberta. These routes have changed over time, with railways and watercourses being replaced by highways that make some small towns and rural areas more marginal and others more easily accessible to travellers. Efforts taken to reach small-town and rural museums influence the perceptions of place by visitors, particularly those who voluntarily take detours while on vacation, hoping to see something unusual. The second part of this chapter shifts attention away from the travel taken to reach small-town and rural museums in order to consider the ways that transportation routes impact how “insiders” value small-town and rural museums. Unlike tourists, residents who live near and work in small-town and rural museums do not engage with the organizations as part of an adventurous side trip.

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They visit the museums for numerous reasons, whether to participate in educational activities, seasonal celebrations, fundraising events, and school field trips or to make donations, volunteer, give tours to friends and family members, or undertake paid employment. Local people build, support, and activate smalltown and rural museums on their own terms, striving to appeal to tourists but also to interact with the immediate community.9 Although tourists enjoy visiting what they consider a marginal or unknown area, local people often create museums to insist on the central importance of their region and its history, usually in light of the area’s declining population and diminishing economic activity, issues either caused or exacerbated by the reconfiguration of transportation routes and practices. Yet some small-town and rural museums argue for a distinctive sense of place for apparently opposite reasons: located near large, urban centres and main highways, they experience expansion and population growth that can seem overwhelming, with those who move into the area typically commuting to work in the nearby cities. In these circumstances, supporters of smalltown and rural museums try to preserve their version of the region and its history in order to combat the perceived disinterest of newcomers. Considering a range of examples shows how changing forms of mobility contribute to the contested sense of place at small-town and rural museums. My arguments are based on travelling to visit a large number of museums and historic sites throughout Alberta and elsewhere, as indicated in the introduction to this book. I draw on the written and visual arguments made at these sites, as well as on printed or online information about them, including travel websites that host reviews of various attractions and museums. Although this breadth allows me to discover some of the general factors influencing smalltown and rural museums, including the role of travel and transportation routes, I avoid minimizing the sheer diversity of these organizations by concentrating on three examples in the analyses that follow. These case studies were chosen on the basis of their association with transportation routes in Alberta rather than a classification of their contents, structure, region, heritage designation, or sources of funding. My first example has already been introduced: the Gopher Hole Museum is in Torrington, a hamlet facing economic decline and an aging population in a location that is a considerable distance from major highways and tourist routes. The second example is the Wadey Centre in Blackfalds, an expanding and relatively prosperous town of around 10,000 people that is situated along a major thoroughfare in central Alberta, just north of the city of Red Deer. The third example is the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum in Fort Chipewyan, an isolated hamlet on the western tip of Lake Athabasca in

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northern Alberta that is accessible primarily by airplane but also via the winter road that emerges whenever the ground is frozen. My discussion of these sites is necessarily informed by my own experiences of them, a particular lens recognized in the photograph discussed above and visible in the arguments that follow. To balance or at least temper this “outsider” view, I conducted semistructured interviews with the curator or manager of each site. Their comments add layers of complexity to the analyses below, even as these workers do not claim to speak for the entire community or to represent the range of experiences that residents may have at each site. While shedding some light on the historical, cultural, and social density of these organizations, this chapter primarily reveals how modes of travel and transportation routes contribute to the interpretations of place at – or to the active “placing” of – each location.

Highways and Back Roads It is not always easy to find the museums located throughout Alberta. In the introduction to this book, I noted that some small-town and rural museums lack an official website and that others are rather remote and are not included in any traditional database. A major part of the research done during phase one of the Alberta Museums Project involved driving around the different regions of Alberta and coming across museums by accident, by following road signs, or by heeding the advice of local residents who provided directions to interesting collections and historic sites. The results were subsequently made available to the public by means of an interactive map on the website designed by Travis Holmes, which displays all of the museums identified by the research team, allowing users to search by name, theme, or region.10 The overall view of the map shows the distribution of museums by location and genre, indicated by differently coloured markers. The tapering rectangular shape of Alberta is filled with over 300 of these signposts, including a dense cluster in the southeastern part of the province. A magnified examination reveals the large lakes and rivers in the province, as well as some of the major highways running through it, notably Provincial Highway No. 1, which is part of the Trans-Canada Highway and traverses from east to west in southern Alberta, and Provincial Highway No. 2, commonly referred to as the Queen Elizabeth II Highway, which stretches from the southern Canada-US border through to the northeastern region of the province. Magnified further, the clusters on the map become individual markers concentrated in and around urban centres, with some spread more evenly along

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the main highways, especially Highway 2, although a few outliers occupy the northern corners of the province. The map was designed as a practical tool, yet it highlights a seemingly obvious feature of small-town and rural museums: these cultural sites are both reached and connected by a network of roadways that are themselves part of the more expansive structure of automobility. Automobility entails more than the opportunities and limitations afforded by car culture.11 According to the editors of Against Automobility, a collection of essays published in 2006, automobility “is a set of political institutions and practices that seek to organize, accelerate and shape the spatial movements and impacts of automobiles, whilst simultaneously regulating their many consequences.”12 This broader picture includes the historical development of transportation policies, roadway construction, car design, highway regulations, urban planning, traffic regulation, and the embodied roles that drivers and pedestrians perform.13 Sociologist John Urry argues that automobility has reshaped concepts of time and space, both enabling and restricting the ways that families interact, work is undertaken, and vacations are understood.14 On the one hand, the car is linked with autonomy and freedom, especially in mythologies of the road trip as an escape from social constraint; on the other hand, automobiles are associated with the destruction of communities because they isolate individuals within a privately owned mode of transport, allow for the growth of suburbs, which are said to undermine communal life, and kill citizens in crashes, claiming over a million lives each year worldwide.15 Despite the dangers of car culture and the pollution that it causes, automobility invites emotional investment and shapes identity, becoming “an integral part of the cultural environment with which we see ourselves as human.”16 Although automobility is in many ways a global phenomenon, its organization and how it is experienced vary between and within nations; cultural theorist Tim Edensor, for example, compares the vastly different driving practices and embodied experiences of the road in England with those in India.17 Whereas some scholars examine how gender and class additionally impact the activities of both driving and “passengering,” others argue that riding in a car is uniformly alienating, with passive occupants strapped inside a vessel that separates them from the smells and sounds of the outside world, more fully enjoyed by pedestrians.18 Dissenters, however, consider how automobile design has adapted to the human body in order to produce the car as a homelike space that they argue is increasingly comfortable and individualized, one that can be in some cases a soundscape filled with music and social interaction and in other cases a place for office work.19 Although the ongoing debates about automobility are multifaceted, they are

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motivated by a similar desire to make its political, social, and cultural aspects less natural and, therefore, more open to analysis and change. Bringing this literature to the study of small-town and rural museums in Alberta can shed light on how automobility both makes these museums possible and shapes their existence, suggesting that museums and driving are mutually constituted. People drive cars to visit museums in rural Alberta because in most cases there is no other way to reach the sites. In Alberta, train passenger routes are minimal and do not connect even the most populated areas, and commercial bus companies primarily transport people between urban centres and larger towns, bypassing many of the small towns and hamlets that host museums or historic sites. For example, there is currently no regular bus service to Torrington, and visitors must detour some 30 kilometres off Highway 2 and back again to visit the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. There are few other reasons for a tourist to go to Torrington. Although the hamlet was once a larger town, with commercial shops and restaurants, it is now sparsely populated, boasting a pizzeria and hotel along with the museum. Torrington continues to host local events, such as an annual hockey tournament, but for the most part, the tourists who make a special trip to the hamlet intend to visit the Gopher Hole Museum. Before or after viewing the small museum, visitors receive a map of Torrington from museum staff so that they might walk around the handful of adjacent streets to see additional gopher features, including the 4-metre-high fibreglass statue of the hamlet’s mascot, Clem T. Go-Fur, created in 1991, and the fire hydrants repainted as gopher characters. Some tourists decide to explore the streets of Torrington on foot, whereas others drive slowly by these sites. Whichever option is chosen, the visit to the Gopher Hole Museum consists of a short interval of walking sandwiched between more lengthy bouts of driving. What kind of driving is usually undertaken to reach Torrington? Automobility scholars provide a framework for answering this question, for they have analyzed a range of driving genres and styles, from the daily commute to the Sunday drive and the road trip.20 Few people commute to Torrington to work, given the dearth of industry and businesses located there, although some have recently purchased homes in the hamlet, driving over an hour each day to work in Calgary, a city with high real estate costs.21 Such lengthy commutes along highways are typically portrayed as either tedious necessities or nerve-wracking entanglements with bad weather and traffic. Edensor argues, however, that repetitive driving can also produce pleasurable outcomes, including an enjoyment of embodied rituals – drinking coffee, eating, or listening to music in the car – or an identification with the increasingly familiar landmarks along the

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route.22 Tourists heading to Torrington may embrace the opportunity to repeat their own driving rituals, but the online reviews of the Gopher Hole Museum indicate that they are not seeking repetitive or familiar motorways. A full thirtythree of the sixty reviewers posted on Tripadvisor as of 2018 mention the drive to Torrington, characterizing it as a “little adventure” along “back roads” that were “a bit out of the way” and “off the beaten path.” One man identifies himself as a professional trucker, claiming that he took the “long road” to Torrington in order to “treat himself ” to a drive linked with relaxation.23 For him and many others, the drive to Torrington is part of an unusual event, not an obligatory chore undertaken to reach the museum as the desired destination. This emphasis on the unfamiliar makes the trip to Torrington seem more like a Sunday drive than a commute. The ritual of the Sunday drive, practised in the recent past mainly in the United States, Canada, and Australia, involved a family piling into the car on a Sunday afternoon to drive both slowly and aimlessly, often taking in scenery outside of the city.24 The trip toward Torrington is similarly linked with the pleasant pursuit of unknown locations in a nonurban setting, with nice views to appreciate along the way, including bright yellow fields of canola.25 Online reviewers portray the route as alluring primarily because it is “off the main highway,” offering experiences that diverge from conventional highway driving. Although few studies elaborate on the nature of these conventions, automobility scholar Jennifer Bonham argues that major highways are not venues designed for sightseeing. In keeping with the historical conceptualization of urban travel in terms of “transport,” most highways were created and older roadways remodelled to facilitate efficient traffic – getting from one place to another as quickly as possible – rather than commerce or enjoyment by pedestrians and bicyclists, among others.26 Main thoroughfares are visually monotonous, with wide, paved roads, concrete barriers, standardized signage, and periodic roadside services such as gas stations and Tim Horton’s coffee shops, at least in much of Canada. The homogenous nature of these highways leads anthropologist Marc Augé to include them in his inventory of “nonplaces” alongside hotel rooms and airports; he argues that these zones of transience are lacking in significance and cannot be considered places that enable human interaction and identification.27 Although his characterization of highways is debatable – it has been disputed by several automobility scholars, including Peter Merriman, who finds more diversity in major autoroutes and more human connection with them28 – references to pulling off the highway in reviews of the Gopher Hole Museum imply that, like Sunday drivers, travellers voluntarily leave the mundane to pursue secondary roadways that are ineffi-

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cient, bereft of the usual roadside architecture, and possibly more scenic. They drive in order to encounter significant places on back roads, eschewing expedient corridors that simply provide passage to somewhere else. Yet the trip to Torrington is not aimless like a Sunday drive; it is fuelled by a purpose. This aspect of the drive is in keeping with a road trip, which traditionally involves extended car travel toward a final destination with periodic stops along the way to refuel, rest, and visit attractions.29 The genre of the driving tour is heavily mythologized and linked with freedom, primarily in the Western literature and films studied by cultural theorists such as Ron Eyerman and Orvar Löfgren.30 These authors argue that representations of road trips romantically portray drivers who reject societal obligations to leave home and eventually “find themselves” within different settings, especially isolated landscapes. According to online reviews and casual reports, the drive to Torrington similarly involves a refusal of productive work and a quest to encounter the unknown in a nonurban setting. A few online reviewers also frame the trip as an act of rebellion during which they defied the standard tourist routes by trying something new that the average traveller would not experience.31 These visitors describe driving to Torrington as a diversion from a more or less organized trip to large, internationally known destinations, namely Banff National Park in the Rocky Mountains, which is two hours southwest of Torrington, or Drumheller, the “dinosaur capital of the world,” which is one hour southeast of the hamlet, places where they had explored multiple attractions during an extended stay.32 Their travel to Torrington was therefore something like a goal-oriented Sunday drive added at the last minute to a road trip. Unlike stops during the road trip, however, the visit to the Gopher Hole Museum is not a convenient resting place on the way to another location. The drive to Torrington involves a lengthy diversion from the primary route, something that I experienced during my first visit to Torrington. In 2009, as relative newcomers to Edmonton, Alberta, my partner and I decided to drive south to attend the Calgary Stampede, an annual rodeo, exhibition, and festival of western Canadian culture founded in 1912.33 Our friends insisted that we visit the Gopher Hole Museum on the way home, claiming that it was “truly a cultural gem.” Although we were reluctant to add hours to our trip back from Calgary on that Sunday afternoon, we pulled off the main highway to visit the unassuming onestorey white house adorned with hand-painted letters identifying it as “The World Famous Gopher Hole Museum” (figure 1.2). This event had a surprising and unexpected impact on me. It challenged my assumptions about the superiority of large, urban museums and historic sites, inspiring my subsequent re-

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1.2 Exterior signage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

search project on small-town and rural museums in Alberta. Along similar lines, filmmakers Chelsea McMullan and Douglas Nayler stopped at the Gopher Hole Museum during their drive across Canada to relocate from Vancouver to Toronto.34 They then returned several times to make a documentary film about the museum, released to acclaim in 2015 and discussed in chapter 3. Although there are undoubtedly many reasons to visit the Gopher Hole Museum, the repeated characterization of the trip as an inconvenient deviation from a standard route and pre-set travel plans suggests that it might be best described as a detour. Broadly defined as an interruption from the normal flow of traffic, the detour has received little if any attention in the automobility literature and thus requires a thorough consideration in the text that follows. According to the MerriamWebster Dictionary, a detour is “a deviation from a direct course or the usual procedure especially: a roundabout way temporarily replacing part of a route,” and the Cambridge English Dictionary states that it is “a way of getting to a place that is indirect and longer than the usual way, and which is taken in order to avoid a particular problem or to do something special.”35 As a noun, a detour involves the substitution of a route that changes direction to avoid a temporary

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problem or to reach an exceptional event. As a verb, to detour means to take a longer route that is either enforced by traffic regulations or voluntarily sought for an inefficient purpose, at least according to the norms of transport outlined by Bonham. A detour defies the principles of transport in a way that can inspire annoyance, anger, or even road rage in those drivers expecting to pursue efficient travel.36 In contrast, those who willingly defy the demand for swift transport and a predictable route, including many visitors to Torrington, embrace driving for pleasure in a nonproductive use of time that may seem extraordinary or even daring. The concept of the detour has been most fully explored in philosophical and literary discourse, including the work of Ernst Bloch. This German Marxist philosopher is best known for his three-volume The Principle of Hope, an influential study of artistic and other cultural forms of utopian dreams published in the 1950s that calls for thinkers to plan for a future of absolute perfection instead of merely describing the present or accumulating the past.37 Bloch also produced literary essays and short stories from the 1930s onward, which demonstrate, according to German scholar Matthias Hennig, Bloch’s use of the tactic of the detour. Hennig argues that Bloch endorsed a particular philosophy of the detour, one in which “[w]hoever takes a detour voluntarily does not seek to dominate space or to travel from point A to point B as quickly as possible; rather, one receives the landscape playfully and pleasurably, while surrendering to the Eros of its breadth and depth.”38 In this positive understanding of the detour, its slower pace allows the subject to perceive the concreteness of the world more fully and to engage with space instead of attempting to overcome it. By embracing “circuitousness” in his writing, Bloch “dispens[ed] with the straight line and the direct path” to portray philosophy as a process of navigation.39 Despite his focus on writing, Bloch’s understanding of the voluntary detour is useful for thinking about the trip to the Gopher Hole Museum below, for he suggests that diverging from a standard path to follow a relatively unplanned route could enable new experiences as well as more creative ways of thinking about one’s surroundings. Bloch’s tactic of the detour invokes power relations between the traveller and the space visited. The notion of “surrendering” to the landscape portrays those who willingly take a detour as open to and accepting of otherness; they yield or capitulate to their new surroundings instead of trying to overcome or dominate them. This understanding of the explorer is strikingly at odds with many representations of travel and tourism, two activities that are intricately linked.

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According to the well-known arguments of sociologist Dean MacCannell, the quintessential tourist wants to “see it all, know it all, and take it all in,” consuming foreign, different, or “other” spaces in an imperialist fashion.40 Expanding on this notion, John Urry theorizes about what he calls the “tourist gaze,” a systematic way of seeing that encourages the tourist to identify sites that are “out of the ordinary.” The tourist gaze transforms people as well as places into consumable images by means of maps, novels, postcards, souvenirs, photographs, and travel blogs.41 Such aggressive looking is not confined to designated tourist sites, according to Jonas Larsen, a Danish professor of mobility and urban studies. He argues that tourists perform a related kind of looking, or “travel glance,” using the windows of their moving vehicles to frame consumable scenes. Larsen contends that these travelling observers both stabilize and collect the passing landscape from a safe and detached position inside their moving automobiles.42 This scholarship suggests that drivers heading to the Gopher Hole Museum may simply be conventional tourists who visit a novel museum in the “backwoods,” taking pleasure in the sheer difference of a place that exists for their visual consumption. It is difficult to evaluate these competing theories of travel and the detour due to the diversity of people and tourists who make the trip to Torrington every year. Yet the online reviews of the Gopher Hole Museum, my own experiences, and the oral reports of friends and acquaintances indicate that visitors do not (or cannot) fully commodify the event. Consider my own photograph of the drive above, taken from the window of a moving car long before I encountered theories of the travel glance or the voluntary detour. This image represents a negotiation between the seer and the seen rather than only the dominance of the possessive observer. The photograph is created by an invisible passenger who reaches out to capture the landscape. Yet the mediated nature of this effort is suggested by the text on the mirror, and the car is revealed in the mirror as a fellow actor in the scene. The photographer is recognized or “hailed” by the sign advertising the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, indicating that the hamlet ahead desires and possibly even depends on the presence of visitors. The passing traveller nevertheless has little visual access to the adjacent rural dwellings or their inhabitants, with fences and trees deliberately preventing both physical and visual entry. The landscape that remains on view is not conventionally scenic, especially when compared with the canyons in the Badlands near Drumheller or with the majestic mountains around Banff, sites photographed in an obligatory way by most tourists, often from their cars. Distinct from the highways and back roads constructed in national parks like Banff, the road lead-

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ing to Torrington is not designed to provide pleasing spectacles. The drive does not foster views of “windshield wilderness,” a term used by historian David Louter in his study of cars, roads, and nature in Washington State. He argues that during the early twentieth century, park planners and landscape architects generally accommodated the growing use of automobiles for tourism, creating highways that would ensure good views. Automobiles thus contributed to cultural understandings of wilderness, which are continually subject to change. For example, by the 1960s, some groups were defining wilderness differently, namely as forested spaces without any signs of automobility.43 Nevertheless, staged views and scenic lookouts remain on offer in national parks and along tourist routes, whereas the rural landscape leading to Torrington is mostly withheld from the eyes of travellers and is far from spectacular. In the 1960s, Guy Debord analyzed what he called the society of the spectacle, creating ways to resist it, including by means of the detour. A French Marxist theorist, he is renowned for his critiques of modern society, where images and objects serve capitalist goals by mediating social relationships, rendering those relationships less authentic and less satisfying.44 As a key member of the Situationist International, a group founded in Europe in the late 1950s to offer leftist critiques of art and politics, Debord developed ways to counteract the effect of the spectacle, including the production of events or situations that would allow people to experience life more directly. One such event was known in French as the dérive, translated as either the detour or drift, which Debord described as “a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society.”45 Those participating in this kind of detour had to abandon their usual work and leisure activities, allowing themselves to “be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.”46 In contrast to Bloch’s literary or philosophical detour, this voluntary but unscripted interaction with one’s surroundings was fully embodied and concrete, undertaken in response to the increasing rationalization of city planning at the time, which prioritized traffic over lived experience. According to Debord, “present-day urbanism’s main problem is ensuring the smooth circulation of a rapidly increasing number of motor vehicles.”47 Embarking on a detour or circulating without a destination was meant to defy capitalist demands for an efficient city filled with productive inhabitants, allowing the “useless” drifters to find an awareness of “their imprisonment by routine.”48 This influential understanding of the detour was developed in relation to urban settings undergoing modernization during the 1950s and ’60s, but it illuminates some aspects of the trip to visit the Gopher Hole Museum, for it is often relatively unplanned, lacks a strictly productive outcome,

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and is informed by the desire to thwart everyday routines and landscapes in order to embrace new experiences by means of “mobile playfulness,” the phrase used by critic Brian Elliott to describe Debord’s detour.49 Although many visitors to Torrington are tourists seeking leisure in a way that Debord denounced, they encounter the unexpected, allowing themselves to be drawn into surprising, refreshing, and critical experiences, which ultimately challenge their understanding of their surroundings, including the museum itself, a space difficult to separate from the drive taken to reach it. The online reviews and other written accounts of the Gopher Hole Museum affirm that visitors take great pleasure in its unconventional nature, repeatedly characterizing it as unique, unexpected, different, out of the ordinary, and quirky. The reviewers indicate that the eccentric museum both eschews and makes visible the regulations of more traditional museums. They note with approval that the Gopher Hole Museum is atypical and “definitely not the Louvre,” revelling in the clever manipulation of the preserved gophers rather than in the methodical display of historic objects often found in art galleries and heritage museums.50 Visitors embrace the playfulness advocated by Bloch and Debord, focusing on what they call the fantastic, fun, and silly dioramas inside the museum, which are filled with dead gophers enacting scenes of small-town life. Along similar lines, reviewers commend the staff, who encourage them to have fun, to take as many photographs inside the museum as they like, and even to try on the gopher mask used in local parades while posing for pictures outside the small building. These experiences contrast markedly with the regulations in place at larger museums, which often enforce bodily restraint, deference to authority, and the quiet contemplation of important objects. Such conventions primarily work to reinforce class distinctions and to reform working-class behaviour, effects examined in well-known sociological research on museums by Pierre Bourdieu, Tony Bennett, and Norman Trondsen, among others.51 In contrast to experiences of restraint and discomfort, visitors to the Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington report taking pleasure in the initially startling displays and embracing a sense of freedom from normative hierarchies and routines. Visitors may also engage in satisfying social exchanges within the Gopher Hole Museum, another cultural goal favoured by Debord. Even though people who travel to the museum are deliberately seeking the kind of tourism rejected by the French philosopher, they are pleased to discover that standard tourist tropes and amenities are in fact lacking in Torrington. Their appreciation of this dearth of services is at odds with the kind of tourism that both seeks and destroys difference, described by art critic Lucy Lippard in her study of tourism

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in the United States. She argues that “towns devastated by capital flight, technological shifts, or union-busting make spectacles of themselves, desperately framing and reinventing their histories to make the picture appealing to those who might buy a hamburger, T-shirt, suntan lotion, Indian jewelry, a plastic sea gull, a shell ashtray, or a boat ride.”52 In contrast to this scenario, several online reviewers of the Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington praise its gift shop because instead of the usual array of mass-produced trinkets, it features local handmade goods at reasonable prices, with monies going directly to the people who made them, not the museum.53 Along similar lines, the low entry fee, a mere two dollars, is offered as evidence that the museum organizers in Torrington are not trying to take advantage of visitors by endorsing conventional tourism. The museum appears to be driven by genuine care, not a capitalist desire to accrue profit. In connection with this point, the character of the museum staff is lauded, with many visitors noting that they were welcomed warmly, even when arriving after hours, by the friendly residents of Torrington, who were eager to talk and share stories, taking pride in their occupation. According to these online reviews and my own experiences, the social encounters fostered by staff at the Gopher Hole Museum are indeed genuine and rewarding, although I am reluctant to characterize them as authentic or direct, despite Debord’s use of these terms, for all social exchanges are mediated in complex ways that are difficult, if not impossible, to recognize, much less avoid. This discussion suggests that the theories of the detour developed by Debord are more easily applied to the museum visit than to the drive toward Torrington. After all, visitors encounter the Gopher Hole Museum and its staff after exiting their cars, and they can also discover the hamlet on foot, the mode of transportation favoured by Debord’s depiction of the detour as a walk through urban landscapes. This privileging of walking over driving is not unique to Debord and can be found in many sources, including the philosophy of Michel de Certeau, who in the 1980s articulated walking in the city as a meaningful tactic for creatively resisting the regulations and grid-like plans meant to enforce rational movement.54 De Certeau understood walking as a practice of everyday life that unconsciously resisted urban planning and other institutions of control, unlike the deliberate efforts to disrupt urban planning promoted by Debord. Yet the way that both French philosophers valued mobility on foot is part of a longstanding Western view of walking, hiking, and rambling as affording more substantial and direct experiences of the world than driving. Hiking in less cultivated areas is consistently praised as offering a refreshing and uplifting break from urban life, based on romantic constructions of nature popular during the

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nineteenth century.55 The preference for walking arguably increased during the second half of the twentieth century, when wilderness was regularly defined in opposition to automobility, as noted by Louter above. In contrast to the praise given to walking, sitting inside an automobile is largely considered a passive, limiting, and artificial experience, one that is hardly worth mentioning, despite the scholarly attention paid to the diversity and complexity of driving in automobility studies. Visitors to the Gopher Hole Museum take the drive to Torrington seriously. Online reviews repeatedly state that the museum is worth the drive and encourage others to enjoy the route. These visitors portray the drive as an investment that carries risk. Noting that the entry fee to the museum is negligible, the reviewers imply that they paid for the museum with their drive to Torrington. This potentially capitalist framework would be anathema to Debord and probably Bloch as well, but it highlights the way that the reviewers view driving as a form of valuable work or labour, albeit one that is pleasant. At the same time, the exchange is not strictly rooted in profit and is more in keeping with a gift economy, where travellers give the gift of the drive based not an explicit agreement with the recipient but on the expectation of a future “return gift.”56 Visitors to the Gopher Hole Museum regard the return gift, or “pay off,” primarily in terms of the unexpected, perplexing, and engaging social interactions that they have in Torrington, where they laugh with museum staff and try on gopher masks. This exchange should not be idealized, for a few reviewers comment that Torrington is a quintessential rural town in Alberta, invoking stereotypes of it as a simpler, less developed place.57 Nevertheless, other reviewers urge potential visitors to keep an open mind, noting their initial skepticism about the museum. They indicate that the visit was transformative, as it was for me and the filmmakers noted above, as well as for one reviewer, familiar with museums and possibly prone to exaggeration, who proclaimed that the visit had changed her life course.58 It is clear that for many visitors the trip to Torrington was undertaken in the spirit of the detour, a cultural event that challenged their understanding of museums while providing them with a sense of freedom and joy outside of mundane life or routine tourism. In contrast to the trip to the Gopher Hole Museum, tourists do not take a detour to visit the Wadey Centre in Blackfalds, Alberta, located only 87 kilometres north of Torrington (figure 1.3). Despite the proximity of Blackfalds to Torrington, the larger town is situated very differently from the hamlet. Blackfalds is positioned directly off of Highway 2, a major thoroughfare, and less than twenty minutes away from Red Deer, an urban centre with over 100,000 resi-

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1.3 Exterior of the Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta, 2019.

dents. Unlike visitors to the Gopher Hole Museum, those headed to the Wadey Centre can simply pull into town. Their drive does not include a back roads adventure or particularly scenic route. Undertaken entirely along a major highway, which remains visible from the site of the Wadey Centre, the drive is more like a commute in the sense that it unfolds on a roadway dedicated to efficient transport. Tourists who pursue leisure by means of this highway can visit the centre as a break from a longer road trip. Even though the Wadey Centre is multifaceted and in many ways functions as a museum, it is primarily staged as a rest stop rather than a unique tourist destination that is “worth the drive.” The Wadey Centre offers a break from driving. Located in a restored historic home, the Centre opened in 2017 in large part to greet tourists, with one local newspaper reporting that “the facility will be one of the first [that] visitors to the community will see.”59 This welcoming role is highlighted on the centre’s official website, which notes that the “Wadey Visitor and Information Centre” is equipped with public washrooms, is wheelchair accessible, and provides a scenic rest area.60 Visitors are invited to collect pamphlets, have a snack, shop, and view the displays of local heritage inside the historic home. Stopping at the Wadey Centre is framed as a practical endeavour, even for those in the commu-

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nity, as the public toilets are also designed for the use of residents enjoying the nearby dog park or walking on the Trans Canada Trail.61 The emphasis on convenience, ease, and service stands in contrast to the investment, risk, and excitement associated with the trip to the Gopher Hole Museum. Tourists who pull off the highway to visit the Wadey Centre are urged to resume driving afterward, using the information provided during their break on-site to continue their road trip or to plan a new one. In this sense, the centre acts as a gateway, opening its doors to tourists expressly to encourage them to stop briefly before continuing to travel in and around Blackfalds. The Wadey Centre is thus more attuned to conventional tourism than the Gopher Hole Museum, which lacks a cafe and other standard amenities as well as an information area. Although the museum in Torrington includes a small wire brochure stand in one corner, the few available pamphlets feature tourist attractions in British Columbia rather than in Alberta. The Wadey Centre is in a better position to support regional tourism because Blackfalds is a larger community with access to passing motorists and is relatively close to smaller towns like Ponoka and Bentley, highlighted among the many pamphlets on view, as well as to Gull Lake and Aspen Beach Provincial Park, among other places of interest to tourists. In many ways, Blackfalds is more central than nearby Torrington, at least in terms of the structures and practices of automobility, notably major and secondary highways. Nevertheless, the Wadey Centre offers displays about the history of Blackfalds for those who get out of their cars to walk around the small house. A number of placards and photographs provide information about the Wadey family, the original inhabitants of the historic house now repurposed as the Wadey Centre. In 1916, the prefabricated home, ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue and shipped from Winnipeg, Manitoba, was assembled and enhanced by George Wadey, who, along with his wife Mary, actively shaped the community that became Blackfalds. The current Blackfalds and Area Historical Society spearheaded the efforts to preserve the building, and its members ensured that objects and furniture from the original home, such as a stained glass window, highboy dresser, crank telephone, organ, cabinet radio, and floor grates, were included within it (figure 1.4).62 This emphasis on heritage preservation is continued with several glass cases filled with the collections of the Historical Society, which are periodically changed. Most striking are the insect specimens, including butterflies and beetles arranged in traditional wooden boxes, stemming from the Gregson family in Blackfalds. Above them are framed letters written between 1903 and 1908 by local justice of the peace Arthur D. Gregson

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1.4 Interior of the Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta, 2017.

to Lord Walter Rosthchild in England that offer to sell moths and butterflies in order to augment the renowned Rosthchild natural history collection (figure 1.5). This small exhibition inside the Wadey Centre celebrates entrepreneurial settlers from England, as well as the fact that Blackfalds was home to an early natural history museum in western Canada, which opened in 1903 in the home of Arthur’s brother, Percy Gregson, who was another amateur entomologist. Educational visual and material objects are therefore part of the rest stop offered to tourists, but these displays are arguably aimed at a local audience, a point made in the second part of this chapter, which provides a more thorough discussion of the origins of the centre. The Wadey Centre includes many aspects of a museum, even if it is not defined as such by its local supporters. The centre is like traditional natural history museums of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the kind created in Blackfalds by the Gregson family – because it embraces an array of objects, ranging from insects to musical instruments, photographs, and artworks, within a multipurpose space. As I have discussed at length elsewhere, natural history

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1.5 Natural history displays, Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta, 2018.

societies were formed in cities and towns across Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to promote the local economy, attract tourists, and provide items for international exchange as well as display.63 Natural history societies created museums that not only exhibited objects but also traded them across borders, hosted entertaining events, sponsored camping trips, amassed libraries, and held fundraising bake sales and teas. That the Wadey Centre provides refreshments and promotes tourism in the region is in keeping with these early museums, as is the inclusion of office space in the restored house for both the Historical Society and the Blackfalds and District Chamber of Commerce, an organization devoted to supporting local businesses in the area. The founders of early natural history museums, like Percy Gregson, saw no contradiction in promoting an appreciation of nature and economic expansion at the same time.64 Small-town and rural museums often maintain the practices of early natural history museums by embracing multiple functions and sponsoring the local economy. This combination of services and functions at the Wadey Centre is nevertheless aligned with recent developments in larger museums and art galleries,

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which are returning to some aspects of earlier institutions by housing exhibition spaces, archives, and libraries under the same roof, sometimes alongside areas for shopping and entertainment.65 The display areas of the New Brunswick Museum, for example, are now located in a building in downtown Saint John that includes shopping and food outlets as well as a public library. The National Archives of Canada merged with the National Library in 2004, becoming a knowledge institution that combines the functions of an archive, library, and museum in response to the ways that digital technologies are reshaping access to and the preservation of information and as a means to share physical space and human resources, thereby facilitating cooperation and collaboration.66 Although the process of professionalizing librarians, archivists, and museum workers during the twentieth century separated these roles from each other, they are slowly coming back together as professional boundaries dissolve and the authority of the professions faces a general decline, in part because of the “expert” knowledge and resources available online.67 These more recent cultural and economic shifts may influence the Wadey Centre, which, in addition to the services and exhibitions noted above, hosts the Blackfalds archives, managed by members of the Historical Society to preserve the family, social, and organizational history of Blackfalds and its surrounding area. The main difference between the Wadey Centre and many larger museums is the scale and size of their exhibition spaces and collections, not the amalgamation of services and activities. The Wadey Centre is a new organization, with little online presence and few online reviews posted by visitors, in contrast to more established museums, including the twenty-year-old Gopher Hole Museum. I learned about the construction of the site in Blackfalds the same way that I first heard about the museum in Torrington: by word of mouth. This time, the friend who recommended my visit had a personal connection to the Wadey Centre. Her great-grandmother was Mary Wadey, the matriarch who ran the family home and surrounding farm as a widow from 1942 to 1992, dying at the age of ninety-eight.68 My friend Heather Caverhill is now pursuing a doctoral degree at the University of British Columbia that focuses on the visual culture of early-twentiethcentury western Canada, the circulation of images of Indigenous peoples, and concurrent museum practices. Aware of my work on small-town and rural museums in Alberta, she invited me to join her and the rest of her family in Blackfalds for the grand opening of the Wadey Centre on 1 July 2017. With my partner and three-year-old son, we organized a road trip to the Wadey Centre, bringing snacks and stopping in Ponoka along the way to explore its impressive

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playgrounds. Despite the role of the Wadey Centre as a useful and educational rest stop, we considered it our final destination. We enjoyed an extended stay at the site and participated in the opening events, which included speeches made and cake served outside the building, as well as casual, family-led tours within it. Our first experience of the Wadey Centre featured aspects of the hospitality and entertainment offered at the Gopher Hole Museum, in contrast to the experience of the future tourist invited to rest briefly and gather information about Blackfalds. The opening of the Wadey Centre was held on Canada Day, a federal statutory holiday that marks the anniversary of the Constitution Act of 1 July 1867, which united the colonies of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick into a single Dominion within the British Empire. The Canada Day of 2017 was special because it was the 150th birthday of the creation of Canada, commemorated nationally with large events, but it was also subject to criticism for failing to acknowledge fully the colonial impact of genocide, suffering, and forced displacement on the Indigenous peoples who have inhabited the land for thousands of years.69 The Wadey Centre was a direct result of the celebration of Canada 150, receiving government funding designated for heritage projects, although the local Historical Society and its president, Judy Carleton, featured below, had been seeking to preserve the Wadey House for at least fifteen years before the grant deadline. In keeping with this celebration, the resulting centre is devoted to colonial settler history in the importance given to the home and the displays inside, a focus that was also clear during the opening event, where two members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided an official presence, representing the involvement of the federal government and symbolizing nationalism. Looking at the large audience gathered in front of the Wadey Centre on 1 July, Heather joked that I might never have seen “such a white crowd before,” but I had indeed seen one at my own family reunions in southwestern Ontario. Despite this shared history of colonial settler identity, I remained a relative outsider at the opening of the Wadey Centre, notably when one speaker proclaimed that Alberta was the best province in Canada; it was the best place to live, raise a family, and get a good-paying job. My childhood in Ontario and early career in New Brunswick were filled with messages and experiences that did not align with such assertions, highlighting the fictional unity of Canada that we were celebrating. This and other moments of disjuncture at the grand opening of the Wadey Centre undermined my efforts to obtain an “insider” glimpse of a heritage site in Alberta, persuading me to leave this role to the local people I would interview later.

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My identity as an outsider to Alberta was most evident during my first visit to the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum in Fort Chipewyan, a hamlet populated by about 900 people and located 850 kilometres north of Blackfalds. This distance seems even greater because it is always difficult and often impossible to drive to Fort Chipewyan, the most isolated northern settlement in Alberta. During the colder months, a winter road connects the hamlet to Fort McMurray, an urban service area that has just under 70,000 people and is located 220 kilometres to the south of Fort Chipewyan. Light vehicles can make the approximately four-hour voyage by the middle of December and heavier trucks about one month later. For over eight months of the year, the road between Fort McMurray and Fort Chipewyan is closed, and the northern hamlet can be reached only by air and sometimes by barge or boat. Nevertheless, over 3,000 vehicles made the round trip on the winter road in 2014, mostly residents, construction workers, and professional truckers bringing food, goods, and fuel from the south.70 The drive is always perilous, with no services or cellphone connectivity available along a slippery, narrow route that winds through dense forests, sand dunes, and muskeg bogs, passing over hills as well as seven major rivers that may or may not be entirely frozen. In a newspaper report about this treacherous drive, Kevin Ellingson, a resident of Fort Chipewyan, stated that “[s]ome of the truckers drive with the window open and one hand on the door handle in case they have to bail out.”71 According to a truck driver who regularly makes the trip, “Even at 50 kilometres an hour, it’s an adventure. But it’s the thing that makes the community go.”72 Far from the efficient transport or predictable highway preferred by commuters, the road to Fort Chipewyan is primarily used as a practical lifeline. The experience of this road is different from those associated with the genres of driving outlined above, even the back roads adventure, which does not usually involve such a high degree of risk. For the people of Fort Chipewyan, the wintery drive is a dangerous necessity, one that I have never encountered and probably never will. Like most visitors to Fort Chipewyan, I flew into the hamlet after boarding a small propeller plane at the airport in Fort McMurray for my trips there in 2013 and 2017. The first voyage was immediately unfamiliar to me, as it featured different regulations. I did not pass through the usual security checks at the airport, and I chose any available seat once inside the aircraft. The helpful airline staff made the loud and bumpy flight enjoyable, but I was surprised when we landed to see that my bag was simply removed from the plane and set on the tarmac near a tiny, unstaffed airport building. During my first trip, I did not know how to call a taxi, but a friendly resident who was also disembarking and

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knew the owner of my lodgings offered to drive me. For my second visit, I had learned enough to call ahead and reserve the local taxi driver. Such unexpected situations were exciting for me, and I initially perceived my surroundings in terms of the tourist gaze outlined by John Urry. I was a stranger who visually consumed the different customs and landscape, despite having already been in contact with long-time resident Oliver Glanfield, curator of the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum from its opening in 1990 until 2016.73 I had no other connection with the hamlet and had not heard anything about the museum by word of mouth, although I had read about it online during early efforts to find as many museums and historic sites as possible in Alberta. In 2013 I carried an anthropological tourist gaze with me into the white clapboard museum, learning about the collections and the history of Fort Chipewyan during a personal tour led by Glanfield (figure 1.6). He explained that the museum building was a reconstruction of the now demolished store of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which had developed its regional fur-trading headquarters in Fort Chipewyan after overtaking and amalgamating with the rival North West Company in 1821, active in the region since 1803. Construction of

1.6 Exterior of the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 2013.

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the Bicentennial Museum was begun in 1988 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the founding of Fort Chipewyan, the first European settlement in Alberta, which had brought French, English, and Scottish fur traders to a region selected for its convenient location beside Lake Athabasca, whose connections to the Peace, Slave, Athabasca, and Mackenzie River basins allowed for the transportation and distribution of goods. Many of the thousands of objects on display in the Bicentennial Museum relate to the rise of Fort Chipewyan as a fur-trading centre, arguably the most active and important one in North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.74 Glass cases exhibit such items as early Hudson’s Bay Company guns, trapping equipment, and dishes, along with the clothing, artwork, and technological objects created and used by the predominantly Indigenous population of the area, notably Saka-withiniwak members of the Mikisew Cree First Nation; Denésoliné people, including members of the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation; and members of the Métis Nation. Although the museum installations provide a roughly chronological narrative of the impact of the fur trade and influx of Europeans into Indigenous land, the story is told with reference to local families, and the installations are accompanied by photographs of long-time residents and Indigenous Elders. In contrast to the focus on the culture of white settlers at the Gopher Hole Museum and the Wadey Centre, the museum in Fort Chipewyan highlights predominantly Indigenous individuals, donors, and content, portraying the continuity of local families and their traditions from the past into the present. The Bicentennial Museum is far from being like the tourist stop offered by the Wadey Centre, but it is also not part of a voluntary detour, given the length of the trip taken to reach the northern hamlet and the lack of driving done by most visitors. However, travelling to Fort Chipewyan can still be a key aspect of the visit to the museum by tourists. According to Maureen Clarke, acting curator of the Bicentennial Museum during my second visit in 2017, about 90 per cent of visitors to the museum are from the immediate region, including school children on designated field trips. “There are no nearby communities from which to draw,” she stated.75 Nevertheless, tourists were among the 3,000 visitors in 2016, including a few people who drove from Fort McMurray, predominantly workers in the oil industry with more time on their hands during a slowing economy.76 One of these underemployed oil sands workers may have encouraged others to make the trip from the urban centre, noting online that “[d]uring the winter, you can drive the ice road from the Oil Sands and visit the Museum.”77 Signatures in the visitor book of the Bicentennial Museum indicate that some tourists had come from as far away as Russia, the Outer Hebrides,

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Australia, South America, Mexico, and Florida. Clarke told me that, in the past, a few people from Germany had canoed to Fort Chipewyan from Ontario, retracing the route taken by early fur traders from York Factory to what is now northern Alberta, covering over 3,300 kilometres of lakes, rivers, and portages.78 In this case, the trip itself was the tourist act, requiring physical endurance as well as advanced preparation. Visiting the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum was a bonus added to an adventure tour of northern wilderness by Europeans with a dedication to, and probable idealization of, Canadian heritage and Indigenous experience.79 Although a few tourists drive to the museum in Fort Chipewyan, most of them relish the opportunity to evade automobility and experience alternative modes of transportation. My visit to Fort Chipewyan was unusual because tourists do not fly into the hamlet with the sole purpose of seeing the Bicentennial Museum. Many are pursuing a “wilderness adventure tour,” something that cannot be done spontaneously, unlike the last-minute decision to add a detour to a longer road trip in order to visit the Gopher Hole Museum or to pull off the highway in order to stop at the Wadey Centre. According to Frommer’s, an online travel guidebook, those visiting Fort Chipewyan need to hire a local guide because it is “a wild land, where all but the most experienced outdoor adventurer will need at least some guidance.”80 Such tourists travel to the northern hamlet because it provides access to nearby Wood Buffalo National Park, a unesco World Heritage Site encompassing the largest expanse of protected wilderness in North America. This area is described as “completely wild,” in part because there is no road access to it from Alberta, in keeping with definitions of wilderness that reject automobility. The northern location is also considered exclusive because “average” tourists will remain in the southern areas of the province. The Frommer’s guidebook asserts that the area in and around Fort Chipewyan is “the antiBanff: no tourist buses, throngs of shoppers, overpriced hotels and restaurants, or wildlife feasting on scattered Pringles that tourists should know better than to entice them with.”81 This sentiment is echoed in an article first published in 2005 in the Globe and Mail, a national newspaper, which claims that the area near Fort Chipewyan appeals to visitors desiring “a taste of what is arguably the least touristy, and most laid-back, region remaining in Canada.”82 This exclusivity is deliberate, according to an employee of the Mikisew Cree First Nation, which provides tourist packages in numbers that are strictly limited to protect the local community, including its members living in Fort Chipewyan.83 The international travellers who take these tours savour the lack of conveniences and services provided in the “wilderness” around Fort Chipewyan, but they do

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not seek the surprises offered at the Gopher Hole Museum, which is hardly “off the beaten path” in comparison. Such tourists wish to fish in remote lakes and to hike through pristine wilderness, pursuits that are harder to sustain in an area experiencing the polluting impact of nearby oil sands industries, including toxins in the local fish population and high rates of cancer in the residents of Fort Chipewyan.84 The lack of easy access by road contributes to the tourist appeal of Fort Chipewyan, but the hamlet itself is not outside of automobility, given its reliance on the winter road and its standard use of motor vehicles locally. Many cars, pickup trucks, motorcycles, and four-by-four vehicles drive the streets of Fort Chipewyan, transporting people and goods. As a white colonial settler originally from Ontario, I relied on residents to drive me to and from the airport, but I could easily walk to the museum once in the hamlet. Although Fort Chipewyan is accessible to pedestrians, some parts of Mackenzie Avenue lack sidewalks, and I braved traffic while dashing up the road in an attempt to view the paintings inside the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Roman Catholic Church, built by Oblate missionaries in 1909 and adorned by Father Émile Grouard and Sister Default.85 This church was locked and I never saw the paintings, but I did view the adjacent site, formerly home to the Convent of Holy Angels Indian Residential School, open from 1902 to 1974, which had the sole purpose of assimilating Indigenous children by stripping them of their specific Indigenous cultures and languages, discussed in the introduction to this book.86 The convent has been torn down and the space repurposed for community celebrations and powwows as residents grapple with the ongoing effects of the sexual, physical, and psychological abuse suffered by children in the Catholic institution.87 This colonial legacy is fundamental to the history and identity of Fort Chipewyan, but it is not always part of the tourist experience, becoming invisible to visitors wishing to escape automobility and commune with an “untouched” nature supposedly outside of modern concerns. The Bicentennial Museum, Wadey Centre, and Gopher Hole Museum are complex organizations that attract tourists for different reasons. At first glance, the three institutions have much in common. They are all located in towns or hamlets within the province of Alberta and are small when compared with large, urban museums. The organizations, however, are vastly different from each other in many ways, including their links with the practices of automobility. If the trip to the Gopher Hole Museum can be considered a detour, the visit to the Wadey Centre is like a rest stop during a road trip. Reaching Fort Chipewyan is far more challenging, creating a sense of distinction among tourists who enjoy

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the lack of easy access to the region, aiming to visit a wild and remote land that is nevertheless shaped by and embroiled in contemporary politics. The understandings of these tourists are directed by, among other things, the modes of transportation that they encounter. Yet these visitors are always outsiders, excluded from local knowledge in ways that may not be visible to them. The residents of the small towns and hamlets significantly shape the tourist experience at each site, both in welcoming visitors and in limiting their access to certain forms of experience. Like tourists, they are impacted by the structures and histories of automobility, the topic explored in the next section of this chapter.

On the Map: Local Views of Small-Town and Rural Museums The expansive name of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum is not merely a joke or a bombastic claim to importance. It refers to the international attention that the small museum in Torrington received before it opened in 1996. The political lobby group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contacted the founders of the Gopher Hole Museum and urged them to use fabricated gophers instead of animal corpses, as discussed in chapter 3.88 The debate and widespread media coverage that followed raised the museum’s profile throughout the world, and it continues to be featured on fan websites and in online reviews, documentary films, and newspaper articles. This free publicity is appreciated by those who work at the Gopher Hole Museum, including long-time curator Dianne Kurta, who explained during an interview with me that the museum was created primarily in order to bring people into the hamlet and to encourage them to stay for a while, chat with residents, and have a meal at the local hotel or pizzeria.89 She and her fellow volunteers view the museum as a means of attracting tourists and are proud of the international renown that their efforts have garnered. A large map of the world is prominently displayed inside the museum to demonstrate the allure that the site holds for tourists (figure 1.7). It is riddled with coloured straight pins inserted by visitors to indicate their place of origin. The pins are densely saturated in Canada and the United States as well as Europe but also seem to mark every other country in the world, no matter how distant. This map makes arguments about geography, not only by featuring North America in the middle of the image but also by portraying Torrington as the centre of the world; the hamlet is like a magnet that draws large numbers of visitors from distant lands. In an effort to shift geographical understandings, the

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1.7 International visitor map, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

map shows the hamlet as a densely populated hub of activity rather than a small town on the periphery of modern transportation routes. Tourists participate in producing this image of Torrington by inserting tacks to mark their homeland, leaving a visible trace of their presence long after their departure. They help to fulfill the primary goal of the museum, which is to put Torrington (back) on the map by making it both a centrally important and memorable location. During the first half of the twentieth century, Torrington played a key role in rural Alberta, providing goods and services to regional farmers and other residents who reached the town via rough roads or the railway. When it was a larger town instead of a hamlet, Torrington boasted shops, restaurants, and grocery stores, bringing those living nearby into the community to collect supplies as well as to attend school and sporting or cultural events. Torrington was also a station along the railway line, equipped with five wooden grain elevators for storing grain to be transported to markets.90 This agricultural activity waned during the second half of the twentieth century as family farms were gradually replaced by larger entities and as farm production was displaced by the oil and gas industry.91 Both the railway and the grain elevators in Torrington fell into

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disuse. The railway ties were removed after an extended period of economic and population decline in the hamlet, and the last large wooden elevator was finally torn down in 1997. Around this time, long-time residents formed the Torrington Tourism Action Society, which strove to counteract these visible losses and effectively save the town. Their innovative solution, the Gopher Hole Museum, reshaped the image of Torrington rather than attempting to restore it, ultimately repositioning the hamlet within national and international tourist markets instead of exclusively targeting residents of the region. The Gopher Hole Museum nevertheless celebrates the glory days of Torrington as a regional service centre by providing historic information aimed at current and former residents. Most of the dioramas feature the cafes and other businesses that were once active but are no longer operating, including the beauty parlour, while referencing the annual parades, jamborees, and picnics that no longer take place in Torrington. Tourists may miss the significance of these scenes, interpreting them as idealized visions of small-town life in the past, given the lack of detailed labels and other printed information. I initially understood the dioramas along these lines, assuming that they offered general representations of rural community. I finally recognized that images of defunct businesses, former buildings, and specific heritage events were portrayed in the dioramas during my third visit to the museum, after reading a book published in 2016 about the history of Torrington since its creation by white settlers during the late nineteenth century.92 In chapter 3, I argue that the carefully staged scenes can act as a site of memory for past and current local people familiar with Torrington and thus able to identify, and to identify with, the detailed representations. The dioramas preserve the golden age of Torrington and ensure its survival into the future while highlighting how modes of transportation, notably the scene with passengers in the old train station, contributed to the initial growth of the town. Outsiders to Torrington will likely overlook this content and form alternative relationships with the dioramas, part of the museum’s appealing openness to diverse interpretations. In contrast to Torrington, which undertook efforts to re-establish its status as a centre after shifting economic conditions and transportation routes moved it to the margins, Blackfalds always was and remains centrally located. Even in the late nineteenth century, the town site was positioned alongside the C & E Trail, a path between what are now the cities of Calgary and Edmonton that was long used by Indigenous peoples and then by European wagons.93 The railway line and later highway followed roughly the same route, with some deviations that favoured Red Deer, allowing Blackfalds to attract settlers and businesses.

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In large part because of its consistent proximity to transportation routes, Blackfalds is not declining like Torrington. In fact, Blackfalds is expanding, its population having increased by over 3,000 people since 2011, and it has been listed as one of Canada’s fastest growing municipalities for the past nine years.94 Instead of providing goods and services to local farmers, however, Blackfalds is now a bedroom community for Red Deer, with many families living in the town but commuting to work in the city. The influx of young families brings vibrancy to Blackfalds, evident in its recently constructed schools and fitness complexes. At the same time, understandings of the town’s “centrality” are changing. Older structures are being replaced by modern ones, threatening to erase the unique heritage and identity of Blackfalds.95 The new residents do not always have strong links to the town and may be more interested in the affordability of amenities offered in Blackfalds than in the early settlers who once lived there.96 This lack of concern for the history of Blackfalds was noticed by Judy Carleton, president of the Blackfalds and Area Historical Society, who spearheaded efforts to save the Wadey House. In an interview, Carleton explained that she founded the local Historical Society, which was incorporated in 2005, after discovering that the town lacked an official archive. Carleton’s efforts to research the foundations of the town – her history of Blackfalds appeared in 2003 – led her to gather the requisite documents and ultimately to create an archive equipped with a database highlighting local genealogical and other information.97 Carleton and her fellow members of the Historical Society then turned their attention to the Wadey House, which was at risk of collapse. After Mary Wadey moved into a seniors’ home – she died in 1992 – the house was rented out by the Wadey family, temporarily left empty, sold, and then seriously vandalized before it suffered from flooding and was boarded up.98 During a span of fifteen years, various plans to preserve the house fell through, including the efforts of one developer to move the house to her acreage.99 In the end, members of the Historical Society collaborated with the administrators of the town to apply for funding from the Canada 150 Initiative, which was meant to celebrate and protect heritage across the country. This funding was most welcome, but it also meant that many interests were involved in the process of restoring the Wadey House, from city planners and members of the Historical Society to the Wadey family. Carleton reported that the restoration process did not go smoothly. It was first necessary to move the former homestead from its location on what was once the Wadey farm to a location owned by the town, on the edge of a public park. This procedure was both expensive and complex, requiring input from

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architectural experts to minimize the substantial risk that the move posed to an already seriously damaged home. Then asbestos and lead paint were discovered inside the house, costing an additional $50,000 to remove. In order to make room for a climate-controlled archive, a foundation was created for the house and a basement installed where none had previously existed. Because of concerns for public safety, the old flooring was updated and reinforced, the house was equipped with modern lighting, and a paved parking lot was constructed outside to welcome cars and tourists, in contrast to the treed yard that once greeted visitors to Mary Wadey’s house. According to Carleton, ensuring that the house was up to code required changes that reconstructed and saved the building but were at odds with the goals of historical restoration.100 This process points to the negotiation of competing interests that is often required in order to accomplish such heritage projects as well as to create and sustain museums. Members of the Historical Society wanted the house to be preserved in an accurate manner, resisting the addition of the parking lot and use of industrial carpet throughout much of the house. They compensated for the insertion of these modern elements by asking members of the Wadey family to provide original artifacts and objects once displayed inside the house. Carleton indicated that she personally knew at least fifty members of the extended family, including Brian Caverhill, the father of my friend Heather, who donated an organ to the project (figure 1.8). The Wadey family was of course pleased to see its ancestor Mary Wadey remembered in the Canada 150 project, as well as relieved that the house, which had welcomed and sheltered them in the past, would be saved from demolition. Yet during the official opening of the Wadey Centre on 1 July 2017, I could see various members of the family searching in vain for the interior that they remembered, disappointed that Mary Wadey’s old stove was not included in the restoration because the kitchen had been modernized for utilitarian purposes. As a local newspaper reported, the resulting compromise is meant to benefit everyone in Blackfalds: “The venue will be a place to foster dialogue that brings people together, a shared and collaborative space that will be a positive benefit for everybody.”101 In the end, the beautiful historic home gleams like new, providing modern conveniences and a history lesson for tourists, while offering a civics lesson about the behaviour and contribution of early settlers for the current residents of Blackfalds.102 The combination of functions, interests, and intended audiences at the Wadey Centre reflects the identity of Blackfalds, a growing town with a central location near transportation routes that attract newcomers and new construction in a way that can undermine the recognition of the town’s early history.

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1.8 Mary Wadey’s organ, Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta, 2020.

Fort Chipewyan shares points in common with both Blackfalds and Torrington. Once the centre of the North American fur trade, it was, like Torrington, a “conveniently” located hub, albeit with transportation links provided via waterways rather than the railway. Like Torrington, Fort Chipewyan is now less centrally located; it is remote, hard to reach, and largely outside of automobility. Nevertheless, the displays in the Bicentennial Museum do not attempt to reshape the image of the hamlet in order to forestall economic and population decline, in contrast to those of the Gopher Hole Museum. The installations in

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the Bicentennial Museum instead insist on the previous centrality of the area, providing a historical lesson about the importance of Fort Chipewyan when it was most economically and culturally active, namely during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In this sense, the Bicentennial Museum is akin to the Wadey Centre in Blackfalds, drawing attention to a unique past in danger of being forgotten. The museum in Fort Chipewyan is nevertheless more conventional than both the Gopher Hole Museum and the Wadey Centre. The objects that fill the museum are arranged in cases and accompanied by labels and photographs that relate a roughly chronological story about the fur trade in the region. According to Maureen Clarke, the current curator of the Bicentennial Museum, the mandate of the museum, passed by members of the Fort Chipewyan Historical Society in 1991, is threefold: (1) to collect, preserve, and display artifacts of historical significance to the history of Fort Chipewyan and surrounding area; (2) to educate the community and visitors about the historical impact of Fort Chipewyan on Canada and the world; and (3) to obtain funding in order to continue operations of the Interpretive Centre, an element of the museum discussed below.103 The first two items are in keeping with the goals of many history museums, both large and small, which focus on preserving the past and aim to tell a mostly positive story of progress or at least of change over time. Despite the Bicentennial Museum’s traditional approach, the narrative that it conveys about the history of Fort Chipewyan is rarely generalized or abstract. For the most part, the story highlights the contributions of local people, with individuals carefully named as donors or creators of the objects on display. One label placed beside a bayonet, for example, notes that the weapon was donated by Lucas Waquan-Ladouceur, who had received it from his grandfather, Ray Ladouceur; the item had originally belonged to Louisa Ladouceur’s brother, Soloman Cardinal, who was a sniper during the Second World War. The displays of beautifully beaded moccasins, gloves, and boots feature labels naming the creators as, among others, Mary Rose Flett, Cecila Simpson, and Rosie Amern (Wylie), the latter of whom had made gloves for her sister Evelyn Oak (Wylie). A nearby pair of beaded moose hide gauntlets were made for Joe Vermillion by his mother Madeline (Vermillion) Tuccaro, families still present in Fort Chipewyan (figure 1.9). These descriptions do not classify the handmade gifts and clothing in an anthropological manner but instead indicate the relationships both forged and reconfirmed by means of the items. According to Oliver Glanfield, the creation of the museum in the late 1980s – it officially opened in 1990 – was a collaborative community effort and almost entirely based on do-

1.9 Interior display, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 2013.

nations: “Everything we have here, except for a few items, is from the community.”104 During my visit to Fort Chipewyan in 2013, Glanfield told me that local people often visit the museum with family members and guests, sharing the stories of their ancestors with reference to the museum displays.105 In 2017, Clarke confirmed that locals provide such personalized guided tours, often coming upstairs to chat with her or other museum staff about the past and about their own contributions to the museum.106 The Bicentennial Museum was created by and for the people of Fort Chipewyan and is not primarily aimed at a tourist audience, who will not recognize the family names repeated throughout the exhibition spaces unless they have a personal connection with the region. Clarke affirmed that the museum is “a fairly neutral clearing house that serves all groups, including Chipewyan, Cree, and Métis peoples as well as those of European descent,” many of whom are related to the colonial settlers who came during the eighteenth century from the Scottish Orkney Islands and were admired for their skills in boat building.107 This representation of the diverse peoples who have long interacted in the region of Fort Chipewyan is possible in part because the Bicentennial Museum is not funded by any one organization.108 It is not what in the United States would be called a “tribal museum” and in

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Canada a “cultural centre,” which is constructed on the land of and managed by a single Indigenous group, as is, for instance, the Saddle Lake Cultural Centre, located in Saddle Lake, Alberta, which celebrates local Paskwa-wiyiniwak (Plains Cree) culture in spaces on the reserve and is owned and run by the band, a type of organization discussed in chapter 5.109 Clarke indicated that the Bicentennial Museum receives various kinds of support from different sources, especially the Municipality of Wood Buffalo, whose annual grant is acknowledged in a statement that is framed and hung inside the museum. Another important aspect of the museum’s ability to address different groups is the fact that its board now includes representatives from each cultural group, some of whom are also active volunteers on-site, making it possible to welcome a range of local visitors.110 In many ways, the Bicentennial Museum functions as a community centre, recalling the multipurpose nature of the Wadey Centre. Since 2013, the museum in Fort Chipewyan has regularly hosted workshops as part of the “cultural investment program,” sponsored by Shell Canada, a petroleum company operating in the region.111 These cultural workshops have offered lessons on how to make moccasins, Métis socks, and ribbon shirts, the latter class offered twice because of its popularity. Clarke reported that one session on making mini drums featured three generations of a single family.112 At the same time, the Bicentennial Museum acts as a resource centre, with a library available for use on-site with publications that cover many topics of local interest, including the history of Fort Chipewyan and the testimony of residential school survivors, some of them from the hamlet.113 Visiting scholars sometimes use this library as well, notably those studying the changing waterways in the region, although the Bicentennial Museum does not include a digital catalogue or official archive suited for historical or genealogical research, like the one found in the Wadey Centre. At the same time, the shop near the entryway of the museum in Fort Chipewyan acts as a local resource since, like the shop at the Gopher Hole Museum, it features items produced in the region, including beaded moccasins purchased from local people and sold for a small profit by the museum. This active engagement with the community is reflected in the installations in the Bicentennial Museum, which continually expand to include important individuals and key cultural events. A row of plaques, for example, is devoted to the different chiefs in the region, and photographs of Elders adorn the staircase that leads to the second floor of the museum. This emphasis highlights the role of the museum as a place to celebrate and preserve local identity rather than as a site primarily or even secondarily meant for tourists.

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Yet the Bicentennial Museum is not a decolonizing museum, according to the definition offered by museum scholar Amy Lonetree of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin. Lonetree investigates how museums can honour Indigenous ways of knowing while challenging stereotypes and speaking “the hard truths of colonization.”114 The value that she places on directly addressing colonial violence is not found in the Bicentennial Museum, in contrast to the explicit critiques of colonialism presented in some of the Indigenous museums and cultural centres featured in chapter 5. The diverse voices of Indigenous people are indeed dominant throughout the displays in the Bicentennial Museum, along with a discussion of the negotiation of Treaty 8 in 1899 and the goal of local residential schools to assimilate Indigenous children within colonial culture. The exhibitions devoted to residential schools are nevertheless impersonal, unlike the family-centred content in other parts of the museum in Fort Chipewyan; these displays are not explicitly critical of colonization, perhaps due to the presence of colonial settlers in management positions or due to the general insistence on neutrality rather than on political lobbying in the museum. Decolonizing efforts could nevertheless occur in relation to reading done in the library, cultural workshops offered, or conversations had on-site. At the same time, as British museum scholar Bryony Onciul found during her interviews with Siksika and Kainai Elders in southern Alberta, their cultural centres are primarily meant to offer positive images for young members of their communities in order to combat the persistent stereotyping of Indigenous groups and are not considered places for divulging painful and largely private accounts of abuse and suffering.115 Along similar lines, the Bicentennial Museum may highlight the positive aspects of the diverse community in and around the hamlet of Fort Chipewyan to allow residents to tell their own stories within the spaces without dictating how those stories should be told. The Bicentennial Museum is currently struggling to survive. During our interview in 2017, Maureen Clarke bluntly stated that the main goal is simply to keep the museum open so that visitors can learn about the past. In addition to the annual grant from the municipal government, fundraising is necessary to cover operating costs and the salaries of one and a half staff members. The Bicentennial Museum is officially a nonprofit charity, allowing its supporters to raise funds by means of casinos, something that has occurred in the past. However, other local groups are also in need of funding and are often given precedence in the awarding of the right to hold a casino.116 The museum shop does not bring in much revenue, and a longstanding reliance on bingos to fundraise

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is also at risk because people now play the game via the radio, trying to win bigger jackpots from an Edmonton-based organization. The location of Fort Chipewyan means that the Bicentennial Museum serves a mostly local audience, and unlike the sites in Torrington and Blackfalds, it cannot rely on tourists for an influx of support. This important cultural resource must compete for scarce funding in the beleaguered but resilient hamlet.

Conclusion The way that tourists as well as residents understand and engage with smalltown and rural museums is influenced by transportation practices and routes. These museums are relational, emerging within experiences of travel and understandings of place, which change over time. Tourist perceptions of these museums begin to be shaped before the visitors arrive on-site, largely by the trip taken to get there. These travellers might experience a transformative detour on back roads, a convenient stop during a road trip, or a wilderness trek that defies automobility and thus seems exotic. For residents, changes to transportation routes impact where they are in the province’s cultural geography. Their locations become either more central or, as is often the case with small-town and rural museums, more marginal. The arguments that they make about place within the museum are influenced by efforts to insist on or to preserve a former centrality. The Wadey Centre in Blackfalds is located near a major highway and at risk of being ignored by passing traffic or absorbed within a nearby city. It strives to maintain a unique and distinctive sense of place. The Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington is no longer centrally located and is primarily aimed at attracting tourists from elsewhere, which requires asking them to drive farther out of their way rather than encouraging them to stop and take a rest from driving, as does the Wadey Centre. Museum organizers in Torrington promote the site as world-famous within an international framework, instead of protecting a longstanding identity. The third example, Fort Chipewyan, is now remote but was once the fur-trading centre of North America. Its Bicentennial Museum primarily serves local people who recall the hamlet’s former glory days as a trading hub and who use the museum’s spaces to confirm and restore cultural identity. Despite these differences, each small-town and rural museum is part of the way that local supporters respond to, negotiate, and intervene in changes to transportation practices and perceptions of place, among other things.

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This discussion has focused on three museums chosen for their diverse relationships with transportation routes to offer an initial grid useful for thinking about other rural and small-town museums, including those in other countries, like the United Kingdom and Australia, where conceptions of the rural are distinct. Museum scholars and engaged visitors might consider the cultural relevance of their trip to the museum, whether by car, bus, or plane, including it in a broader analysis of the significance of these sites. Although the influence of such travel is clearest when remote or “exotic” places are visited by tourists, it can be overlooked when the trip seems banal, notably when it occurs along a major highway. The impact of transportation could also be applied to urban museums but is arguably more important for the analysis of small-town and rural museums, which usually require that extensive travel be undertaken by tourists and other visitors. Considering automobility and travel as key parts of the experience of small-town and rural museums and the arguments that they make about place can add another layer of complexity to organizations that are already challenging to study and filled with fascinating possibilities.

2.1 The Kiddo, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

 M  2

G HOSTS IN THE

USEUM

Haunted Histories at the Museum of Fear and Wonder

The fabric doll is the size of a young child, with long thin arms and legs. Her stuffed oval head shows signs of wear; roughly cut and fraying beige cloth surrounds plump red lips, and crude stitches adorn a patchy scalp (figure 2.1). In contrast to the visible damage on the doll’s face and head, she is nicely dressed, wearing a short-sleeved plaid blouse, navy blue skirt, and what appear to be real leather sandals. Although unusual, the doll is not frightening to behold. She is the product of intense care and a certain ingenuity. The doll’s unsettling qualities – missing hair and bulging eyes – indicate that she was both handmade and well used, perhaps as a beloved toy. Why, then, is this doll installed in the Museum of Fear and Wonder, an exhibition space that draws on “the dying tradition of the rural museum”1 to display emotionally charged and disturbing objects? Jude and Brendan Griebel provide an explanation while guiding visitors through their private collection in a southern Alberta farmhouse. They bought the doll, which dates from around 1920, from a specialty shop, but it was originally owned by a family from La Grange, Texas.2 The parents deployed the toy, nicknamed the Kiddo, as a kind of surveillance device, using it to watch over the children and prevent their bad behaviour. Although this information sheds light on the doll’s appearance, her ability to frighten people is enhanced by the experiences of a later owner. In 2017, Rachel Marie Meyer, an Internet personality better known as grav3yardgirl, purchased the doll because of her fascination with antique items potentially linked to the paranormal. Initially finding the doll creepy, she brought it home and renamed it Robertina. In the following

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months, Meyer came to associate the doll with negative energy, describing to over 8 million followers on YouTube the despair that it brought into her life.3 After returning the “possessed” doll to its point of purchase, Meyer was relieved to learn that it was subsequently placed in a museum rather than a home. She implied that a museum setting could remove or at least contain the doll’s power, isolating it from everyday life. The Griebel brothers were unaware of Meyer’s online discussion of the doll before acquiring it and were surprised when the followers of grav3yardgirl tracked Robertina down and announced her new location online, drawing international attention to the Museum of Fear and Wonder, which opened in 2017. Although the Griebel brothers welcome all visitors to the Museum of Fear and Wonder, they do not participate in the popular resurgence of interest in the occult. Their collection explores the psychological and narrative aspects of unique objects, reflecting on how these materials shape human relationships. The museum reframes the Kiddo – this name is retained by the Griebels – by displaying it alongside other dolls from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as anatomical models, wax figures, and a few taxidermy animals. Each specimen was made by human hands, given human attributes, and in many cases, meant to stand in for the human body. Like the Kiddo, all of the objects have a history, retaining traces of their former lives. A few items, including the antique Ouija boards, were once used by groups of people conducting seances to communicate with ghosts. Now arranged on a wall inside the Museum of Fear and Wonder, the boards are offered to the curious eyes of visitors who might discuss how they played with them as children, a social activity aimed at reducing the space between the living and the dead. This chapter approaches the Museum of Fear and Wonder as a site haunted by ghosts, analyzing the experience of visiting and interacting with the collections. Unlike the spirits feared by Meyer’s followers or sought out by users of Ouija boards, however, the ghosts that interest me – and that communicated with me while I was there – stem from museum history. The Museum of Fear and Wonder makes contact with and revives structures of collecting and exhibiting objects from past museums, traditions now in their death throes in rural areas, according to Jude and Brendan Griebel. Both the intimate scale of the Museum of Fear and Wonder and the guiding presence of those who collected the intriguing items on display allude to early museum practices in Europe and North America. The juxtaposition of selected objects within wooden cases bereft of labels defies “professional” museum standards, returning visitors to earlier understandings of the acquisition of knowledge from the objects

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arranged and illuminated by benevolent collectors.4 Far from a simple recreation of historical museum formats, the Museum of Fear and Wonder revitalizes the potential of these formats, opening a critical space for considering the simultaneous absence and presence of museum history both on-site in southern Alberta and more generally in other large and small museums. Jude and Brendan Griebel deliberately invoke the ghostly presence of rural museums lingering on the edges of memory and experience in isolated areas and soon to be forgotten. Both museum founders are familiar with a wide range of museums, having visited many extraordinary collections around the world. A number of small museums, including the House of Frankenstein Wax Museum in Lake George, New York, are documented and thus partially preserved on the website of the Museum of Fear and Wonder.5 The brothers are equally well versed in the everyday challenges of working within modern museums. Brendan is an Arctic-based anthropologist and archaeologist employed by the Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq/Kitikmeot Heritage Society in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. He has curated, among other installations, an exhibition at the Canada Goose Arctic Gallery in the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.6 Jude is a contemporary artist who regularly installs his sculptures in museums and art galleries across Canada, the United States, Finland, Germany, and Iceland.7 The Griebel brothers combine their expertise in museum practices with a passion for collecting material objects in order to provoke, challenge, and engage visitors within a rural setting during the summer months. My arguments about the Museum of Fear and Wonder are informed by the theories of haunting developed within the disciplines of sociology and literary studies. Sociologist Avery F. Gordon argues that “haunting is a constituent element of modern social life. It is neither premodern superstition nor individual psychosis; it is a generalizable social phenomenon of great import.”8 According to Gordon, past social forces continue to cast a shadow; elements that might appear to have been overcome or replaced remain a “seething presence” that impacts experience.9 Drawing attention to this lingering past is disruptive, argues literary and media scholar Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, for “beneath the surface of received history, there lurks another narrative, an untold story that calls into question the veracity of the authorized version of events.”10 In the Museum of Fear and Wonder, elements from historical museums, such as early modern (primarily sixteenth- and seventeenth-century) cabinets of curiosities, eighteenth-century wax museums, nineteenth-century natural history museums, and even twentieth-century tourist attractions, resurface without fully emerging. The ghosts of past exhibition spaces are embedded within a modern

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museum, presenting something that is no longer present. These ghostly elements are “ineffective, virtual, [and] insubstantial,” according to philosopher Jacques Derrida’s influential formulation of hauntology, but can nevertheless create an unsettling disjunction of time, a situation linked with political possibility.11 In this light, I contend that the Museum of Fear and Wonder suggests different museum futures by providing a palpably haunted space that resurrects ghosts officially banished from modern museums, especially those large survey museums filled with carefully labelled objects that are classified and displayed for pedagogical purposes. The museum in southern Alberta shows that the shift to the supposedly more rational and authoritative modern museum was not seamless; earlier forms of display and experience remain embedded within its modern structures, ready to emerge and contest their efforts to contain objects within particular narratives. The first section of this chapter considers the visit to the Museum of Fear and Wonder, including the process of attaining an invitation, driving through the back roads of rural Alberta in search of the unassuming site, and receiving a guided tour of the collections from the owners, Jude and Brendan Griebel. Various aspects of visiting this private collection invoke the conventions of early modern cabinets of curiosities, which positioned viewers as privileged guests invited by the museums’ patrons, figures who united their collections with their personae. In this scenario, the idiosyncrasies of the collectors are foregrounded as an organizing principle of the collection. The Griebel brothers highlight their personal connection with various objects by describing the process of acquiring them while pursuing a dialogue with visitors. This experience can be compared and contrasted with the techniques used in other small and remarkable museums, including the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art, and Natural History, established in London, England, in 2015, as well as the more famous Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, California, opened by David Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson in 1988. Although the Museum of Fear and Wonder is significantly different from these comparators in content and impact, it similarly emphasizes individual collectors instead of crafting a supposedly thorough representation of a local, provincial, or national identity like the representations on offer in recognized museums that receive funding from various levels of government. In the second part of this chapter, I turn my attention to the ghostly aspects of the objects in the Museum of Fear and Wonder, emphasizing the ways that they are displayed. Most of the curious items in the collection are installed in repurposed wooden cases purchased from defunct local stores, recalling the

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historical association of museums with merchandising at a time when they overtly participated in the production of economic value. This allusion to the commercial motivations of museums throughout North America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including natural history museums, materializes a past that is largely forgotten. At the same time, some of the collections, notably the wax heads acquired from the recently closed Criminals Hall of Fame Museum in Niagara Falls, Ontario, reference the associated history of tourism and sensational attractions.12 This restaging of wax figures highlights the connection of the Museum of Fear and Wonder with for-profit spectacles and museums of the past while noting the particular importance of wax museums in North America and Europe, including the Musée Grevin in Paris, which has featured gruesome re-enactments of the French Revolution since 1882, and the late-eighteenth-century anatomical collection now known as La Specola in Florence, which displays wax models that offer lessons in sexuality and mortality. The Museum of Fear and Wonder positions similarly thrilling material in a more restrained manner than these sites, equivocating between sensual attraction to fleshly substitutes and the rationalized contemplation often encouraged in modern museums. This chapter shows how the Museum of Fear and Wonder enables visitors to experience traces of historical museum displays within a sometimes startling realm of rural hospitality. The site in southern Alberta reveals the multiple ways that museums actively shape knowledge instead of neutralizing objects, as Meyer’s followers might imagine. The Museum of Fear and Wonder is ultimately more hopeful than frightening, despite its provocative name. It reveals how museums can recall experiences of looking and knowing from the past, reviving them in altered forms to attract visitors in the present. This strategy is appealing to visitors who are willing to engage with uncertainty but could disconcert those who remain wedded to the idea that museums are (or should be) places of authority where museum professionals provide lessons for audiences to absorb.

Anticipating the Visit Visiting the Museum of Fear and Wonder is an exciting challenge that brings a sense of distinction to those who manage it. Prospective visitors must first make an appointment using the online system at the museum’s website, fearandwon der.ca, before all of the available times are taken. These visits are offered exclusively during the summer months and are quickly booked because the Museum

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of Fear and Wonder is already popular, featured in national magazines, podcasts, blog posts, and scholarly articles.13 If an online request is accepted, groups of up to eight adults – bringing children is not recommended due to the potentially upsetting nature of the displays – will receive the museum’s address as well as directions for getting there. Given the remote location of the museum on a privately owned farm, driving an automobile is the only way to access the museum, with the trip along main highways and back roads a key part of the experience, as argued in chapter 1. Never spontaneous, the successful visit relies on planning ahead and requires an official invitation that positions the visitor as a guest calling on a home, a role enhanced while on-site. I first encountered the museum when it was under construction, a special privilege gained while undertaking a studio visit with Jude in 2016. I was there to learn more about the sculptural work that he was creating for a collaborative project, flux: Responding to Head and Neck Cancer, which brought artists, healthcare practitioners, and cancer patients together to produce original research as well as contemporary art for exhibitions in Edmonton and Chicago.14 After contemplating the future museum in 2016, I returned to visit the museum in June 2018, when it officially opened. By then, the online bookings were entirely filled, and I had to request a personal invitation from Jude, which he generously provided. Once various friends learned of my plans to visit the Museum of Fear and Wonder, they joined me, and in the end, two carloads of art historians, museum scholars, and curators, including one from the Art Gallery of Alberta and two from the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, made the trip to the farm. I recount such details because I was an “insider” at the Museum of Fear and Wonder, equipped with social and cultural capital, including my knowledge of the history of museums and practice of curating. This fortunate position made me comfortable and confident within the museum, unlike the “outsider” status that I felt (and for the most part enjoyed) as an Ontario-born city dweller during my visits to other small-town and rural museums in Alberta. We experienced the drive to the museum, located outside the rural neighbourhood of Bergen, between the cities of Edmonton and Calgary, as an exciting road trip and voluntary detour away from our everyday routine. The voyage temporarily became an involuntary detour when we lost our way on the gravel roads near the museum, despite having received detailed directions to the site. After texting Jude for further assistance, we doubled back and discovered the sign marking the museum’s presence. Placed near a barbed wire fence was a small board painted black and adorned with simple white letters identifying the museum (figure 0.1). It led us down a gravel driveway and toward a modest

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house set within a prairie landscape, its long green grass dotted with vibrant yellow dandelions. Jude and Brendan were standing on the wooden front porch, ready to greet us. While walking toward them, I noticed that several of the blue railings had been replaced by large white bones carved to resemble human femurs. These interventions altered the familiar domestic space of the porch, foreshadowing the intriguing fragments on display inside the building while blurring the distinction between its interior and exterior. The porch was clearly more than a functional passageway or temporary shelter (figure 0.2). Its ornamentation alluded to the constructed nature of the displays inside but also created a transitional zone that prepared visitors to enter the building. According to museum scholars Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, the exteriors of modern museum buildings often send a powerful message about the interior spaces.15 Many of them adapt the monumental stairs, columns, and pediments of Greek temples to convince visitors that they are about to enter a more elevated, civilized realm. Instead of invoking such understandings of antiquity, however, the Museum of Fear and Wonder stages a rural porch setting with unexpected bone railings that frame an ominously large set of entrance doors. These wooden doors are adorned with a brass knocker in the shape of a monstrous face, alluding to the ghostly occupants inside the museum. Gigantic nostrils and eyes have been carved above the doors to echo the grotesque form of the door knocker, suggesting that when the doors are opened, visitors will enter the building by means of a gaping mouth, perhaps even a hellmouth (figure 2.2). During the Middle Ages in Europe, the opening to hell was pictured as a terrifying monstrous jaw ready to punish those who were damned.16 The entryway of the Museum of Fear and Wonder thus configures the museum as a deformed body about to engulf the visitor, leading them toward unknown terrors rather than enlightenment. This mouth also invokes historical monuments from the early modern and modern periods. It reminded me of the famous bocche della verità (mouths of truth) found in some Italian cities, including Rome. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the relatively small grotesque faces with open mouths were used for depositing notes that denounced the social and sexual sins of neighbours.17 Now these sculptures primarily serve as photo opportunities for tourists who perform mock tests of integrity by placing a hand inside the opening. Veiled references to danger and tourism surface at the entrance to the Museum of Fear and Wonder, even as the exaggerated size of the monstrous mouth adds an element of funhouse entertainment to the structure. Many carnivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries featured walk-through funhouses with

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2.2 Front door of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

facades vividly painted to resemble the faces of clowns whose open mouths led visitors toward dark corridors, mazes, and distorting mirrors.18 Unlike the thick red lips and painted white teeth of these funhouse entrances, however, the monster at the Museum of Fear and Wonder is a hand-carved, monochromatic, and relatively restrained work of art. Nevertheless, its open mouth portends the necessary participation of the visitor who enters the building in pursuit of amusement and unexpected challenges.

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This practice of rearticulating and combining historical methods of display extends to the performance of the Griebel brothers on the front porch. On the one hand, they proffer a traditional form of rural hospitality, welcoming invited guests into their home. On the other hand, they stand on a raised platform like barkers at a carnival, providing information about the displays inside. During the nineteenth century, barkers sought to entice patrons, expounding on the novelty, excitement, and value of the spectacles to be revealed inside the circus tent after payment was received.19 The Griebels similarly describe aspects of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, building anticipation in the guests waiting to pass through its fabulous doors and encounter the wonders inside. Yet the words of Jude and Brendan Griebel are neither scripted nor exaggerated. They hardly need to coax the willing visitors toward the building, which is open free of charge. Rather than advertise their museum, the Griebel brothers establish themselves as the museum’s owners and as the hosts who will converse with visitors throughout the guided tour. While standing on the porch of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, Jude and Brendan Griebel might discuss the building that now houses their collections, as they did when I was there. The structure was built in Fort Wainwright, Alberta, about 400 kilometres away from the current site, to serve as an internment camp for German officers during the Second World War. It was subsequently transformed – physically lifted and moved five times – to serve various functions, acting as, for example, a trailer park office in Red Deer before becoming a sheep rancher’s base. This description of the previous lives of the museum building encouraged guests to contemplate its former inhabitants, effectively invoking the presence of absent phantoms. I wondered, for example, how the German prisoners had experienced their captivity and planned to look for any remaining traces of their imprisonment once inside the building.20 The narrative told by the Griebel brothers indicated that the building itself was an active part of the visit, encompassing a past that was not always positive. Learning about the many lives of the building also linked the Museum of Fear and Wonder with the history of rural museums rather than that of most large, urban, provincial or national institutions. Small-town and rural museums are typically located in repurposed spaces, ranging from former residences to old schoolhouses and prefabricated agricultural sheds.21 The evident recycling and transitory nature of these buildings stand in stark contrast to the monumental appearance and apparent permanence of the purpose-built and classically inspired buildings described by Duncan and Wallach, not to mention sleekly designed new museum complexes such as the Royal Alberta Museum in

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Edmonton, a modern structure that opened in 2018.22 This impressive provincial museum displaces and for the most part erases signs of its former history, although ghosts arguably linger in the storage areas and become more visible in the habitat dioramas of Canadian mammals on the second floor, conserved from the original building. In contrast to what are mostly fresh, spotless spaces, the Museum of Fear and Wonder is figured as worn, reconditioned, and filled with memories, as well as potential suffering, before visitors enter the building. The Griebel brothers hold their guests outside the museum doors for some time, urging visitors both to imagine the building’s past and to experience its current location. When my friends and I were there in 2018, we listened to Jude and Brendan Griebel while standing within a striking prairie landscape. The day was sunny and warm, and the fragrant, long grasses near the building swayed in an ever-present wind. I looked around, taking in the barbed wire fences that divided sections of agricultural land and hearing the bleating of nearby sheep. The overall impact was idyllic, although the land held its own story of transformation; as the traditional territory of Indigenous peoples, notably the Siksika and Kainai members of the Niitsítapi (Blackfoot) Confederacy, it was claimed, cleared, and enclosed by people of European descent in assertive and often violent ways.23 This history remains embedded in a landscape that is contained by fencing and subject to the needs of domesticated animals. The Museum of Fear and Wonder is now part of this history of possession, resettled on the land to house a unique collection of objects. When the Griebel brothers described how the building was transported to its present site, they alluded to the colonizing role long played by museums and heritage sites, an issue explored in chapters 4 and 5. The time spent on the land around the Museum of Fear and Wonder expanded the boundaries of the museum while slowing down the visit. At urban museums, I tend to rush toward the building and through the doors, anticipating the “main event” inside, without necessarily experiencing the broader setting. In Paris, I can get off the metro and walk directly into the Louvre by means of an underground shopping mall.24 In Edmonton, I usually disembark from the light rail transit train and walk through subterranean passageways to enter the Royal Alberta Museum, moving toward displays of human and natural history. On the farm situated outside of Bergen, however, I paused to encounter the landscape and feel the rural atmosphere. I thought about where I was and how I got there before I was admitted to the building now resting on the site. When Jude and Brendan Griebel opened the front door of the Museum of Fear and Wonder and led us inside for a guided tour, they foregrounded their

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2.3 Chess set carved by an inmate on death row in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2018.

creative role as collectors, museum founders, and hosts. They allowed us partial access to their private domain; the large room housing the bulk of their collections is separated from residential areas alongside and beneath the gallery spaces. As guests, we had the freedom to look around and be drawn to particular items, but we were also directed to consider key acquisitions. Brendan described, for example, a wooden chess set that had been purchased from the Susan Whitney Gallery in Regina during the 1970s (figure 2.3). Now placed inside a glass display case, the chess set was carved by an inmate on death row in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, infamous for its brutality toward primarily African American inmates.25 The game pieces, roughly hewn from lightcoloured wood, are remarkable, with one set of pawns portrayed as small, truncated feet rather than soldiers. Figures aligned on the opposite side of the board have been stained with black shoe polish, including knights who wear body armour and brandish threatening weapons. The exhibit attests to the humanity and inventiveness of the doomed inmate, who passed his remaining time in a productive way that left a mark on the future. His execution transforms the chess set into a relic; it preserves traces of the hand of an inmate, although one

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undertaking artistic pursuits that defy stereotypes. The intimate connection between the objects on display and a mysterious criminal history recalls the earlier narrative about German prisoners of war. The materiality of the building as well as the objects in the collection invoke a ghostly presence of previous lives potentially felt by visitors thanks to the Griebel brothers. Brendan’s animation of the chess set made it relevant to guests while highlighting his own role within the museum. The central and physical presence of him as well as Jude during the tour of the collections recalls earlier forms of collecting and display, notably the cabinets of curiosities, or wunderkammer (cabinets of wonder), created by wealthy patrons and scholars during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe.26 These diverse collections of natural and human-made objects ranged from pieces of coral to unicorn/narwhal horns, elaborate shells, engravings, paintings, globes, and items from the Americas such as stuffed crocodiles, exotic plants, weapons, and clothing.27 Although the collections were mostly absorbed into later museums and reclassified as specimens of biology, geology, or anthropology, idealized images of them remain, providing some indication of how they were viewed during the early modern period. An engraving made in 1599 shows, for example, the collection of Ferrante Imperato, an apothecary who specialized in fossils, taxidermy animals, and shells, among other items, which he displayed in a private setting in Naples (figure 2.4).28 Like other contemporary collectors, he allowed selected guests to experience the rare items that he had arranged in a manner designed to invoke awe, curiosity, and wonder, significant responses linked with the pursuit of knowledge rather than superficial entertainment. In the image commissioned by Imperato, he is shown as a munificent host, relaxing in a central position by a window with legs crossed, while his guests gesture in amazement at specific items. Memories of this personalized mode of collecting resurface at the Museum of Fear and Wonder, with invited guests allowed to express and explore emotional responses to the material made available to them by hosts driven to collect by their personal inclinations. Other small, private museums invoke the history of cabinets of curiosities and highlight the role of collectors, but they offer rather different experiences to visitors. One example is the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Natural History, which officially opened in 2015 in Hackney, an east London neighbourhood (figure 2.5).29 The name of this museum directly refers to the early modern cabinets of curiosities, and it contains a more diverse selection of objects than the Museum of Fear and Wonder. According to the explanatory guide available for purchase at the Museum of Curiosities and partly reproduced

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2.4 Engraving from Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale (1599).

on its website, “this Museum merely displays everything that has glittered & caught the eye of its founder – from rare priceless marvels of the natural & scientific worlds like Dodo Bones or specul[a] to the intriguing beauty of McDonald’s Happy Meal Toys, from old master etchings to prison inmates[’] & mad women’s doodles, occultist[s’] paintings & pop art prints, the horrors & wonders of nature, two-headed kittens & living coral.”30 This statement highlights the whims of its collector as the organizing factor of an array of marvelous objects that otherwise defy efforts to categorize them. The personal desires of Viktor Wynd, a multidisciplinary artist and writer, underpin the exhibition of the shrunken heads and taxidermy mammals suspended from the ceiling, as well as the jars of severed genitalia and celebrity feces displayed in the densely packed basement of the museum. The website portrays Wynd not as a host but as a strange and defiant populist who founded an alternative museum to “fill the vacuum between what the establishment elite believes is worthy of worship & what exists in the world,”31 suggesting that visitors perform a transgressive act when they explore the Museum of Curiosities.

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2.5 Facade of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art, and Natural History, which opened in 2015.

Those who enter the museum in London – my first visit was in June of 2019 – are unlikely to meet Wynd at the threshold or to receive a personalized tour of his collections. In contrast to the Museum of Fear and Wonder, the Museum of Curiosities is open year-round and visitors can drop in without making an appointment. These fee-paying visitors are patrons rather than invited guests receiving a warm welcome after undertaking a lengthy voyage on back roads to reach the site. Like visitors to the Museum of Fear and Wonder, those heading to the Museum of Curiosities may nevertheless feel a sense of distinction when they locate its modest storefront facade, noticing the liquor bottles lining its large picture window alongside a fetal skeleton posed to advertise the museum’s contents.32 They may even understand Wynd’s museum to be “off the beaten track,” for it is a small and peculiar museum in a city boasting many large, internationally renowned institutions. The Museum of Curiosities is ranked number 32 of 434 museums in London on the travel website Tripadvisor, where

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reviewers recommend making an effort to see the collections as part of an “alternative London” tour, noting that the museum is “better than the usual boring tourist stuff.”33 The unnamed boring or conventional sites presumably include such established museums as the Tate Modern or the British Museum, which attract millions of visitors each year. In contrast to these well-known venues, the Museum of Curiosities is portrayed by promoters of Wynd’s collections as marginal and slightly shocking, a site visited by people in the know who are intent on pursuing unique adventures. This association of sophistication with the museum is reinforced in various ways on-site; some exhibits in the crowded subterranean display areas feature the theme of the “dandy,” a historically fashionable and urbane man concerned with his appearance and social reputation, and the cocktail bar on the main floor offers exclusive absinthe tastings.34 Despite a common emphasis on distinction, these aspects of the visit to the Museum of Curiosities are strikingly different from those offered at the Museum of Fear and Wonder, where visitors experience a rural landscape before passing through a monstrous funhouse mouth or hellmouth to enter the museum. The overall impact of the visit to the Museum of Fear and Wonder is closer to that provided by another small museum, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, although their similarities should not be overstated.35 The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City, Los Angeles County, California, is located in a rather unassuming urban storefront, like the Museum of Curiosities (figure 2.6). In Culver City, visitors ring a buzzer for admittance before paying the suggested entrance fee. Whereas Wynd appears primarily through the material displays inside the Museum of Curiosities, the key founder of the Museum of Jurassic Technology may greet visitors in person – as do the Griebel brothers – or be found playing a musical instrument in the courtyard.36 When the museum opened in 1988, David Wilson was often there to chat with visitors and answer their questions, without offering guided tours of the galleries. For the most part, staff members now perform this role as Wilson travels to undertake a range of artistic and film projects or to share knowledge with researchers and scholars who wish to set up their own small museums.37 Wilson is increasingly respected for the groundbreaking exhibitions in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, which address natural and scientific phenomena in a way that mixes fact and fantasy, framing pristine specimens with explanatory texts that strain credibility. Both the contents and display techniques of this museum draw on the conventions of science museums but are “famously difficult to describe,”38 according to its official website; the first-hand experience of the museum is equally challenging to portray in words.

2.6 Facade of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, California, which opened in 1988.

Scholars have nevertheless written at length about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, attempting to clarify and define its purpose. Some authors argue that the museum is best understood as an artistic installation, but others view it as an ironic institution designed to critique the truth-producing conventions of traditional museums by drawing attention to the ways that knowledge is created through imagination, doubt, and forgetfulness.39 Many of these accounts position Wilson as a central figure in their explanations, using his persona to ground interpretations of the museum, a role that he consistently resists.40 Wilson is evasive, especially during interviews, refusing to provide stability to puzzling displays about zombie ants, Russian space dogs, and images delicately

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carved from individual strands of hair. Are these installations about real or fake phenomena? Wilson avoids straightforward answers as well as any attempt to classify the Museum of Jurassic Technology, disliking descriptions of it as a cabinet of curiosities – a category embraced by Wynd, whereas the Museum of Fear and Wonder alludes to a wunderkammer.41 Nevertheless, one gallery in the Museum of Jurassic Technology features a display on the seventeenth-century Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, who established the Museum Kircherianum, a cabinet of curiosities, in Rome.42 During my first visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in March 2009, I embarked on a self-guided tour of the puzzling displays about which I had already read, moving through dimly lit, mazelike corridors. I remembered that some published accounts mentioned the differing reactions of visitors, which ranged from delight to anger at being “duped” by installations that appear to offer accurate information even as they seem incredible. I was uncertain during my tour of the museum, especially when I ascended the stairs to the Tula Tea Room, a space that was not clearly part of the museum at that time. I hovered at the edges of a potentially private area for staff only, watching a woman serve tea from a samovar. She finally offered me some, and I sat down to drink it on a cushioned seat, next to a large Russian wolfhound. This event was social in nature but at odds with the personalized welcome and conversation immediately provided by Jude and Brendan Griebel at the Museum of Fear and Wonder. Visitors to the museum in southern Alberta may be discomfited by some of the objects on display, but they can be reassured by the guiding presence of their hosts. The Griebel brothers do not play the role of the transgressive artist and collector like Wynd; nor are they particularly evasive like Wilson. Instead, they display their interest in compelling objects linked with the body, death, and confinement in a relaxed and engaging manner. All three of the museums discussed here invoke the ghosts of early modern collections. Wynd’s Museum of Curiosities is significantly different from the other two because it strives to look like an early modern cabinet, with ceilings, walls, shelves, and tables densely packed with objects in apparent disarray. Neither the Museum of Jurassic Technology nor the Museum of Fear and Wonder attempt to restage the appearance of early modern cabinets of curiosities in this manner. The museum in Culver City offers a series of elaborately produced and interactive displays with explanatory texts, resembling those found in modern science centres. Although without reference to science museums, the Museum of Fear and Wonder is similarly orderly, with objects carefully positioned, often in antique wooden cases, analyzed below. These museums do not

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resemble early modern cabinets, but they do recall the embodied experience provided by such collections, encouraging visitors to participate in the production of knowledge. Both the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Museum of Fear and Wonder are committed to recovering the “seething presence” of past modes of understanding and approaching objects. The museum in Culver City links confusion and uncertainty with the act of interpretation, whereas the museum in southern Alberta encourages visitors to feel pleasure, amazement, and intrigue while discussing the history of selected objects and their relationships with humans both living and dead. These sites privilege the experience had while on-site and are not pedagogical in a traditional sense. They do not aim, as do many modern museums, to teach historical narratives, good taste, or thoughtful citizenship. The ghostly effect of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, however, is especially multilayered, as the museum combines early modern modes of inquiry with later techniques of display that stem from a range of commercial, natural history, and wax museums.

Encountering the Displays After visitors pass through the monstrous doors of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, they may be surprised by what greets them on the other side. The main gallery space is not dark, menacing, or filled with hellfire. The interior is in fact rather spacious and well lit, with objects organized within gleaming cases, set upon plinths, or installed on walls (figure 2.7). Unlike the crowded, dusty basement of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, the Museum of Fear and Wonder is airy and suffused with natural light. In contrast to the narrow corridors of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, the museum in southern Alberta is open, with a unified aesthetic. Its clean, white walls and polished hardwood floors are like those often found in modern art galleries. Visitors to the Museum of Fear and Wonder have enough room to step back and contemplate the individual objects that their hosts have placed within pristine wooden cases. These cases – one contains a dead foal that was stuffed and transformed into a child’s rocking horse (figure 0.3) – present the objects as valuable items worthy of serious consideration. The structure of the cases is equally admirable, with reflective glass panes held in place by finely crafted oak supports. Although of varying dimensions, all of the cases are substantial. Some span the length of an entire wall, and others extend to the ceiling. Brendan explained that he sourced the elaborate cases

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2.7 Overall view of the interior, featuring the repentant thief and rows of wax heads, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

from local grocery stores, butcher shops, and pharmacies, most of them shut down. One monumental case, with two enclosed shelving units resting on a large wooden set of drawers, was originally in the Hudson’s Bay Company department store that opened in downtown Calgary in 1913 and has since been renovated.43 The “outdated” case finds a new life in the Museum of Fear and Wonder, alluding to historical forms of displaying material goods. Although the drawers remain closed, retaining their secrets, the glass shelves on top of the chest now house a series of modelled wax heads, accompanied by the Kiddo, mounted to stand and gaze out at visitors. These viewers are invited to look at the Kiddo and the other objects as precious belongings available for their visual appraisal, recalling the longstanding connection between museums and consumer culture.

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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, museums and department stores were mutually influential. Both institutions attempted to shape public taste by displaying material goods on shelves or inside cases. According to historian Neil Harris, designers of department stores in major North American cities looked to museums when they constructed luxurious period rooms, often employing references to classical architecture in order to increase desire for the goods on sale within them.44 In response to the growing competition offered by such alluring spectacles in the department stores, museums borrowed some retail display and lighting techniques. Harris argues that museum staff became more selective about which items to exhibit, showcasing one or two significant objects beneath dramatic lighting instead of revealing the entire collection in an overwhelming state of disarray.45 The resulting museum spaces were less crowded and more directive, indicating what visitors should look at while providing room for their comfortable circulation. This focus on uncluttered, well-lit, and carefully installed spaces has been retained in many modern museums, but its historical association with the commercial realm is largely forgotten by members of the public as well as museum staff. Memories of department stores may resurface at the Museum of Fear and Wonder when visitors gaze at the objects carefully arranged inside the antique cases. This possibility is heightened by the animatronic figures now positioned behind glass in the museum, for they once activated the windows of department and toy stores. A happy elf with bushy white eyebrows and a beard dates from the 1950s (figure 2.8). Originally made to decorate the Christmas window of the Eaton’s department store in New York City, the elf is now stripped of his costume to reveal the metal arms that can raise and lower a (missing) hammer. Such spectacular recreations of Santa’s workshop and other scenes drew holiday crowds seeking both entertaining window displays and consumer goods, a tradition that continues at major urban department stores to this day.46 Whereas the elf remains pleasant to behold, the large figure placed beside him does not. An improbable toddler with a huge head and short chubby legs sits awkwardly in a miniature high chair. From a 1920s window display, the bulky baby once swayed back and forth in its chair, attracting visual attention while marketing the toy department. These and other commercial items – a sinister looking Mrs Claus from the same Eaton’s holiday window, an animatronic bear, and an antique wax mannequin used to model clothing for sale – have been carefully selected and placed in the Museum of Fear and Wonder. These items are not decontextualized or stripped of their earlier meanings. On the contrary, their restaging within antique commercial display cases recalls the historical imbri-

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2.8 Animatronic elf, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

cation of museums and commodity culture, linking the marketing techniques of department stores with the creation of value within museums. The wooden display cases and commercial figures at the Museum of Fear and Wonder bring the complex history of museums closer to view without sending a clearly didactic message. Jude and Brendan Griebel explain how they acquired the cases and animatronic figures to those visiting the museum but do not elaborate on the meanings produced by their installation methods unless asked to do so. Nor do the brothers attempt to direct the experience of visitors by means of written texts within the cases or explanatory placards on the walls of the museum. Instead, knowledge is produced in the museum during the interaction between the hosts, their guests, and the displays. As a historian of museums, I was particularly struck during my visit by the impact of the impressive cases, noting their allusion to merchandising techniques. These cases and the commercial figures within them indicate the presence of another story lurking beneath the surface, one that is palpable rather than strictly legible.

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While walking through the Museum of Fear and Wonder, I noticed that several of the elaborate wooden cases also featured natural specimens, including a large seated baboon (figure 2.9) as well as the rather disturbing rocking horse noted above. A lone stuffed groundhog was displayed on a shelf mounted on the wall rather than inside a case (figure 2.10). These three taxidermy mammals recall the contents of natural history museums established during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in cities and small towns across Canada as well as other Western countries.47 Although sometimes founded by individuals, the museums were organized mostly by societies of natural history enthusiasts – now called amateur biologists, entomologists, geologists, paleontologists, ornithologists, and botanists. They strove both to preserve and to promote local resources by displaying taxidermy mammals as well as insects, minerals, fossils, stuffed birds, dried plants, and samples of lumber within finely crafted wooden cases.48 Members of natural history societies praised the beauty of the local landscape while lobbying for the industrial expansion of mining, forestry, and agriculture, goals not considered contradictory at the time. Both local residents and tourists were encouraged to visit the collections in order to grasp the spiritual value as well as the economic potential of their surroundings.49 Few of these early natural history museums have survived, although many specimens have been absorbed within broader museum collections, where they are reclassified and redeployed to convey narratives less directly linked with economic ambitions.50 The taxidermy mammals at the Museum of Fear and Wonder do not reiterate either the display methods or economic goals of early natural history museums. In keeping with my earlier arguments, these specimens haunt the space, alluding to layers of museum history that threaten to reappear in distorted forms. The lone groundhog, for example, does not celebrate local resources or promote the fur trade, as taxidermy rodents often did in early natural history museums. Nor does it offer a lesson about local ecology, as it would in a modern natural history museum. Instead, the groundhog is comical, shown standing upright, if unsteadily, with a cane in one “hand” and a small liquor bottle in the other. This overtly artificial and anthropomorphized animal is at odds with the “natural” effects desired by the creators of natural history museums, especially in the meticulous dioramas produced for large, wealthy organizations. The American Museum of Natural History in New York is justly famous for its finely crafted dioramas, which feature exotic mammals such as gorillas and elephants posed in lifelike tableaux.51 The reopened Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton has been praised for refurbishing its “vintage” natural history dioramas, including

2.9 Top Taxidermy baboon, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020. 2.10 Bottom Taxidermy groundhog, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

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one portraying three taxidermy North American beavers gathering wood beside an illusionistic lake.52 In contrast to this image of active beavers in their habitat, the specimen at the Museum of Fear and Wonder stands alone, an entertaining artifact that sends an “inappropriate” message about alcoholic consumption. When not absorbed within larger and more modern museums, early natural history collections were dispersed for sale, entering antique and specialty shops.53 This process undermines the fantasy of the permanence of museums, which are deliberately opened, continually transformed, and regularly closed. The sale of such collections also reveals museums as sites engaged in commodity exchange through the purchase, display, trade, and sometimes even retail of objects. Although the tipsy groundhog was likely never installed in an early natural history museum, the baboon was originally housed in one such museum in New York State.54 Exotic mammals of this kind were desired for display within North American natural history museums, including the smaller ones. The founders of early natural history societies strategically exchanged local items with comparable societies around the world. Members of the Natural History Society of New Brunswick, for example, traded local fossils for Japanese bird skins in 1899, increasing the exposure and value of their own specimens abroad while adding an exotic attraction to their museum in Saint John.55 Likewise, Arthur D. Gregson, a key member of the Northwest (Canada) Entomological Society, founded in the 1890s in Blackfalds, Alberta – only 120 kilometres northwest of the Museum of Fear and Wonder – shipped local fleas to England.56 The insects were purchased by Lionel Walter Rothschild, a famed zoologist who amassed the largest private collection of insects, birds, mammals, fish, and reptiles from around the world, eventually bequeathed to the Trustees of the British Museum.57 Gregson also displayed local insects alongside imported tarantulas and other specimens in the Entomological Society’s museum, situated in his home. Although his museum no longer exists, a few of Gregson’s original specimens, arranged inside shallow, wooden cases, are currently on view in the recently opened Wadey Centre, analyzed in chapter 1. These natural history specimens are now repurposed to provide evidence of the distinguished heritage of Blackfalds, portraying it as the site of one of the first museums in Alberta. In contrast, the ponderous baboon inside the Museum of Fear and Wonder does not promote pride in local accomplishments; its material presence alludes to a fragmented past that lingers but cannot be clearly elucidated. The uncertainty associated with the baboon and other displays in the Museum of Fear and Wonder undermines continuing understandings of the modern museum as an authoritative entity that shapes knowledge and delivers pedagogical

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lessons to visitors. Instead of posing as an arbiter of knowledge, the small museum in southern Alberta acknowledges that there are limits to knowing, thwarting efforts to sustain a masterful position in relation to the collections. The taxidermy foal is another natural specimen in the Museum of Fear and Wonder that eludes comprehension (figure 0.3). Visitors may experience a range of emotions when regarding the strangely familiar yet unnerving child’s toy now preserved within an antique case. The stuffed brown pony, equipped with a handmade saddle and stirrups, was meant to be ridden. Signs of wear on the beautifully constructed rocking horse indicate that it was indeed well used. This transformation of a dead foal into a child’s plaything may seem unnatural, even monstrous, but such horses were ridden while alive. The rocking horse highlights the ways that some animals – like the groundhog and the baboon – become objectified after their death whereas others do not. Portraying the dead foal as a useful possession is in keeping with the spirit of early natural history museums, but the rocking horse is a far cry from what was installed in those spaces. Like the stuffed groundhog, the taxidermy foal alludes to submerged museum histories but in a way that is startling and altered rather than straightforward or mimetic. Even though the taxidermy mammals inside the Museum of Fear and Wonder are remarkable, they are significantly outnumbered by the wax figures installed throughout the main gallery. These diverse waxes provide the most sensational vestiges of museum history. About thirty detached wax heads line the shelves of the monumental Hudson’s Bay Company case. A life-sized wax model of a crucified figure, his suffering face upturned, hovers on the wall alongside them. Across from this arrangement, a smaller case contains several outstretched amputated wax limbs that caress the velvet lining beneath them. Another case resembles a glass coffin, with two life-sized wax torsos inside it, reclining as if dead. These impressive wax sculptures were acquired over the past two decades by the Griebel brothers, who searched for high-quality examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made with care and artistry. When combined within the museum, the collection embodies the history of wax techniques, presenting works made by different artists using various methods. The collection also marks the shifting function of wax modelling, which was primarily used to form votive and religious sculptures before it took on an increasing role in the creation of medical specimens and, more recently, was deployed in the production of lifelike figures on display in novelty museums. I was immediately attracted to the severed wax heads in the Museum of Fear and Wonder because they seemed familiar (figure 2.7). Jude explained that some

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of the meticulously crafted heads portrayed individual serial killers, including Ted Bundy, Lizzie Borden, and Billy the Kid, originally on view at the Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum, which operated in Niagara Falls, Ontario, from 1977 to 2014.58 After the museum closed and its collections went up for sale, the Griebel brothers purchased as many criminal heads as possible. I had probably seen the grimacing visages within their initial setting, for I grew up in southwestern Ontario during the 1970s and ’80s. My family made periodic visits to gaze at the majestic waterfalls before enjoying the souvenir shops and commercial venues in town. The Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum was a tourist attraction located in a tourist town. During the 1800s, Niagara Falls was famous for hosting honeymooning couples, but its popularity as a site associated with bodily pleasure and natural wonder began to wane in the twentieth century.59 Local proprietors then strove to broaden the appeal of Niagara Falls by including dangerous thrill seeking, resorting to what some critics have characterized as kitsch in a growing number of spectacular displays in entertainment centres, shops, and at least five wax museums.60 In this light, the reinstallation of the heads in southern Alberta links the Museum of Fear and Wonder with popular amusements from the past, providing some of the darkly surprising content promised by the building’s monstrous funhouse or hellmouth entrance.61 The criminal heads preserve fragments of a recently closed wax museum while invoking the wax reconstructions of notorious thieves and murderers displayed since the late eighteenth century. Madame Marie Tussaud first advertised the Chamber of Horrors in her London wax museum in 1843, highlighting its scenes of brutal murder and execution to paying customers.62 Some of the wax figures heading to the guillotine, however, had been previously modelled in Paris by her teacher, Philippe Curtius, who in 1782 had exhibited horrifying wax recreations of criminal exploits in his Caverne des Grands Voleurs, or Cavern of the Great Thieves.63 Madame Tussaud elaborated on the theme of terror for her London patrons with a compelling realism, reproducing famous figures killed during the French Revolution using the casts that she had made directly from their severed heads.64 Although Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors closed in 2016, historical tableaux inspired by her example remain on display in the basement of the Musée Grévin, a Parisian wax museum established in 1882.65 One particularly gory scene from the French Revolution shows Charlotte Corday stabbing politician Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub, just as she did in 1793. Marat’s wax hand desperately clutches the knife that was originally plunged into his chest, and his sculpted corpse slumps inside the same tub. The inclusion of these historical artifacts increases the audience’s sense of proximity

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to the murder, restaged in vividly coloured wax and set beneath dramatic lighting in the Musée Grévin. The Museum of Fear and Wonder continues the Chamber of Horrors tradition by displaying wax representations of criminals but avoids the theatrical presentation style typically used in the past. The serial killers’ heads now in southern Alberta are arranged on shelves and evenly lit, not placed in narrative settings that recreate the murders committed or punishments received by individual killers. At the Museum of Fear and Wonder, the wax visages are offered as compelling objects with lifelike elements. Removed from their bodies, the heads are lined up behind glass, with viewers asked to compare and contrast their realistic features – moist eyes, visibly dry lips, textured facial hair – from a safe distance. Visitors to the Museum of Fear and Wonder are not asked to become voyeurs who witnesses a violent act; they are invited to scrutinize the particularities of each head while admiring the craftsmanship of the wax specimens selected for purchase and display by the Griebel brothers. As with its references to early modern cabinets of curiosities and natural history museums, the Museum of Fear and Wonder resituates the traditions of former wax museums without attempting to recreate them. The modified installations in the Museum of Fear and Wonder draw attention to how wax displays offered, and continue to offer, modes of seeing and knowing. When visitors carefully examine the criminal heads, they may engage in the practice of physiognomy by looking for signs of evil inscribed in the facial features of serial killers. The longstanding belief that character is visibly evident in external appearances was deployed to legitimate the display of criminal visages in wax museums, linking such venues with the provision of information to the public.66 During the mid-nineteenth century, physiognomy was revived within a scientific framework to bolster the nascent field of criminology. Such theorists as Italian army doctor Cesare Lombroso argued that criminality was biologically inherited, with traits becoming visibly evident in hawk-like noses or bloodshot eyes.67 Now considered a pseudoscience that reinforces racial and class-based stereotypes, the effort to recognize criminal types by their appearances is remembered at the Museum of Fear and Wonder, which offers a “lineup” of heads – some of which depict criminals – for viewers to contemplate. Yet this supposedly rational form of assessment is also undermined at the museum, for the heads have been arranged to highlight differences rather than similarities. One face with eyes that gaze straight ahead is positioned beside another that looks askance. Several figures have large noses, but they are interspersed with those that have small features. The exhibition case encourages

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but ultimately thwarts attempts to draw generalized visual conclusions from the wax heads. The religious figure hovering beside the serial killers further confuses efforts to identify the physical traits of criminality. His detailed wax face, with its scruffy beard, glistening eyes, and parted lips, resembles a number of the detached heads, inviting their comparison. At the same time, the figure once portrayed the “good” or repentant thief from the Christus Gardens, an outdoor religious attraction in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that from 1960 to 2008 dazzled visitors with vivid dioramas.68 The original setting was based on the Gospel of Luke, which describes the crucifixion of Christ between two thieves receiving a similar punishment. One thief was penitent, asking Christ to remember him, whereas the other refused to atone for his sins. The beautifully rendered figure of the repentant thief was relocated to the Museum of Fear and Wonder, bringing biblical content into dialogue with popular representations inspired by the Chamber of Horrors. Although this placement of a life-sized religious figure alongside murderers in the Museum of Fear and Wonder may be unexpected, it is not exactly blasphemous. The clever curation of the gallery in southern Alberta shows how both genres of wax sculpture – religious and popular – are informed by stories of crime and punishment, undermining narrow understandings of historical wax museums as lurid tourist traps with no meaningful content. Across from the upright figure of the repentant thief, two other wax figures from the Christus Gardens lie dismantled inside an antique case, their bodies opened to multiple meanings (figure 2.11 and 2.12). One is Christ, covered in scars added by a subsequent owner, and the other is the unrepentant thief, shown sneering rather than seeking redemption. In contrast to the complete body of the good thief, these figures resemble ancient marble sculptures, with heads attached to torsos that lack arms and legs. The wax fragments recline along the bottom of a footed case, just above floor level, obliging visitors to look down on them. To a certain degree, this viewing stance positions the wax heads and torsos as valuable ruins rescued from an archaeological site. The wax body parts are also framed, however, as anatomical specimens prepared for visual inspection. This medical interpretation is bolstered by the presence in nearby cases of other bodily fragments: faces, arms, ears, hands. Some body parts are made of wax, but others are papier-mâché casts made using the nineteenth-century technique pioneered by French anatomist Louis Auzoux.69 Among these examples is a remarkable upper arm and hand with veins clearly demarcated in blue and muscles in a red hue that is beginning to fade. Such objects were made as educational substitutes for the fleshly body, which decays quickly after death

2.11 Top Wax torsos, installation shot, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2017. 2.12 Bottom Torso of the unrepentant thief (detail), Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2017.

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and dissection.70 When viewed alongside these anatomical models, the repurposed torsos conjure the flexible history of wax museums, which have offered visitors spectacular recreations of criminals and religious characters, as well body parts designed for medical instruction. The installation of the recumbent wax figures at the Museum of Fear and Wonder is reminiscent of the display methods used at the Museo della Specola in Florence, a famous collection of anatomical waxes that opened to the public in 1775.71 Now largely a tourist attraction, the Italian waxes originally served as models for teaching human anatomy to medical students.72 At La Specola, the galleries are filled with anatomical imagery. Drawings and small glass boxes containing wax organs and appendages line the walls, and larger floor cases feature upright figures flayed to reveal layers of fascia, musculature, and bone. The collection is best known, however, for the three life-sized female Venuses that recline in the centre of a large gallery inside glass cases similar to the one housing the bad thief and Christ at the Museum of Fear and Wonder.73 The women are shown as if in their death throes, with mouths open and eyes rolling back. Their heads are meticulously rendered, with long hair, glowing cheeks, moist lips, and pulsing throats adorned with jewellery. In shocking contrast to these signs of life, the women’s wax bodies are open to reveal glistening viscera, organs, and wombs, some of them removable. Such alluring female figures were fashioned during the early modern period by a number of artists, including chief modeller Clemente Susini, to offset the potentially upsetting destruction evident in the dissection of women’s bodies, which appear to have been butchered.74 The erotic aspects of the figures are clearly gendered, with the sexualized female bodies portrayed as passively available, perhaps to excuse the rather aggressive possession of them by medical students and other viewers during the eighteenth century. This objectification of the female body continues to send simultaneously disturbing and exciting messages to the modern visitors who now populate the galleries of La Specola. Despite their similar mode of display, the reclining torsos in the Museum of Fear and Wonder are not objectified in the same way as the Venuses. Like the female figures, the bodies of Christ and the unrepentant thief are open to view, with deliberate cuts visibly marking the absence of their lower bodies and arms. Visitors to the Museum of Fear and Wonder can see inside these bodies, but instead of organs and intestines, they encounter thick slabs of wax. The traces of bone structure and musculature inscribed on the exterior of the torsos are clearly superficial. A vertical tube pierces the interior of each torso, indicating the former presence of a support pole that once held the figures upright in place

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of a spine. The opened bodies of the religious figures from the Christus Gardens point not to anatomical secrets but to the formerly hidden process of creating wax sculptures. The exhibition thus reinforces references to the technical production of wax figures, showing how the pieces of each body were cast separately and then expertly assembled. It also highlights the materiality of the wax bodies to undermine the effect of realism evident in other figures, from the Venuses at La Specola to the upright repentant thief and the criminal heads in the same gallery. This installation of the torsos complements the other wax sculptures at the Museum of Fear and Wonder by extending their material impact while invoking the diversity of wax modelling. Overall, the wax displays in the Museum of Fear and Wonder rearticulate the complex history of wax museums within a modern setting, providing visitors with embodied experiences that vacillate between the past and the present. The Museum of Fear and Wonder combines diverse modes of display, inspired by exhibitions of late-eighteenth-century anatomical waxes, nineteenthcentury natural history specimens, and twentieth-century versions of the Chamber of Horrors. The site in southern Alberta does not, however, offer historical recreations of earlier museum formats, aiming to provide an immersive encounter like the period rooms once featured in department stores as well as museums. Instead, the Museum of Fear and Wonder reconceives past exhibition practices in the present, altering them in provocative ways. Like the decidedly unnatural stuffed groundhog, the deconstructed torsos are no longer convincing recreations. Their fragmented body parts both undermine the compelling realism of wax sculptures and insist on the artistic value of wax. These wax figures as well as most other objects in the Museum of Fear and Wonder are positioned within antique commercial cases that frame them as objects made to be displayed, bought, and sold. Jude and Brendan Griebel have collected objects that retain traces of their histories of exchange and manipulation. The display strategies in the Museum of Fear and Wonder highlight how these objects hold on to the past in material ways that are no longer fully present, offering visitors layers of museum history embedded within modern spaces.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have attempted to recreate the sensation of visiting the Museum of Fear and Wonder, starting with my request for an invitation and ending with an account of the ghostly impact of the installations. This museum engages with modes of seeing and knowing associated with museums of the early modern

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and modern periods, reminding us that their foundational role lingers in the present. Haunted by museum history, the Museum of Fear and Wonder provides visitors with an experience of past modes of collecting, understanding, and displaying diverse objects. This experience is embodied, for it is felt on-site rather than received as a pedagogical lesson. Visitors learn by driving to the museum along rural roads, encountering its prairie setting, meeting its creators on the intriguing front porch of a farmhouse, passing through a monstrous funhouse or hellmouth door to enter the building, and once inside, discussing the disturbing objects on display with their hosts. Because visitors participate fully in the process of creating knowledge, and given that the Griebel brothers regularly acquire new items and reinstall the exhibitions in their gallery spaces, each visit to the Museum of Fear and Wonder will be somewhat different. I have highlighted those aspects of the experience that relate to the history of museums but have by no means exhausted the content of the Museum of Fear and Wonder. There are many layers of meaning within the museum that concern the emotional and narrative aspects of the objects, as well as parts of the collection that I did not analyze but might be of great interest to other visitors, notably an amazing array of theatrical and Halloween masks.75 If any of Meyer’s followers made the trip to southern Alberta, they would probably pay more attention to the Kiddo, confronting a form of haunting that is rather different from the one that I had in mind. They and other viewers might also spend more time looking at the dolls that populate the cases I have not mentioned, where groups of old-fashioned baby dolls, some with cracked porcelain heads and missing eyes and others made entirely of cloth, stand beside small toy monkeys, marionettes, and at least one stuffed kitten. These potentially unsettling playthings, both handmade and mass produced, convey signs of their former lives in keeping with the concerns of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, but they do not carry traces of the history of museums in ways that are comparable to the exhibition of wax figures and natural history specimens. Of course, doll collections appear in various museums, including the heritage museums common to small towns and rural areas in Alberta, described in the introduction to this book. Many of these “pioneer” museums were founded during the twentieth century to celebrate the previous 250 years of history in the province, emphasizing the hard work of early settlers and the growth of towns. Dolls formerly owned by local children were donated by residents to preserve local heritage. These dolls are often arranged with other toys and school desks in the sections of the museums devoted to childhood, alongside more or less chronological displays related to local farming practices, industries, and

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community organizations. Neither the modes of seeing and knowing promoted by pioneer museums nor their techniques of display are referenced by the Museum of Fear and Wonder. Although pioneer museums are worthy of study and are discussed in chapter 5, their histories are not directly addressed or reshaped by the museum in southern Alberta. This lack of allusion to pioneer museums might seem strange since the Museum of Fear and Wonder was inspired by “the dying tradition of the rural museum.” Yet the rural museum invoked by Jude and Brendan Griebel is not the kind with standard collections of old farm tools, schoolbooks, and washboards; it is the kind with unpredictable collections that seem out of place. The historical artifacts in the Donalda and District Museum in central Alberta, for example, are overwhelmed by the display of more than 1,100 lamps dating from 1600 to 1960, donated by local residents Don and Beth Lawson.76 One of the world’s largest lamp collections is found in a rural village with a population of fewer than 250 people that is famous for its creamery and railway station, not for making or selling lamps. A rather different example of the type of rural museum admired by the Griebel brothers is the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, less than an hour east of Bergen by car. As argued in the following chapter, in this grassroots museum, local people commemorate the hamlet’s heritage with an unforgettable series of dioramas populated by stuffed gophers wearing dolls’ clothing. The Museum of Fear and Wonder recuperates the rural tradition of fostering such astonishing and disquieting museums, insisting on their value as well as their link with historical museum practices. These remarkable museums are nevertheless at risk of decline, as noted by the Griebel brothers. Innovative museums (as well as more conventional pioneer museums) are hard to maintain in rural areas with diminishing economies and populations, especially when most of them are run by senior staff who may not be replaced by a younger generation.77 Even rural museums that are popular and widely respected struggle to keep their doors open. The Trekcetera Museum, for instance, opened in 2013 in Vulcan, Alberta – 240 kilometres south of Bergen – to expand the town’s Star Trek theme with impressive exhibitions of the costumes worn and props used in the television series, as well as memorabilia related to the Alberta film industry. This unique collection was privately owned by Devan Daniels and Michael Mangold, who moved it to Drumheller, Alberta, in 2017, hoping to attract more paying customers in the larger tourist town. Unfortunately, Trekcetera was forced to close for financial reasons in 2018, and the collections were sold. As a result, key elements of Alberta’s media history were dispersed, and part of Alberta’s small-town and rural museum history was lost.78

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Despite fearing the death of such organizations, the Museum of Fear and Wonder ultimately offers a positive message about the future of rural museums. The small museum in southern Alberta is clearly successful, attracting a broad array of visitors eager to travel along back roads in order to see an exciting, challenging, and entertaining collection. The Museum of Fear and Wonder offers these visitors compelling social and cultural experiences related to the complex histories of earlier private, commercial, and sensational museums, which continue to linger in the present. Jude and Brendan Griebel encourage their guests to encounter the ghosts of past museums on-site while enabling them to sense the haunted nature of other museums, even those that have tried to exorcise their ghosts. Informed visitors can strive to perceive traces of the past in small museums whose owners have “professionalized” them by removing objects deemed worthless and by replacing references to local families with more general historical narratives.79 In large, modern venues that have reconstructed and mostly effaced their pasts, such visitors can also look for ghosts by seeking out those objects that continue to promote irrational wonder rather than any didactic message. In the end, the Museum of Fear and Wonder embodies hopeful ways to seek out and appreciate the haunted nature of many museums, advancing the disruptive, critical, and creative potential of those spaces.

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Contesting Rural Heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum

“We are a small museum in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Yet we are known all over the world.” Dianne Kurta, curator of the Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington, Alberta, expresses pride in her accomplishments during an interview with me on a Sunday morning in August 2016.1 From our vantage point at a picnic table just outside the museum, we can see cars full of people begin to arrive for the 10:00 a.m. opening (figure 3.1). These visitors line up in front of the building, eager to pay the two-dollar entry fee to see displays of taxidermy gophers – otherwise known as Richardson’s ground squirrels – dressed as firemen, beauticians, fishers, and picnickers (figures 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4). Whereas some have driven a short distance from neighbouring towns, many have come from Europe or Japan, stopping in Torrington on their way to visit larger venues in southern Alberta, including Banff National Park and Calgary. According to Dianne, some 6,000 tourists arrive between May and August each year. This number strikes me as remarkable because the hamlet of fewer than 200 people is in a relatively isolated location 30 kilometres off the main highway and an hour’s drive from a metropolitan centre, as examined in chapter 1. Reflecting on the popularity of the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum, Dianne notes that she and her colleagues do not advertise the museum in any way. All of its publicity has been free, another point of pride. The curator explains that the museum gained notoriety before it opened in the spring of 1996. In 1995, officials from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (peta) sent letters of protest to the mayor of Torrington asking that prefabricated models be

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3.1 Exterior of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2015. 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 Opposite top to bottom Fire hall diorama, beauty shop diorama, and fishing diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

used in the exhibits instead of gopher corpses. After Dianne and other museum organizers sent peta a card advising its members to “get stuffed,” the ensuing debate attracted global media coverage, inspiring people from as far away as the United Kingdom and Germany to write letters both in favour of and opposed to Torrington’s new museum.2 Thousands of visitors were initially attracted by the media frenzy, but the Gopher Hole Museum continues to garner attention over twenty years later in newspaper reports, in a short documentary film released in 2015, and on fan websites.

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This chapter considers how the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum acts as a popular site of contested heritage, with locals and tourists defining its value and negotiating its meaning in vastly different ways. In the first part, I analyze how the creators of the museum appropriate some techniques of conventional natural history and heritage museums to represent Torrington, highlighting the value of rural life and local resources. In dialogue with the pioneer museums that dominate the Alberta landscape, discussed in chapter 5, the Gopher Hole Museum restages scenes of homesteading and civic events, but it does not strive to preserve historically significant objects or archival documents. Instead, the Gopher Hole Museum legitimates local forms of knowledge with the creation of contemporary material culture, most of it quite humorous. For Dianne and other local contributors, the Gopher Hole Museum is part of a continuous Torrington tradition of do-it-yourself community organizing, hard work, adaptability, and hospitality. The social events held in relation to the museum encourage the production of stories aimed primarily at residents. At the same time, visitors from outside of the region are not excluded; they are invited to “rest a spell” in the hamlet, eat at the pizzeria, and chat with the museum volunteers. Although these visitors ultimately react favourably to the museum, they represent it in diverse ways, sometimes crafting their responses in online reviews, in a documentary film, and on promotional websites. The second part of this chapter analyzes how the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum is portrayed in these visitors’ interpretations of it. For the most part, the museum is considered quirky and unique – a form of marginal outsider art – rather than an extension of local culture.3 Visitors often express admiration for the innovative handwork and dedicated volunteers at the Gopher Hole Museum, but they view it as a homespun testament to the decline of Torrington and the inevitable disappearance of a former way of life in Alberta. According to this lens, rural heritage is already in the past, not part of the present; it is strange, unfamiliar, and removed from modernity. In some ways, such reactions are based on misunderstandings of and stereotypes about rurality, but in other ways, they attest to the popular appeal of the museum, which is an engaging and open-ended text able to convey mixed and even contradictory messages to different audiences, including tourists. I examine and interpret these competing views of the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum from a visual and cultural studies perspective, analyzing the site of representation by paying close attention to the material displays within the museum itself and to the messages that they convey by alluding to and reshaping

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visual conventions.4 I then consider the various multimedia responses to the Gopher Hole Museum. My characterization of the museum as an “open text” is based on the arguments of John Fiske, a media scholar who contends that texts, a broad term that includes books, television shows, and films, among other things, become popular when they are “producerly” – that is, when they challenge readers or viewers to recreate those texts, participating in the construction of meaning.5 The Gopher Hole Museum is just such an inviting “text,” as it does not attempt to limit interpretation with standard narratives, administrative directives, practised tour guides, or explanatory labels. Instead of offering a single story or clear script for visitors to follow, the museum provides many interpretive opportunities. It creatively combines some techniques of natural history museums with heritage conventions, reshaping them within miniaturized settings that recall dollhouses, which invoke, among other things, nostalgic understandings of childhood. Because these complex allusions do not cohere into an overall or entirely consistent message, they work to make the Gopher Hole Museum an open text that can appeal to broad audiences while remaining relevant to residents.6 The local creators highlight their own interests, skills, values, and ways of knowing, gaining agency without attempting to control the museum’s meaning. Their approach to the museum diverges from what Laurajane Smith has called the “authorized heritage discourse,” which typically privileges monumentality, innate artifacts, the significance of site, nation building, social consensus, and scholarly expertise.7 The Gopher Hole Museum instead offers a detailed account of Torrington by celebrating an apparently trivial rodent in miniature handmade displays located inside a modest double-wide trailer. The scenes feature local events and sites, not narratives of national or even provincial identity. Museum organizers do not try to build social consensus by avoiding controversy; they cultivate debate, recognizing it as a key draw to visitors. At the same time, the museum is primarily run by local women with no official museum training. These women staff the museum during opening hours, design and make the dioramas, and speak with researchers as well as members of the media. This disregard for dominant norms enables the Gopher Hole Museum to surprise and entertain visitors, potentially sending subversive messages about museums, heritage, and rural life, as suggested below. In 2016, I published another chapter about the Gopher Hole Museum, focusing on the role of women in its creation, as well as its representation of gender and class, relationship with modernity, and identification of rural Alberta with gopher figures, content glossed over in the following analysis.8 The chapter

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in this book builds on that initial discussion by developing the idea of “open text” introduced at the conclusion of that chapter. Specifically, I highlight the reception of the museum by local and tourist audiences. My arguments are based on additional research, including site visits, an interview with the curator, and interpretations of related cultural products, such as online and guestbook reviews, blogs, a website, and a documentary film. The wide appeal of the Gopher Hole Museum provides a key point of comparison with other small-town and rural museums, indicating what kinds of content and exhibition techniques might support the negotiation of the meanings of heritage by both locals and tourists. Given the differences between the insider and outsider positions of these two audiences, the displays in the Gopher Hole Museum can be read by residents and visitors in quite distinct ways. I argue that although the Gopher Hole Museum seemingly avoids explicit narratives or self-conscious ideological messaging, its creators have provided displays that enable a sophisticated and flexible understanding of Torrington’s heritage.

Local Matters When visitors enter the Gopher Hole Museum, they find a dimly lit room lined with two rows of rectangular boxes that measure approximately 50 by 30 centimetres (figure 0.5). Each of the forty-seven boxes is open at the front, its interior theatrically lit to reveal scenes of local life both past and present: patrons enjoy a meal in the diner, players engage in a game at the curling rink, children cavort in the playground. The townspeople, however, are played by gophers, their stuffed bodies dressed in tiny clothing and arranged in decorated settings complete with miniature chairs, tables, and curling brooms. Although many of these dioramas are funny – for instance, one churchgoing gopher is asleep – some are overtly political. One striking display depicts a protest taking place on the sidewalk outside of the Village Office in Torrington (figure 3.5). Two gophers play tug-of-war with the body of a third animal. A figure dressed in a navy vest, bow tie, and top hat insists, “This one is needed for the museum,” while his rival, a bearded gopher adorned with a long ponytail and a purple poncho, shouts, “Save the endangered species!!” The handmade sign beside this hippy gopher proclaims his affiliation with “g.a.g.s.,” or “Gophers Against Getting Stuffed.” This invented lobby group alludes to the criticism that the Gopher Hole Museum has received from animal rights groups. In the diorama, the Torrington

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mayor, a conservative gentleman in nineteenth-century garb, is forced to battle a 1960s hippy. As an outsider to rural Alberta, the hippy gopher attempts to take not only the animal that he grasps but also the right to determine its meaning. Although the diorama favours the residents of Torrington and ridicules critics, it is accompanied by many of the protest letters sent over the years. Visitors can read these letters in full, consider how the Gopher Hole Museum remains subject to debate, and take up their own position. In a 1999 interview about the controversy at the museum, Kurta argued that gophers are hardly endangered and said that residents “have problems with gopher damage to crops, to fields, and damage to cattle.”9 The curator of the Gopher Hole Museum reframed the debate by focusing on the rights of local farmers rather than gophers. From the farmers’ point of view, gophers are a

3.5 G.A.G.S. diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

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nuisance causing economic damage, not creatures worthy of protection. This emphasis on the perceptions of those who interact with gophers suggests that the significance of gophers is informed by everyday life and first-hand experience, a point misunderstood by outsiders. In tandem with the g.a.g.s. diorama, the statement made by the curator of the Gopher Hole Museum aligns the residents of Torrington with local knowledge and values while positioning them against what some of them consider the presumptuous moralizing of the museum’s critics. At the same time, the inclusion of the protest letters alongside the diorama acknowledges the museum as a site of cultural production, revealing the ongoing contest over its meaning. People from Torrington have historically engaged with gophers, attempting to remove or trap them. In Alberta, and indeed throughout the western prairies, the gopher has been considered an agricultural pest since at least the late nineteenth century, second only to grasshoppers.10 Governmental policies attempting to limit the gopher population or even eradicate the species include the bounties placed on them during the early twentieth century – by 1913 in Saskatchewan and 1924 in Alberta. Putting a price on injurious pests was commonplace during the twentieth century; such government campaigns reinforced the practice of viewing the landscape primarily in terms of economic opportunity, providing financial relief to impoverished residents while continuing the colonial project of clearing the territory of obstacles to the agricultural and pastoral exploitation of the land.11 For decades, monetary rewards encouraged citizens, especially rural children, to hunt and kill gophers.12 Children living in and around Torrington took advantage of this government program, collecting gopher tails and submitting them to officials for payment.13 In this light, the use of stuffed gophers in the museum is far from random. It both invokes and continues the practice of collecting gopher bodies for economic purposes, alluding to the displacement of animals and Indigenous peoples in order to claim the land.14 The museum’s creation was also inspired by another form of government intervention. The Gopher Hole Museum was initially funded by a small start-up grant from the Government of Alberta’s 20/20 Vision program, designed to help small towns diversify and improve their economies.15 By choosing to work with gopher corpses, the museum organizers opportunely drew on an established survival mechanism, transforming it into a cultural spectacle. The organizers’ decision to place the gopher bodies on display in a museum had no precedent in Torrington, but it resonates with the longstanding collection of natural history specimens, still included in many of the museums located

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throughout Alberta, as highlighted in the Museum of Fear and Wonder, discussed in chapter 2. Natural history museums were formed in cities and towns across Canada during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when societies of amateur naturalists voluntarily amassed collections of stuffed mammals, dried insects, plant cuttings, minerals, and fossils, exhibiting them publicly to promote the natural riches in their particular regions.16 They adhered to what historian Steven Conn has called “naked eye science,” promoting authentic learning directly from specimens, without resorting to books.17 In keeping with traditional natural history practices, the Torrington museum organizers gathered specimens from their own landscape, presenting them in the museum to communicate information about life in rural Alberta, without adding elaborate labels or explanatory pamphlets. Taxidermy is a key element in such natural history displays and precisely what critics have found most offensive about the Gopher Hole Museum. The practice of mounting animal skins on frameworks produced to mimic a lifelike appearance was developed to transport exotic animal bodies from the colonies to Europe during the early modern period, but it reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, when birds and mammals were arranged and exhibited in glass cases inside homes as well as museums.18 The organizers of the Gopher Hole Museum extended this strategy by creating dioramas, a display format developed during the early twentieth century, usually featuring stuffed animals placed within elaborate recreations of their native flora and fauna. The most famous examples were made during the 1920s and ’30s, when mountain gorillas, elephants, and lions were arranged inside life-sized dioramas in the Carl Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (figure 3.6).19 These display methods were repeated in other museums for decades afterward, including the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, which opened in 1967 with large dioramas featuring mammals from all parts of the province. Smaller organizations often lacked the resources to create such elaborate settings and simply placed stuffed animals on shelves or inside unadorned cases. This more spare method remains visible within the renowned Banff Park National Museum, founded in 1895, whose natural history collections include taxidermy mountain goats and grizzly bears. In contrast to these magnificent and wellknown specimens from Alberta, the gopher bodies in Torrington are diminutive and far from exotic, and they are placed within overtly unnatural settings that simultaneously mimic and refuse conventional museum practices. The gophers are at once natural history objects representing the region and cultural artifacts pointing to the townspeople.

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3.6 Lion diorama, Akeley Hall of African Mammals, American Museum of Natural History, New York City.

The organizers of the Torrington museum drew on local natural and human resources in order to create dioramas that feature stuffed gophers positioned within domestic and social scenes. The intricate taxidermy, made especially difficult by the small size of gophers, was contracted from nearby craftsmen, local artist Shelley Haase Barkman painted the interiors, and the female members of the museum committee either found or fashioned the tiny clothes for the figures, sometimes adapting Barbie jewelry and combs, along with other toys.20 In the beauty shop diorama, for example, a gopher with long blonde hair wears an elaborate lace dress and gazes into a pink Barbie hand mirror, listening to the aproned aesthetician behind her state, “I’m a beautic[i]an, not a magic[i]an” (figure 3.3). The beauty parlour contains a window delineated with a wooden frame, miniature pictures, a tiny potted plant in the corner, and wallpaper topped with a border. This scenario resembles a girl’s dollhouse, highlighting the women’s design skills and fashion sense.21 Although many visitors find such scenes funny and bizarre, as indicated below, they are not without precedent.

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During the late nineteenth century, Walter Potter opened a museum in Sussex, England, which similarly anthropomorphized small creatures such as rabbits, birds, and guinea pigs, placing them in human social settings.22 A particularly striking example shows seventeen taxidermy kittens enjoying a tea party, creating an effect that some contemporaries found lighthearted and others ghoulish or cruel. Yet these early miniature dioramas are now rarely exhibited and are familiar mainly to specialists in the history of museums. The creators of the Gopher Hole Museum did not intend to resurrect this particular nineteenthcentury form of display. They developed their anthropomorphized gopher dioramas after taking stock of the opportunities in Torrington, which lacked historic older buildings and officially designated heritage sites or collections. The museum organizers ultimately pursued a display technique that was affordable and possible, both drawing on and celebrating local skills while creating an appealing representation of their hamlet. The production of such miniature dioramas is labour intensive, enhancing the value of commonplace gophers while drawing attention to the handwork of local residents. In her analysis of miniature displays, literary critic Susan Stewart argues that lavishing care on small items invests them with a significance that they would otherwise lack.23 The act of creating miniatures involves a transformation of scale that draws attention to potentially infinite detail, highlighting each object’s material construction and sensuality, with “the hand being the measure of the miniature.”24 Miniature handwork is visible throughout the Gopher Hole Museum in knitted items of clothing, tiny stitches, gluegunned roses, and even the penciled captions in the voice bubbles that accompany many gophers. This evidence of intricate labour makes the local creators present while conferring value on the scenes that they have fabricated. The subject matter of these miniature scenes was carefully selected by museum organizers to represent the heritage of Torrington and the surrounding region. According to American historian and geographer David Lowenthal, heritage is at odds with history because, formed by hindsight, it exaggerates positive elements of the past while omitting negative ones to create an affirmative account that reflects well on the people telling it.25 This invention of heritage is present in many of the dioramas in the Gopher Hole Museum, which portray a prosperous region being enjoyed by happy, hard-working, and fun-loving citizens. The scenes highlight venues such as a post office, fire hall, general store, bank, gas station, and diner, depicting a town that once offered all of the amenities. The dioramas also show residents who are provided with a rich social life

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that includes picnics, parades, fashion shows, and musical jamborees, available locally. This idealized vision of Torrington’s heritage imagines it as an independent and fully functioning community filled with harmonious interactions. A significant sign of conflict is presented in the g.a.g.s. diorama, which shows how townspeople react when told what to do by outsiders: the people of Torrington stand their ground while incorporating the debate into their image of the town. References to civic institutions and social rituals are common in most of the small-town heritage museums in Alberta, but the dioramas in the Gopher Hole Museum do not offer a generic image of small-town life in the past. Almost all of the scenes relate to specific buildings, businesses, and community events in ways that are recognizable primarily to long-time residents who remember the town, not to visitors encountering it for the first time. Even after several visits to the museum, I remained unaware that the dioramas had such additional layers of meaning until the curator advised me to learn more about the Gopher Hole Museum by reading the weighty tome Torrington and District History 1890s–2015, published by the Torrington Historical Society in 2016 and launched as part of the twentieth anniversary of the museum. The authors of the book – many of whom are also contributors to the museum – present an oral history of Torrington from its inception to the present day, reproducing the letters written by early twentieth-century settlers, summaries of the interviews done with hundreds of former and current residents, and numerous black and white photographs. These photos are featured in the section on Torrington and area businesses, which surveys key structures and services from the 1920s onward, noting that most of the buildings have been torn down or repurposed.26 The information in this section reveals that the beauty shop diorama, for example, is based on the Torrington Beauty Salon, which was operated from 1980 to 1998 by Evelyn Bauer in a building that had previously housed a post office, drug store, machine dealership, town office, and insurance office.27 The book shows that the g.a.g.s. diorama portrays the Village Office as it looked from 1979 to 1997, when it was vacated because the town had dissolved into a hamlet.28 Another diorama makes a direct visual reference to the fertilizer dealership that existed in Torrington from 1989 to 2013, with small versions of the plant’s conical white storage towers placed behind a gopher who tends a field embellished with real sheep droppings covered in plastic, remarking that “the real fertilizer is the best.”29 The dioramas that feature events rather than places are likewise based on specific gatherings that no longer occur, including the spring fashion show, annual town yard sale,

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and “old tyme” music jamboree.30 Like the use of gophers in the dioramas, the subject matter in these scenes is not random. Many visual elements are designed to resemble key buildings and events from the past, addressing the memories and lived experiences of former and current residents. The contents of both the Torrington and District History text and the Gopher Hole Museum celebrate the region’s community spirit and commitment to socializing. When recounting their family’s history for the book, residents consistently reinforce themes of hard work, community support, social interaction, and humour. Many interviewees describe clearing and tilling the land while caring for children and making do with limited resources, but they nevertheless recall always managing to help friends in need and to have fun, finding tales to tell about amusing things that occurred even in the midst of difficulties.31 One resident regrets that the five grain elevators that once operated in Torrington were demolished, but his account moves quickly to what was most important about the elevators: their role as a social hub for local farmers, who met there for a good visit while chatting, smoking cigarettes, and drinking coffee.32 A diorama in the Gopher Hole Museum similarly refers to these elevators, without attempting to reconstruct them. A blue elevator labelled “Alberta Wheat Pool Torrington” and a red one labelled “Pioneer” provide hand-painted backdrops for two gopher farmers discussing the quality of their yield. This focus on the importance of intangible social exchanges rather than material structures is summarized by Laural Kurta, Dianne’s daughter: “Torrington isn’t about fancy houses, great jobs, prestige or culture. Torrington has always been about community and that community becomes your family and a part of your memories.”33 Such statements shed light on why the organizers of the Gopher Hole Museum employed a do-it-yourself approach to create humorous dioramas that promote the manual skills and longstanding social values of their community. Both the Torrington and District History book and the Gopher Hole Museum are imbued with nostalgia, conveying a sense of loss for a golden age, often part of utopian creations of heritage.34 In an analysis of small local museums in the United States, museum scholar Amy Levin found that they rely on nostalgia to gesture at “a happier, halcyon time, an age of innocence before the fall into the knowledge of urbanism and industrialism.”35 This idealization of the past is especially clear in the representation of childhood innocence in the book as well as in the Gopher Hole Museum, echoing a theme increasingly mobilized in the heritage industry.36 The oral histories in Torrington and District History regularly

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extol the benefits of growing up in a tightknit community, noting favourite bus drivers, high school antics, close friendships, and leisure activities such as sledding, camping, and attending holiday events.37 These references extend to the content of the dioramas at the museum, for five of them are exclusively devoted to children, with gophers shown sledding, skating, camping, building a snowman, and cavorting in a playground. The predominance of miniature forms in the dioramas augments the theme of childhood, particularly the use of toys, dollhouse furniture, and Barbie accessories. The emphasis on outdoor activities continues to highlight the natural bounty of Torrington while also linking the region with simple pleasures in a way that appeals to residents as well as tourists, who are charmed by the apparent naïveté of the displays even as they find them “weird,” as indicated below. The form of nostalgia promoted in the Gopher Hole Museum nevertheless differs from the kind endorsed by Torrington and District History. The book adheres to what literary scholar Svetlana Boym has identified as “restorative nostalgia,” which attempts to reconstruct a lost home by preserving the truth.38 The authoritative textbook, complete with maps, diagrams, tables, and reproductions of original documents, opens with claims of its accuracy; the editors assert that they undertook thorough archival research and attempted to verify all oral reports by consulting other historical sources.39 In contrast, the museum partakes of “reflective nostalgia,” which “thrives in the longing itself,” according to Boym, and calls truth into doubt by drawing attention to its own fabrication of heritage, offering multiple plots, cherishing fragments rather than unity, and sometimes even fostering irony and humour.40 With its series of miniature dioramas that highlight creativity rather than preservation, the Gopher Hole Museum portrays Torrington’s heritage as an appealing myth with numerous narrative threads. The museum invites reactions that can be critical or emotional and welcomes the production of diverse interpretations, at odds with the more closed nature of the textbook. Torrington and District History is dedicated to and was written for “the families and individuals who have formed the central Alberta farming community of Torrington.”41 The last 400 pages of the book provide the oral histories of individual families, organized in alphabetical order for those familiar with the region, a format off-putting to those with limited knowledge of the people who lived there. This approach may deliberately keep outsiders at bay and forestall close scrutiny, an aspect that Lowenthal identifies with defensive forms of heritage.42 Lacking any reference to original documents or accurate history, the

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Gopher Hole Museum is open to interpretation, its design meant to bring outsiders into the town, even though some of the layered messages conveyed by the dioramas are discernible only to a local audience. Despite commemorating the past, the museum is open enough to embrace the present and recognize change. One diorama shows a gopher that has tripped over a hose in the Torrington Volunteer Fire Department (figure 3.2), an organization that continues to exist, as does the curling rink. As of this writing, the most recent diorama celebrates a new business in the hamlet, Jesse James Coating Ltd, which in 2015 moved into the remains of the old Viscount Torrington School. The additional diorama was launched with a social event at the Gopher Hole Museum to which everyone was invited, including its latest business operator. The museum focuses on the continuity of the past into the present, representing Torrington as, among other things, an adaptable and welcoming town eager to receive new neighbours and visitors. This focus allows the Gopher Hole Museum to contribute to the local economy, despite the fact that it does not produce significant revenues with its two-dollar entry fee. These fees fund the operating costs of the museum, enabling it to continue without the need for additional government grants or periodic fundraising events. Yet the museum has an impact beyond its walls because all proceeds raised by its small gift shop go directly to the local people who have made the knitted baby clothing, Raggedy Ann dolls, gopher-themed T-shirts, and other items. At the same time, during my interview with Dianne Kurta, she told me that the museum had succeeded in getting people to linger in Torrington, with some spending money at the hotel restaurant or the pizzeria. Perhaps more importantly, the museum is now central to the identity of Torrington, allowing it to attract new residents drawn by the inexpensive housing and visible community spirit of the now primarily residential hamlet. The Gopher Hole Museum encourages the survival of Torrington by bringing indirect economic benefits. The museum is pragmatically deployed to attract tourists and to promote the local economy, but it plays a key role in the community, upholding traditional values even as it offers a self-reflective critique of the cultural productions in which it participates, from the conventions of natural history and heritage museums to nostalgic recreations of childhood and rural life. The Gopher Hole Museum creates an idealized vision of the past that includes the present, pointing to the talented people who created its dioramas, some of whom volunteer to staff it. The museum is thus a site of agency for these local residents. Although

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the dioramas are meant to be funny and to appeal to tourists, they are not jokes or tourist gimmicks. They offer a serious testament to the hard work, cooperation, good humour, and hospitality central to Torrington’s identity. The museum and its staff make it clear that outsiders are always welcome in Torrington, whether they are new business owners, families who buy affordable houses while continuing to commute to Calgary, or tourists who make the trek to the countryside during the spring and summer months.

Outsiders React Visitors have responded in diverse ways to the Gopher Hole Museum, drawing on their existing knowledge of museums, rural life, and the practices of tourism to represent the Torrington attraction in written texts, in a film, and on websites. Some of these reactions are entirely at odds with the perceptions of local people, but other visitors recognize the values promoted in the museum, seeming to do so after spending time there and interacting with staff members. Many tourists convey conflicted messages, showing respect for the efforts made by the museum’s organizers even as they position rural heritage as either strangely “other” or located strictly in the past. One particular group of tourists is nevertheless comprised of diehard fans who unabashedly adore the Gopher Hole Museum and have formed their own identities in relation to it on a promotional website. All of these outcomes are enabled by the layered narratives offered within the museum, which intersect with the expectations of the curious tourists who arrive by the thousands every year. The comments written after visiting the museum are the most frequent type of response. The remarks made in the visitor’s book inside the museum are quite brief; many praise the museum and thank its staff. Some visitors, however, evaluate the museum more fully after leaving Torrington, using online websites such as Tripadvisor and Yelp, which allow travellers to book hotels, find restaurants, and review the attractions that they have visited in order to provide fellow tourists with advice. As of 2017, at least sixty visitors had reviewed the Gopher Hole Museum on these accessible websites, leaving similar comments. Whereas several praise the Gopher Hole Museum as well constructed, creative, and ingenious, by far the most repeated assessments are that it is quirky, weird, hilarious, adorable, bizarre, and unique.43 One reviewer labels the museum “oddly delightful,” and another notes surprise at its contents, commenting that it is “not the Louvre.” Sometimes more colourful terms are used to describe the mu-

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seum, such as a “red neck dollhouse,” “theatre of the absurd,” and “furry freak show.”44 From these visitors’ points of view, the museum in Torrington is monstrous and even “insane.”45 In contrast to the former and current residents of the hamlet, audiences from outside of the region can struggle to recognize and make sense of the museum’s contents, finding the displays arbitrary, inexplicable, or simply crazy. These reactions have a common thread: visitors were surprised because the Gopher Hole Museum had not provided the experience they had expected. Their visit to Torrington both invoked and thwarted generally held understandings about museums and the tourist experience of rural settings. Some tourists, who thought they were going to visit a standard museum, make reference to the Louvre as a joke – one that is nevertheless suggestive of the conventions they had in mind: an impressive building filled with objects imbued with significant monetary, historic, or educational value. Within this framework, the architecture and contents of the Gopher Hole Museum were disappointing. One woman noted that the museum “looks from the outside like a one room schoolhouse,” suggesting that the small building did not conform to her anticipated encounter with a more distinctive and grandiose site. Other visitors had intended to visit a kind of science museum that focused on the natural history of gophers. One commentator admitted that he “had been expecting a science-centre-esque location,” for he had assumed that the museum would offer lessons about the habitat and life cycle of gophers.46 Regardless of the type of museum invoked in these comments, when visitors to Torrington were startled to find a small structure filled with apparently uninformative displays, they had to rethink their presuppositions and try to make sense of what they were seeing. A number of tourists responded to this challenge by reclassifying the Gopher Hole Museum as a freak show or theatre of the absurd. They recognized the museum as a site of display but shifted away from thinking of it as a conventionally monumental or educational organization and toward perceiving it as an entertaining exhibition of oddities. The display of humans deemed abnormal dates from at least the early modern period in Europe, but freak shows were institutionalized during the nineteenth century, when especially small, large, hairy, or otherwise remarkable humans were exhibited in travelling circuses and museums for commercial purposes.47 The best known example of this practice is P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, which included a range of attractions highlighting people deemed “freaks” in New York City from 1841 to 1865, including the hybrid “man-monkey” William Henry Johnson, a microcephalic African American dwarf.48 Comparing the Gopher Hole Museum with such potentially

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offensive precedents is both hyperbolic and revealing, for it acknowledges that the museum organizers fabricated hybrid “gopher people” to draw visitors into Torrington, doing so in a self-promotional manner akin to the techniques used by Barnum. At the same time, this comparison suggests that the dioramas in the Gopher Hole Museum were deliberately created to shock visitors rather than to promote traditional small-town values such as hospitality and community. Characterizations of the Gopher Hole Museum as a freak show are informed by another set of conventional expectations related to its rural context. Within the scholarly field of critical rural studies, the rural is a category of thought imbued with social and cultural values more than a geographical location.49 Although construed as part of a binary dynamic, the rural is not simply opposed to or other than the urban. Both categories are overlapping and mutually informing, although cultural hierarchies consistently favour the urban.50 The rural, defined in diverse and contradictory ways, is often perceived as a residual space not enclosed by urban boundaries.51 It is therefore regarded as somehow “nowhere,” available for possession, and ready to be moved into in a colonizing way by settlers and visitors rather than already functioning within broader social and economic systems.52 For the urban tourist, the rural can appear to be a simple place suitable for temporary escape or an idyllic site for leisure.53 At the same time, key literature focuses on how the concept of rurality is regularly formed in the popular imagination as a strange and frightening place located outside the boundaries of civilization. Visitors to Torrington may unconsciously draw on popular culture’s stereotypes of the rural small town as a standard location for horror movies.54 The idea that such places are supposed to be idyllic and simple but can nevertheless produce unnatural freak shows is directly confirmed in the description of the museum as a “red neck dollhouse” and informs the continual reference to the dioramas as quirky, weird, and bizarre. Those tourists who portray the Gopher Hole Museum as abnormal position themselves as ordinary people who have entered a foreign land that eludes their comprehension. Contemporary understandings of tourism also help to explain why many visitors are initially surprised and unsettled by the Gopher Hole Museum. The museum is not completely accessible to outsiders, featuring content that only former or current residents can grasp without elaborate labels or written explanations. The volunteer staff are friendly and helpful, as noted below, but do not provide detailed descriptions of the content, beyond telling stories about how the museum was founded, who constructed the dioramas, and the early battle with peta. This relative lack of direction is unusual at tourist sites. Ac-

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cording to cultural theorist Tim Edensor, tourists are rarely left to draw their own conclusions about the places they visit; they are instead presented with multiple signs, brochures, maps, and guidebooks that shape tourist experiences and indicate what should be valued.55 He argues that most museums and heritage sites provide visitors with a “directed performance” to enact, having spaces that prefigure a path to follow, including places set aside for eating, not to mention regulations about behaviour and dress. Scholars of tourism are increasingly attentive to the embodied aspects of the “tourist script” created and repeated at many sites.56 They recognize that tourists do not passively gaze at spectacles57 but enact embodied performances in response to the possibilities and limitations of the location in question.58 Yet the Gopher Hole Museum does not support this kind of tourist performance, and Torrington is not a particularly picturesque town, with no other historic sites or shops to visit outside of the museum and only a few small restaurants. In addition to lacking the structure of a contemporary museum and offering a potentially frightening vision of rurality, the museum and its surroundings do not support the expectations of seasoned tourists, leaving some of them at a loss, at least temporarily. The provisional nature of such negative reactions is worth stressing because visitors overwhelmingly recommend a visit to the Gopher Hole Museum, claiming that it is adorable and fascinating, even when they also judge it to be bizarre. These contradictory responses – many tourists report being both shocked and delighted – are in keeping with the multiple layers of meaning produced within the museum itself, which combine references to natural history with explicitly fabricated scenes related to rural heritage and childhood. At the same time, the lack of a standard tourist script and amenities in Torrington ultimately encourages many visitors to improvise and make their own meanings at the museum, together with the friends and family members accompanying them. In a number of comments on Tripadvisor, tourists note that although they had been skeptical about visiting the museum or had brought reluctant companions with them, everyone had laughed and had fun in the end. Their enjoyment developed as they strove to understand the museum as a group, assisted by its friendly staff, mostly comprised of older women who live in Torrington. Visitors to the Gopher Hole Museum are warmly welcomed by these volunteers, who do not assume the role of museum expert, provide educational lessons, or tell anyone what to do. Instead, these women encourage the visitors to have fun, take as many photographs as they like, vote for their favourite diorama, and even try on the papier-mâché gopher mask formerly worn by residents during parades

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in Torrington. These acts of generosity and sharing convey the values of hospitality, community, and innocent childhood fun to tourists, who include such aspects in their remarks without ever relating them to the scenes pictured in the dioramas. The interactions at the museum lead many visitors to feel that they have received special treatment and have participated in an adventure, which prompts them to rethink their presuppositions about museums and rurality but does not undermine their perceptions of the museum as strange. Only two of the dioramas at the Gopher Hole Museum directly address tourist expectations, with gophers posed to portray places and activities located outside of Torrington. One scene, formerly labelled “Indian Village” – the label was removed in 2018 – features a single gopher in a feathered headdress and loincloth standing beside a decorated tipi near a camp fire and an animal hide drying on a traditional stretcher (figure 3.7). The mountains in the background situate its inhabitant elsewhere, to the west of Torrington near the Rocky Mountains, suggesting another time and place. The setting may refer to the longstanding display of an “Indian Village” at the Calgary Stampede since 1912, although the installation of two dozen tipis near the Elbow River was recently renamed the “Elbow River Camp” to avoid using outdated terms.59 The “Indian Village” diorama at the Gopher Hole Museum draws on and rehearses stereotypical images of Indigenous peoples, found in other small museums and shops throughout Alberta.60 It provides imagery familiar to visitors hoping to see such “exotic” spectacles while in Alberta, including Europeans with inaccurate or romantic understandings of Indigenous cultures, discussed in chapter 5. The second unusual diorama is labelled “Prehistoric Times” and includes a “cave man” gopher in an animal skin garment standing near skeletal remains while capturing a lizard for dinner. Unlike the “Indian Village” diorama, which is set near the mountains, the prehistoric scene invokes the desert landscape of southern Alberta, famous for its dinosaur remains as well as the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, a world-renowned collection of over 130,000 prehistoric fossils located near Drumheller.61 Both the “Indian Village” and “Prehistoric Times” dioramas in the Gopher Hole Museum thus refer to cultural attractions located within driving range of Torrington. They draw on familiar imagery to acknowledge and appeal to visitors from outside of the region, thereby positioning the Gopher Hole Museum as a legitimate tourist destination. Many visitors to the Gopher Hole Museum understand the site as a tourist attraction, responding to it in brief reviews written for travel websites, but a few people have created elaborate replies in other media. These tourists pay more attention to the contents and spirit of the museum, moving away from judg-

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3.7 “Indian Village” diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

mental terms that focus on the visit itself. They produce new and distinctive forms of culture highlighting the ways that the Gopher Hole Museum can function as an open and “producerly” text that promotes a complementary form of “reflective nostalgia,” challenging consumers to recreate rather than simply respond to or interact with the museum. These recreations confirm John Fiske’s argument that audiences now have a considerable freedom to become producers in the cultural economy based on an increasing lack of distinction between producers and consumers.62 Those who invent new cultural forms in response to the museum take up such a position, doing so in ways that can draw more attention to themselves than the museum. Even though these producers admire the museum, they continue to rely on stereotypical understandings of rurality

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and risk displacing or at least misconstruing the museum organizers and residents of Torrington. Arguably the most sophisticated response to the Gopher Hole Museum is a fourteen-minute film called World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, now available online.63 Debuted by directors Chelsea McMullan and Douglas Nayler at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015, it was nominated for an award for best short documentary. According to an interview with McMullan, the directors were relocating from Vancouver to Toronto when they stopped in at the museum and felt compelled to make a film about it.64 The resulting work uses documentary conventions such as hand-held cameras and awkward, unrehearsed interviews with Dianne Kurta to present information about the foundation and fabrication of the Gopher Hole Museum. Many scenes move outside of the museum to show the town of Torrington, focusing on its decline: a torn flag blows in the prairie wind, wide empty streets are lined with shabby storefronts no longer in use, old railway tracks are pulled up and abandoned in the middle of a farmer’s field, a school-crossing sign that has been spray-painted over because the school is now closed. Interviews with long-time residents record them remembering the excitement of the Canadian Pacific Railway train coming to town and the bustling nature of Torrington, which once had two general stores, a machinery dealership, three service centres, a blacksmith shop, and a restaurant. The film’s overall theme of irremediable loss becomes unmistakable in an extended shot of an old-fashioned television that screens what appears to be a 1950s documentary about the demise of ancient Egypt. The female narrator explains that Egyptians believed in cyclical time, with an inevitable rebirth and renewal, but finally had to recognize that the good times were not coming back. Although this comparison between an ancient civilization and a contemporary hamlet in rural Alberta is surprising, the filmmakers stress the cyclical nature of the seasons in Torrington, beginning with shots of the Gopher Hole Museum during the summer and ending in the winter. The final scene shows the older inhabitants of Torrington square dancing in slow motion, with the overlaid musical score helping to create a surreal, melancholy effect. In the end, the museum is depicted as the last gasp of a dying culture that will soon be lost forever. Although McMullan and Nayler’s film is beautifully made and recognizes the intricate relationship between the Gopher Hole Museum and its location in the hamlet of Torrington, it ignores the optimistic and good-humoured aspects of the museum. The film highlights death, loss, and mourning rather than recognizing the museum’s contributions to a place that has continued to

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adapt and persevere while maintaining the values of hospitality and cooperation. The film potentially reinforces stereotypes about the backward nature of rural life, depicting heritage as always already in the past, not remade in the present. The filmmakers close down the invocation of reflective nostalgia in the Gopher Hole Museum by insisting on a view of history that is more traditional than the one supported by the structure and contents of the museum. The film was nevertheless praised by Dianne Kurta during our interview in 2016 for drawing renewed attention to the museum, which provided another round of free advertising. Her positive response to the film reconfirms the museum organizers’ lack of interest in controlling the meaning of the museum, as well as its openness to diverse interpretations. The museum volunteers had welcomed the urban filmmakers and accepted the results, being well aware of the rather mournful tone that emerged from the final version.65 They had stepped aside to let the filmmakers tell their own story about the museum, in keeping with the hospitable role that the museum staff regularly adopt with tourists. This supportive act was not based on deference to authority figures but on a continued dedication to the values of sharing and sociability, which are fundamental to the foundation and continuation of the Gopher Hole Museum. Another reaction to the Gopher Hole Museum differs from both the comments written online and the documentary film because its creators convey an unfettered adoration for the museum, promoting it on a professional looking website.66 This website is often mistaken as an official source that stems directly from the organizers in Torrington, as it provides information about the museum, including its opening hours, entry fees, location, a contact phone number, and images of almost all of the dioramas. The web masters have no direct connection with the museum, however, and made the site without receiving permission. They too were tourists who visited Torrington and felt compelled to recreate it – in this case, using a digital format. Unlike the film made by McMullan and Nayler, the authors of the website are not named, although a link giving credit for the photographs leads to the main page of the travel and lifestyle blog written by Raymond Walsh, otherwise known as Man on the Lam, who left the corporate world to commit himself to “escapism.”67 His blog site includes a post from 2012 that features numerous pictures of the Gopher Hole Museum and a brief text that portrays the dioramas as both wonderful and creepy, reinforcing the views of other online reviewers. The actual creators of the promotional website are likely the owners and staff of Evolution Web Management, a digital media company based in St Mary’s, Ontario, identified on the home page. A disclaimer on the contact page admits, “[W]e have created this tribute website

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as fans of the Gopher Hole Museum.” The use of the term tribute suggests that the site was made to honour the museum by “fans” who share an enthusiasm for it and wish to extend its sphere of influence beyond Torrington. Yet fandom is increasingly studied by scholars as a key way that people participate actively in popular culture, forming communities to reinterpret the texts that they embrace, sometimes producing fan magazines, wearing costumes based on beloved characters, and sharing images on social media networks.68 The web designer fans of the Gopher Hole Museum likewise reshape rather than simply reproduce the museum, intervening in a way that promotes their own company but also restages many of the strategies used in Torrington. Like the museum’s organizers, the designers highlight their own skills, identify themselves with gophers, invite the active participation of visitors, and position the museum within contemporary culture, not a rural past that will soon disappear. The designers of the promotional website take up the role of gophers, writing all text from the point of view of the rodents. “Hello World! We are the Gophers of Torrington, Alberta, Canada!” is the first sentence on the home page, greeting visitors before inviting them to come to the hamlet in Alberta. These online gophers are unremitting in their hospitality and in responding to the needs of visitors. The website includes activities for children, notably a downloadable page with a gopher figure that can be coloured, in keeping with the museum’s focus on childhood and having fun, albeit without reference to nostalgia. The website places the Gopher Hole Museum firmly in the present, with gophers enlivened by voices but also by means of the “Meet the Team” page, which introduces five gopher characters invented by the creators of the website based on actual gopher figures on display in the museum. Like a corporate website, these gophers are pictured in headshots accompanied by biographical information. The gophers are also given nicknames and provide data about their favourite song, occupation, and ambition, more in line with the construction of identity in social media formats such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram than a corporate site. The humorous intent of this information – graphic designer gopher Jonathan lists Kanye West’s “Gold Digger” as his favourite song – extends the museum’s ethos while tying its display methods to contemporary culture, not a distant and dying past. In contrast to the film by McMullan and Nayler, the promotional website argues that the museum actively responds to change, noting on the home page, “We gophers are a resilient species and are constantly adapting to new conditions and learning new skills.” By taking up the point of view of resident gophers rather than visiting tourists, the designers of the tribute website recognize the ways that the Gopher Hole Museum nego-

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tiates the realities of the present instead of attempting to forestall them. In many ways, this website provides the fullest and fairest representation of the museum by associating it with lively, amusing, and welcoming residents equipped with an adaptable nature.

Conclusion Although easily dismissed as a quirky, off-beat rural museum, the Gopher Hole Museum is a complex “open text” that both employs and critiques the conventional methods used in natural history and heritage museums to offer multiple narratives about childhood, heritage, and rural life, addressing local people as well as tourists. The organizers of the museum are active agents who take pride in the local skills used to produce the dioramas, which in turn promote the longstanding values and heritage of Torrington and its surrounding region. At the same time, however, they also deploy humour in a subtle self-critique. These meticulously crafted dioramas draw attention to their own fabrication and contain references fully recognizable only to former and local residents. Similarly, the museum draws on nostalgic tropes in ways that embrace a wistful affection for the past while still welcoming modernity. The multivalent displays thus make the contradictions and tensions of Torrington accessible to insiders and outsiders alike, creating a space of open-ended meaning making. Some visitors find the scenes of taxidermy gophers simultaneously creepy, weird, and delightful, reinforcing stereotypes about rural life, others portray them as the last gasp of a dying rural culture, and a few are ardent fans. The organizers of the Torrington Gopher Hole Museum do not attempt to control or forestall such responses. On the contrary, they encourage the representation of the Gopher Hole Museum in various media, including a sophisticated film and website that act as forms of promotion, potentially bringing new audiences to the museum for a chat and an opportunity to develop an appreciation for Torrington and its people. This analysis of the Gopher Hole museum is relevant to a wide range of historic sites and museums. The discussion sheds light on the factors that can make other small-town museums successful and thus able to serve a local populace and to please international tourists. The museum in Torrington was a grassroots endeavour envisioned and created by local people; it remains tied to its community but is still able to attract outsiders with little knowledge of the town or its history. Although the contents of the Gopher Hole Museum are

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certainly remarkable, the low-tech methods used could be emulated to a greater degree in other museums, especially smaller, unfunded ones struggling to maintain a local identity in the face of competing demands to engage with digital technology or to professionalize. The museum in Torrington is based on the strength of local skills and talents, acknowledging and playing with the conventions of museum display and heritage discourse instead of trying to conform to them. It succeeds in large part because it sends mixed messages and is able to engage diverse viewers equipped with various forms of knowledge. These visitors are challenged by the dioramas but nevertheless respond to the invitation to have fun on their own terms, remaking the museum in ways that are meaningful to them. In the end, the Gopher Hole Museum reveals that an ingenious and subversive cultural form can attract tourists, serve the local population, and promote debates about rural heritage, even in a remote place that seems to be in the middle of nowhere.

 O  4

E COUNTERING

IL AND WATER

The Politics of Play at Extraction Museums and Historic Sites

The Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site is a glorious ruin. Constructed by the Canadian Pacific Railway (cpr) between 1912 and 1914 to bring water from the Bow River to the parched prairie land of southeastern Alberta, the aqueduct was declared structurally unsound in 1979. It was too costly, however, to demolish the 3.2-kilometre-long steel-reinforced concrete flume and its massive pedestals, set on bases installed over 2 metres below the ground. A chain-link fence was therefore erected around the aqueduct to protect the public and preserve the visibly decaying structure, officially designated a Provincial Historic Resource in 1980 and a National Historic Site in 1983. Now visitors who pull off of Highway 1 and drive down a dirt road to see the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site are greeted by a series of informational placards, a welcome kiosk staffed by guides during the summer, and a small playground for children. An impressive albeit crumbling feat of engineering technology, the empty aqueduct remains fenced, looming 20 metres above the landscape. Its stature and evident deterioration enable visitors to engage with the challenging history of the site, encountering the environmental impact and ultimate failure of the aqueduct. The Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site is worth studying in detail, for it provides ways to think complexly about the representation of natural resources in Alberta, offering a welcome contrast to the celebration of technological innovation at science and discovery centres.

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Currently eleven museums and historic sites in Alberta are primarily devoted to presenting visitors with information about the extraction, modification, and transportation of natural resources, although almost every display of heritage in the province includes references to the history of industry and agriculture.1 Three of the sites highlighting extraction are dedicated to oil and gas: the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray, the Leduc No. 1 Energy Discovery Centre in Leduc, and the Turner Valley Gas Plant in Turner Valley. Three are dedicated to coal: the Diplomat Mine and Interpretive Site in Forestburg, the Atlas Coal Mine in East Coulee, and the Bellevue Underground Mine Tour in Bellevue. Two are dedicated to forestry: the Alberta Forest Service Museum in Hinton and the Whitecourt and District Forest Interpretive Centre in Whitecourt. One is dedicated to clay: the Medalta Historic Clay District in Medicine Hat. And two are dedicated to water: the Taber Irrigation Impact Museum in Taber and the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, described above. All of these sites are unique; some permit visitors onsite engagement with the locations and processes related to the extraction and modification of natural resources, including those in Turner Valley, Forestburg, East Coulee, Bellevue, Medicine Hat, and Brooks, and others provide a more conventional museum encounter with displays about and objects stemming from extraction industries, including those in Fort McMurray, Leduc, Taber, Hinton, and Whitecourt. Even this subdivision is too broad, for the Alberta Forest Service Museum in Hinton acts as an educational training site for forest rangers in the province, promoting conservation and sustainability, and the Whitecourt and District Forest Interpretive Centre defends the harvesting of trees, receiving financial support from local companies engaged in forestry. Despite the specificity of each type of exhibition, it is useful to categorize them thematically in terms of extraction, setting aside the usual mechanisms of classification – region, type of facility, main source of funding, organizational structure, professional affiliation, and official heritage designation2 – to foreground the representation of natural resources in Alberta, analyzing the range of display strategies used to portray nature, land, and the environment. This chapter compares and contrasts the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site with the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray, drawing on other examples when needed, including museums and sites located outside of Alberta. At first glance, the Brooks Aqueduct and the Oil Sands Discovery Centre seem to have little in common with each other: the aqueduct is a historic site rather than a discovery centre or museum complex, it is dedicated to water rather than oil, and it is primarily funded by the government, receiving

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little of the corporate support enjoyed by the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. The aqueduct is exclusively an outdoor facility in southeastern Alberta, whereas the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, located in the north of the province, has a major indoor component. Although the economies of both Brooks and Fort McMurray now depend heavily on the oil and gas industry, the extraction methods used in the northern oil sands (sometimes called tar sands) are notoriously polluting and embroiled in political struggles that defend and resist them, creating an inescapable context for interpreting the Discovery Centre.3 In contrast, the politics of water rise and fall in prominence, tending to focus on pollution and the effects of oil pipelines, with less attention currently paid, at least in Alberta, to the environmental or social costs of irrigation technologies.4 Also striking is the fact that the Brooks Aqueduct is a damaged relic from the past, surrounded by a forbidding fence, whereas the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, which opened in 1985 and was renovated between 1998 and 2002, resembles a modern science centre, with spacious, colourful, interactive displays and a theatre. Presumably polar opposites in terms of history, purpose, and contemporary concerns, the Brooks Aqueduct and Oil Sands Discovery Centre can nevertheless be brought together to provide new ways of thinking about the aesthetics and dominant messages of each site, revealing surprising links between them that are otherwise easy to overlook. The first section of this chapter focuses on the aqueduct as a ruin, a term that is meant to be suggestive rather than negative, in keeping with the arguments made by cultural theorist Tim Edensor. According to him, industrial ruins offer limitless possibilities for encounters with the unexpected, enabling moments of adventure and imaginative play that diverge from the increasingly regulated spaces of modern cities and tourist attractions.5 Instead of assuming that ruins are wasteful, Edensor insists that they usefully contest the capitalist effort to purchase and reterritorialize all space. His points can be assessed by means of an analysis of the visual and written arguments made at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, along with the embodied experiences that the site offers to visitors. Although the aqueduct is framed by accompanying text as a monument to engineers and pioneers in a way that reinforces longstanding settler narratives, the historic site also promotes visitors’ physical encounter with environmental change, advancing multiple opportunities to experience the unpredictable outcomes of industrialization. The second section studies how the Oil Sands Discovery Centre extends visitors a rather different encounter, providing a clean, bright, and carefully managed series of spaces for learning about the history and scientific methods of

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removing oil from the sands in northern Alberta. The exhibitions in Fort McMurray present the exploitation of the oil sands as both inevitable and socially beneficial, a pro-industry message that is hardly surprising given the corporate support for and location of the centre near major extraction zones. A comparison with the aqueduct allows the analysis of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre to go beyond a superficial critique of its corporate message by highlighting how this information is conveyed, particularly the strategies used to neutralize the pro-industry content of the centre and deflect criticism of it. Not only does the institution in Fort McMurray avoid most signs of ruin, decay, or controversy, but it also features children as its primary audience, in keeping with the conventions of a science centre. I argue that the aesthetics and interactive exhibitions at the Discovery Centre link the extraction of oil from the region with the pleasurable play of curious young boys, suggesting that working in the oil sands is like digging in a sandbox with dump trucks. This association of childish play with the exploration and excavation of land is far from novel, dating from at least the nineteenth century in Canada, when some of the earliest museums were founded by natural history societies as places where children were encouraged to enjoy, investigate, and possess nature for spiritual, educational, and entrepreneurial gain.6 Thus, despite appearing to be modern and on the cutting edge in its presentation, the Oil Sands Discovery Centre adheres to a traditional underlying ideology that is based on nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century understandings of nature, similar to the ones that encouraged the construction of the Brooks Aqueduct in the 1910s. Nevertheless, the rundown aqueduct no longer provides evidence of the human mastery of nature so strongly featured at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. The Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site portrays human interaction with nature as unstable and interdependent, a view in keeping with arguments made by contemporary environmentalists, among others. In this sense, the “ruined” aqueduct is more relevant and innovative than the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, despite the flashy appearance of the latter. In the end, however, both representations of the extraction, modification, and transportation of natural resources share similar blind spots. Neither the centre nor the historic site acknowledges the role of its respective technologies in displacing Indigenous cultures by advancing the colonial appropriation of land and water. During a period of increasing government and public support for the recognition of the devastating effects of colonization on Indigenous people in Canada, attending to these oversights can contribute in a small way to addressing some of these effects in Alberta, a topic also considered in the introduction to this book and in chapter 5.7

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My methodology is at once historical, informed by years of archival work on natural history and other museums across Canada, and art historical, as I apply the skills of close visual analysis to selected museums and sites currently operating in Alberta. Bringing a sophisticated understanding of the history of museums to the topic complements my detailed examinations of particular museums and historic sites, ensuring that my arguments consider both longstanding museum conventions and the specific forms of visual communication operating today. As indicated in the introduction to this book, I have visited the museums in question numerous times, as well as many other museums and heritage sites in Canada, Scotland, England, France, the United States, and Australia. Although this chapter is informed by the diversity of these encounters, it prioritizes the messages conveyed by the visual and written arguments made at the “site of representation,” namely the visual and material installations at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre and the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, in keeping with the methods developed by critical museum theorists such as Carol Duncan and Mieke Bal.8 This approach privileges the content of the exhibitions themselves instead of the official statements made about them in print and online or the intentions of authorities such as funders, directors, managers, board members, and curators. Paying close attention to the site of representation enables me to consider what kinds of arguments are made both explicitly and implicitly, what information is presented, and what is rendered invisible at each location. In addition to providing a critical view of particular extraction museums and historic sites in Alberta, this chapter is meant to develop ways of thinking that can be tested in other settings dedicated to representing natural resources, allowing diverse visitors and researchers to determine how their selected case deviates from or overlaps with the examples outlined here.

The Glorious Aqueduct When visitors to the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site turn off a gravel road to enter the parking lot, they see simple wooden shacks, gazebos, picnic tables, and benches inviting them to rest. From this setting, they can look at the aqueduct stretching into the distance, its flume suspended above the landscape by hundreds of sets of legs that span the valley with mathematical precision. This image of a rational structure dominating its surroundings, however, is countered by the appearance of the empty and apparently useless aqueduct, with its orange stains and patchy discolouration. The Brooks Aqueduct is

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a ruin at once impressive and past its prime, demonstrating a function that is no longer necessary. According to Edensor, ruins feature lack, for “in the ruin, [the] sequences of productive action reliant on the organization of time, space and materiality are now absent.”9 This absence is nevertheless appealing, part of the reason why crumbling buildings have been admired and used as attractive backdrops for leisure activities since at least the eighteenth century in Europe.10 Echoing this tradition, the aqueduct is a ghostly relic that can be associated with romantic notions of death and decay. Like ancient ruins, including the remains of Roman aqueducts, the Brooks Aqueduct is picturesque, especially in the summer months when it towers above wind-blown prairie grasses and an artificially created reservoir, providing scenery during a picnic lunch or impromptu break from highway travel (figure 4.1). The invitation to relax beside the Brooks Aqueduct is enhanced rather than discouraged by its damaged appearance. The fence around the aqueduct and

4.1 Picturesque view of the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta, 2020.

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posted warning signs indicate that it is dangerous, part of the allure of modern industrial ruins, according to Edensor. He argues that the forbidding fences around abandoned ruins create an uncanny space amid a familiar realm, becoming spaces for illicit play. Children and adults alike are drawn to the risky nature of ruins, engaging in forms of adventurous play that provide escape from the surveillance and structured organization of modern life.11 Making use of that which is designated “useless” is exhilarating and can be associated with freedom while contesting the capitalist idea that all space can be managed and made lucrative. Visitors may be drawn closer by this sense of the otherness and decrepitude of the aqueduct even as the fence keeps them at bay, preventing them from climbing the narrow ladders up to the flume. Unlike the industrial ruins praised by Edensor, the Brooks Aqueduct has not been abandoned. Despite its ruined appearance, the site is presented as a tourist attraction, primarily at its entrance, which features informational placards that direct both the interpretations of the aqueduct and the movements of visitors. Scholars of tourism study how particular sites emerge as “tourist places” when they are appropriated, used, and made part of the living memory and accumulated life narratives of people performing tourism.12 They analyze how tourists enact embodied performances in response to the possibilities and limitations of sites, arguing that “[t]ourists are rarely left to draw their own conclusions about objects or places before them. Instead, they more often confront a body of public discourse – signs, maps, guides, and guidebooks – that repeatedly mark the boundaries of significance and value at tourist sites.”13 Such claims are borne out at the entrance to the Brooks Aqueduct, where colourful placards advertise tourist destinations in the Badlands of southern Alberta, providing descriptions and a map. These signs, including one that invites tourists to follow the “Irrigation Trail” by visiting dams, reservoirs, lakes, and museums devoted to water in the region, position the aqueduct within a broader history of the province that features technologies of irrigation and the lives of white settlers. At the same time, nearby plaques indicate that the Brooks Aqueduct is officially recognized as important by organizations outside of the region, including the federal government. A brass plate topped with the Canadian coat of arms verifies that the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada considers the aqueduct a site of national significance.14 Such notices insist that the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site offers an organized tourist experience of a substantial monument, offsetting the perception of the aqueduct as a dangerously exciting ruin.

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4.2 View of the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta, showing signage and historic plaque, 2011.

The aqueduct is primarily depicted as an engineering marvel in the information provided at the entrance to the site. Text on the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada plaque notes that the structure was part of a large irrigation scheme to transform 55,000 hectares of land east of Brooks into farmland suitable for settlement (figure 4.2). Another brass plaque at the entrance designates the aqueduct a national historic civic-engineering site, with text indicating that it is “[a] monument to the achievement of those civil engineers who developed irrigation in southern Alberta.” Details about this achievement are posted in the placards, as well as in the pamphlets available at the information kiosk. Emphasizing quantitative information, they indicate that the design of the aqueduct features 1,030 supporting columns and a unique flume that was at one time the largest cement structure of its kind in the world.15 Another engineering highlight is the underground siphon that once forced water to travel beneath the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks that intersected the path of the aqueduct, a remarkable accomplishment that continues to demonstrate how irrigation and transportation technologies were developed in tandem, shaping

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the appearance and expansion of each other. The aqueduct was built, after all, by the cpr’s irrigation division, which designed it to promote settlement in the “Arid Region” given by the Dominion Government to the cpr as payment for expanding the railway in order to help colonize western Canada and create its economic value.16 This positive representation of the Brooks Aqueduct is in keeping with widespread government support for what is sometimes called “industrial archaeology” in the United Kingdom. Archaeologist Hilary Orange writes, “During the second half of the 20th century … [a] transformation occurred which turned industrial remains from derelict functional structures to icons of an innovative industrial past.”17 Reclaiming and resignifying industrial ruins works to erase signs of waste and turn sites of uncertainty into productive and meaningful places.18 When the Brooks Aqueduct is refigured as a powerful monument to those who made it, rather than a derelict and outmoded irrigation technology, it promotes a positive historical narrative about the region and the province. The aqueduct is repurposed as a site of triumphant historical memory and tourist relaxation, preventing it from becoming a largely forgotten and useless edifice. Yet the aqueduct has hardly been cleaned up and made pristine. Conservators have not touched the structure, which remains riddled with signs of damage and wear. Nor has the aqueduct been restored to demonstrate its former use. The empty flume is notably unproductive, especially when contrasted with the land-based canal that runs beside it. Built in 1979, this canal effectively replaced the aging aqueduct, providing farmers with a more reliable and substantial flow of water than the aqueduct had ever delivered.19 One placard at the entrance to the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, entitled “River in the Sky,” acknowledges that the canal was dug to improve irrigation in the region in response to the ongoing and almost immediate problems with the aqueduct. Despite towering above the visually unremarkable canal, the aqueduct never lived up to the hopes of its engineers, transporting less water at a slower rate than expected because of the flume’s rough interior. The sluggish flow of water encouraged the growth of weeds inside the flume, and they needed to be cleared out on a regular basis. The constant and costly maintenance of the aqueduct made it seem more like a lazy artificial river in the sky than a modern form of technology. This suggestion that the Brooks Aqueduct was not an entirely successful feat of engineering is at odds with the dominant message at the entrance to the site. A similarly mixed message, however, is reinforced by the guides hired to greet

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visitors. These student educators provide information about the role of irrigation in attracting pioneering farmers to the “Arid Region,” noting that early surveyors had declared the area unsuitable for agriculture. The guides refer to John Palliser, the Irish-born geographer and explorer who investigated the climate and ecology of western Canada between 1857 and 1861, reporting that a semi-arid steppe region located mostly in southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, now called Palliser’s Triangle, was inhospitable.20 Whenever I was there, the guide displayed this triangular area, highlighted in yellow on a seemingly handdrawn map, explaining that it was subsequently developed for agriculture by determined pioneers who required various methods of irrigation (figure 4.3). The implication was that prior to the arrival of irrigation technologies, the land in Palliser’s Triangle was largely vacant and useless. The introduction of water to the area effectively invested the land with meaning, launching its history of significance. Even as the guides praise the Brooks Aqueduct, they draw attention to its many problems. They explain that the aqueduct never operated at full capacity; difficulties with the relatively weak Portland cement – previously untested in the climatic conditions of southern Alberta – were evident as early as 1918, when the first pieces fell away from the concrete shell and the alkaline water began dissolving the surface of the pedestals. Throughout the 1920s, the cpr constantly repaired the aqueduct, replacing the leaking expansion joints, adding drainage ditches, and using a cement gun to spray the rotting pedestals and flaking shell.21 The guides direct visitors’ attention to braces still in place, which support damaged sections of the aqueduct (figure 4.4). They then describe how annual repair work was continued by farmers in the Eastern Irrigation District – the irrigation region in Alberta where the Brooks Aqueduct is located – after they organized to take over water management in 1935, negotiating a payment of $300,000 from the cpr in recognition of the ongoing challenges in the district, including the crumbling aqueduct.22 This counternarrative indicates that the Brooks Aqueduct was in many ways a failure, creating a financial drain on the cpr, government, and even farmers until it was replaced by a land canal. Discussions with student educators at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site reveal a richer story about early irrigation technologies, inviting visitors to consider a range of contradictory messages. The experience of the aqueduct becomes increasingly complex if visitors elect to take a closer look at the structure, following the self-guided tour highly recommended by the student educators and outlined in one of the pamphlets at the information kiosk.23 This tour is worth analyzing in some detail, for it is

4.3 Top Map displayed by a student guide at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta, 2015. 4.4 Bottom Brace still in place for repairs, Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta, 2015.

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arguably the most directed part of any visit, enabling the emergence of the Brooks Aqueduct as a tourist attraction, with an emphasis on embodied experience notably lacking at the entrance to the site. Scholars engaged in heritage and tourism studies explore the dialogic exchange between people, places, and things, examining the embodied nature of encounters at historic and other sites. For these scholars, tourism is a fully sensorial practice that contributes to the continual cultural production and reproduction of heritage.24 Although tourists are offered a scripted or directed performance to follow, as noted above, they are not passive consumers; tourists bring their own experiences to sites while creatively deploying their bodies in space, resulting in the mutual configuration of tourist and place.25 Anthropologist Setha Low, for example, has studied how people walking through organized sites are moving fields that make what she calls “embodied space.”26 A similar understanding can be brought to the self-guided tour of the Brooks Aqueduct, which produces a directed performance of tourism that highlights both the materiality of the aqueduct and the physicality of its surroundings while recognizing that different tourists will bring varying memories, knowledges, and bodies to the tour. During one of my visits to the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, I did the self-guided tour with a friend, leaving the managed entrance to the historic site and its picturesque view in order to draw nearer to the chainlink fence and rough texture of the aqueduct. The fourteen-page guide directed us to walk along the unpaved trail surrounding the aqueduct, originally created during the early twentieth century to accommodate the vehicles and train cars required during the construction process. The first of the twenty-two stops highlighted in the trail guide re-emphasizes the marvelous engineering of the aqueduct by noting, for example, that the 2.1-metre-deep holes required for the pedestals had been blasted out of the hardpack with dynamite. However, the problems with the aqueduct are also addressed near the beginning of the tour, which directed our attention to the plywood forms that had held the poured cement in place during ongoing restoration efforts, especially the one left strapped to the belly of the flume after the last repair period before the land canal was dug. During the walking tour, the mixed messages provided by the entrance placards and student guides were reinforced, but at the same time, a different version of the aqueduct began to emerge as we moved around it. Instead of an emphasis on how its technology attempted to manage and control water as a natural resource, the aqueduct was reframed as an active part of nature involved in co-creating an ecosystem to be enjoyed by visitors in a sensual and embodied manner.

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The majority of the stops along the self-guided tour explained the unexpected features of the aqueduct, noting how it had interacted with its environment to create a new ecosystem in collaboration with plants and animals. We learned that because the leaking expansion joints could never be fully repaired, a number of plants were nourished by water seepage from the flume, including the wild rose, called “a survival food rich in Vitamin C” (stop number 5), and sage, “used as a seasoning as well as an herbal medicine by Native peoples” (stop number 18). At this point, we were invited to “crush a few leaves to enjoy a real prairie fragrance,” which turned our attention away from a detailed visual evaluation of the life around the aqueduct and toward our sense of smell, along with the suggestion of taste. These embodied interactions positioned us as active participants in the production of place while portraying the aqueduct as a vital part of the prairie landscape rather than as a marvelous technology that had helped to defy, improve, or colonize the region. A few stops later, the trail guide explained that “the orange-coloured ‘stain’ on the concrete is in fact a member of a very large and diverse group of plants – the lichens,” which have no roots and can grow on rock, soil, wood, or tree bark. In this narrative, even the supposedly ugly or failed aspects of the aqueduct supported life, transforming the area into a marsh complete with cattails and frequented by mule deer, coyotes, badgers, gophers, jackrabbits, songbirds, partridges, ducks, and other waterfowl. We also read that colonies of cliff swallows regularly built their jug-like mud nests under the girders and braces of the aqueduct, indicating the various ways that the structure was altered by the prairie environment with which it continually interacted. During the walking tour, the aqueduct began to emerge as a living entity, moving beyond its characterization as a “river in the sky” to become an integral part of a localized ecosystem. This insistence on the life of the aqueduct is not limited to the self-guided walking tour. Consider the following description of the structure, which is the first sentence to appear on the government website as well as in several pamphlets: “Like a giant centipede, the Brooks Aqueduct spans a shallow 3.2 km wide valley, suspending a concrete sling twenty metres above the parched prairie landscape.”27 This imagery does more than compare the paired pedestals with the legs of an arthropod; it suggests that the aqueduct is a living creature, although one typically considered either ugly or monstrously fascinating. Centipedes are notoriously complex, consisting of numerous segments, and although they may be unwelcome in domestic spaces, they are also beneficial, devouring such bothersome insects as bed bugs.28 In tension with the quantitative information that is also provided, this characterization of the aqueduct

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portrays it as part of nature and not human-made; the structure acquires agency as an entity that never fully cooperated with humans and could not be controlled by them. The Brooks Aqueduct is not represented as a masterful imposition on a more or less passive natural habitat that is controlled by it for human use but instead as a changing part of nature that is understood as participating in a shifting set of relationships that are neither fully good nor entirely harmful. The ambivalent relationship between the aqueduct and humans is directly invoked in the trail guide, albeit to a lesser degree than references to plant and animal life. A few of the stops move beyond discussions of the construction and continual repair of the aqueduct to consider more mundane encounters. The self-guided walking tour drew our attention to the ladders used by workmen known as ditch riders, who regularly climbed to the top of the aqueduct, balanced on the rim of the flume, and walked its length, looking for plant growth or debris that might stop the flow of water. The voice of one such ditch rider is recorded in the pamphlet: “[M]y nostalgia [about the aqueduct] goes right out of the window because if you’re walking along the thing … full of water moving at about 1.1 metres per second average velocity and the wind is blowing from the south, and you’re looking down 18.3 metres … it’s not fun.” During this particular stop along the tour, we were again faced with the physicality of the aqueduct, although in this case with an emphasis on its negative impact on the bodies and lives of the locals who regularly engaged with it. The summer guide staffing the welcome kiosk had already told us something about these ladders, noting that local people would climb up them in order to catch the fish swimming in the flume. This striking vision of fishers precariously suspended above the prairie provides another example of the unforeseen results of the aqueduct, highlighting the multiple kinds of interactions between humans, nature, and technology by moving beyond a triumphant account of the management of nature by modern technology. During the self-guided walking tour, the aqueduct emerged as an unwieldy living creature that formed multiple relationships within an ecosystem that it had helped to create. This representation of the unexpected results of the aqueduct stands in contrast both to the glorification of it as an engineering marvel and to the usual discussions of the environment at other historic sites and museums in Alberta. Human intervention in the land is more typically framed within a scientific discourse to explain that although industrial mistakes were made in the past, causing unchecked pollution or rampant deforestation, increased knowledge has now rectified such problems, effacing them from the

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landscape. This is the kind of story told at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, as noted below. A similar account of well-meaning mistakes that are now fully erased is not repeated during the self-guided tour of the Brooks Aqueduct, during which the structure is largely associated with the creation of a rich and wonderful ecosystem. The tour generally conveys an environmentalist ethos that strives to understand the impact of industrialization on nature and to conserve current ecosystems, albeit without directly invoking these values at the heritage site. The visitor is instead asked to experience fully the natural environment in and around the aqueduct. This appeal to sensory engagement and interdependence is increasingly common at heritage and historic sites. According to anthropologist Veronica Strang, there is an important relationship between the environmental movement and the tourist industry. She argues that both interests promote the transformation of sites of production into those of consumption, in which the material environment is experienced aesthetically, spiritually, intellectually, and recreationally rather than in terms of economic rationalism.29 In her case studies, Strang explores the contested use of water, with tourists interpreting their interactions with such natural resources not in commercial terms but as sites of physical pleasure and leisure, in contrast to the rationalist insistence on productivity and efficiency regularly found in nonurban and rural areas. Her work demonstrates that a concern for ecology can be taken up by privileged outsiders and tourists who assume that their interactions with water or other natural resources are at odds with industrialization and do not have economic implications. Along these lines, the welcome representation of the changeable environmental conditions at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic site may have unanticipated side effects, reinforcing positions of privilege while diverting attention away from more fully historical and critical accounts of the structure. Several negative or at least troubling aspects of the aqueduct are not addressed at the site. The redirection of water from the Bow River to farmers, which continues to this day, is portrayed as entirely positive, without historical contextualization. The placards, pamphlets, and student guides all suggest that the area known as Palliser’s Triangle was empty and useless before the introduction of irrigation technologies and that the increasing presence of white settlers pursuing agriculture in the area was unquestionably beneficial. I could not find any mention at the historic site or in its related literature of the people who had been displaced by the irrigation and colonization of the region (other than the use of sage leaves by Indigenous peoples). According to historian Barry

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Potyondi, the “Arid Region” was not abandoned or untouched by human hands before the twentieth century. He describes the interventions made by First Nations peoples, who burned the grasslands to improve the quality of the grass for the bison that once populated the area.30 According to Potyondi, Palliser’s Triangle was used as a hunting ground for bison by the Blackfoot (Niitsítapi) and Crow (Apsáalooke) peoples for centuries, until Treaty 7 was negotiated in 1877. He argues that as many as seven different Indigenous groups frequented the area until the 1870s, hunting herds of bison without exceeding the natural carrying capacity of the land.31 The decline of the herds was not caused by irrigation technologies – as government policy, the commercialization of buffalo robes, overhunting, and the destruction of habitat by cattle ranching all played a role – but the promotion of mixed and dryland farming techniques in the “Arid Region” contributed to the marginalization and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and their way of life. The Brooks Aqueduct was and continues to be part of this larger story. Irrigation expert P.M. Saunder recounts how the Dominion Government pursued irrigation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to promote colonization and resettlement in southern Alberta.32 An engineer who participated in planning and creating irrigation methods around the Lethbridge area, he describes how water flows were increasingly monitored and measured, with the government suppressing riparian rights, including those of farmers, after declaring water a form of government property in the Northwest Irrigation Act of 1894.33 Saunder explains that controlling water was key to claiming the area and defending it against American incursions, with battles over the flow of water from the Milk River near the border between the two countries culminating in 1903, when the International Waterways Commission was formed, resulting in the 1909 Boundary Waters Treaty.34 Irrigation technologies participated in this political struggle over the definition of nationhood, encouraging the transformation of land and water into property that could be used and thus legitimately possessed by the “stout” immigrants targeted by government policies for settlement in the region.35 In keeping with philosopher John Locke’s labour theory of property, land rights were seen to stem from both transforming the land into something that colonialists recognized as productive and occupying it on a continuous basis. Locke’s theory was used to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their ancestral lands, playing a role in legal decisions about land and water rights in both British Columbia and Alberta, according to historian Kenichi Matsui.36 By allowing permanent settlers to convert the supposedly uninhabited and uninhabitable area of Palliser’s Triangle into agricultural land,

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the Brooks Aqueduct was part of a colonizing process that displaced the seminomadic Indigenous peoples who had long used and altered the region. Visitors to the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site participate in this colonial heritage, whether intentionally or not. As a designated tourist attraction, the aqueduct remains useful, although its function is reframed in terms of the enjoyment of nature and appreciation of industrial technology rather than the promotion of colonization. The organized entrance to the site presents it as offering a relaxing break to travellers, especially families who might picnic near the aqueduct while children amuse themselves in the small playground next to the welcome kiosk. This emphasis on pleasure is continued during the self-guided tour even as it raises multiple narratives that draw attention to the changing ecosystem in a potentially innovative and thoughtful way. Yet by walking around the aqueduct with only these issues in mind, we risk physically reclaiming the site and its legacy, reaffirming with our presence the value of the colonizing process that informed the creation of the Brooks Aqueduct.

The Naturally Lucrative Oil Sands The Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray offers a more consistent message than the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, although it too contains layers of meaning, drawing on historical and modern museum methods of display while alluding to childhood play, scientific practices, technological innovation, and the progressive mastery of the landscape. Overall, the structure and contents of the Discovery Centre combine to convey a reassuring narrative about the industrial activity in the nearby Athabasca oil sands – massive deposits of bitumen, or heavy crude oil mixed with silica sand, clay minerals, and water, that lie beneath thousands of kilometres of boreal forest and muskeg in northeastern Alberta.37 In the Discovery Centre, the oil sands are portrayed as a natural opportunity that became the economic engine of Alberta and Canada once a series of scientific and technological inventions succeeded in extracting oil from them, albeit while creating by-products that damaged the environment. The triumphant story ends with a discussion and display of reclaimed tailings ponds – engineered dam and dyke systems used to capture the salts, suspended solids, acids, benzene, hydrocarbons, residual bitumen, fine silts, and water that result from the extraction process – showing how the toxic areas are ultimately transformed by the corporations involved in the oil industry into parks safely enjoyed by humans and animals.38

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This largely positive vision of the Athabasca oil sands industry is hardly shocking given the sponsorship received by the Oil Sands Discovery Centre from corporations such as Shell Canada Energy, Caterpillar, Finning (Canada), Suncor Energy Foundation, and Syncrude Canada. A plaque near the entrance at the Discovery Centre thanks these and other corporations, along with the Government of Alberta, for each donating more than $100,000 – some gave $250,000 – toward the renovation of the main exhibition hall between 1998 and 2002.39 Advocates of the Discovery Centre nevertheless deny taking up a position in relation to the oil sands. Bert Mackay, a retired oil company executive who helped to found the centre, argues that it is meant “to present the facts to people and let them form their own opinions. Like all science museums, we want to explain things so that average people have more information.”40 Yet science museums have never been neutral spaces that simply provide information. Corporations have regularly sponsored educational public exhibitions to legitimate industrial products and practices, a rebranding method that was already occurring within North American natural history and science museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.41 During the 1930s, for example, DuPont created displays that championed the wonders of chemical products for the New York Museum of Science and Industry.42 The portrayal of oil sands development in Alberta in terms of innovative entrepreneurs who provide social benefits and become committed environmentalists is thus a traditional strategy, even if corporate spokespeople did not literally create the content at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. According to media studies scholar Brenda Longfellow, multinational oil corporations manage ongoing environmental disasters with a sophisticated and “slick combination of infomercials, re-branding as ‘energy companies,’ and targeted public relations campaigns.”43 Those companies extracting and processing the Athabasca oil sands face great challenges in defending their practices, for they arguably have the worst reputation in the world for producing a form of “dirty oil” that causes greenhouse gas emissions and the pollution of nearby water systems.44 The increasingly negative publicity about the effects of the oil industry in northern Alberta has featured aerial photographs of damaged land and water, including the Oil series by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky in 2007, reports about birds dying after landing on tailings ponds in 2009, and doctors decrying in 2014 the high cancer rates in the First Nations and Métis communities living downstream from Fort McMurray, especially in Fort Chipewyan.45 Oil companies have long tried to change the story by highlighting the economic benefits of oil sands production to Alberta and the rest of Canada,

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using various media, including the documentaries studied by communications expert Geo Takach. His book Tar Wars (2017) surveys the documentary films and videos made both in favour of industrial activity and against it in what he calls the “bit sands,” using a reference to bitumen that avoids both the negative appellation “tar sands” and the term “oil sands,” preferred by the oil industry. According to Takach, pro-industry defences of operations in northern Alberta typically take up a position of corporate transparency, claiming to provide factual information about the progress, economic benefits, and technical development of the oil sands since the 1920s.46 This defensive emphasis on the determined efforts made by Canadians to extract oil from the sands, their impressive development of technologies, and the increasing commitment of corporations to environmental responsibility echoes much of the story presented at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. Nevertheless, there have been few, if any, sustained analyses of the centre, perhaps because of the expectation that oil companies will manage their image in multiple ways.47 One critical comment about the Oil Sands Discovery Centre was made in 2012 by Emily Coats, a member of the United Kingdom Tar Sands Network, an anti-oil-sands organization: “It’s taboo not to like the tar sands in Alberta … There is an Oil Sands Discovery Centre in which they ask, ‘How dare you not be impressed by the struggle to get this resource out of the ground?’ … Everyone is caught up in oil. It’s so integrated into our economy, it’s hard to oppose it.”48 She points out that it is difficult to question the oil sands within Alberta, much less to criticize an educational and purportedly neutral “science museum” located in the boom and bust oil town of Fort McMurray. It is not enough, however, to reveal the pro-industry messages at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, as if they were hidden and in need of denunciation. These messages are clearly presented within the framework of scientific information and dispassionate commentary, helping to portray oil sands corporations as transparent entities that have nothing to hide and are eager to provide the public with information. It is therefore important to consider the strategies by which these messages become compelling and appealing, as well as largely immune from critique. This approach is in keeping with the goals of a growing field of study known as petrocultures. Scholars now strive to “highlight the pervasive social character of oil … a substance that is simultaneously omnipresent and invisible.”49 Whereas contributors such as literary scholar Graeme Macdonald propose to “dramatize the disastrous nature of oil’s benevolent banality,” others insist that the culture of oil is already highly visible. Art historians Amanda Boetzkes and Kirsty Robertson, for example, note that the environmental disasters

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caused by the oil industry, including pipeline breakdowns and oil spills, are almost continually in the news, although usually displaced by heroic narratives about efforts to clean them up.50 These and other scholars highlight the emotional and pleasurable aspects of petroculture, a culture that is “lived from within” and cannot be examined from an external or neutral position. In keeping with these arguments, I contend that the exhibitions at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre are effective and engaging because they combine discourses of science with understandings of childhood to create an apparently educational spectacle that reassures the public about the future, avoiding the references to instability, contradiction, or mutually created ecosystems presented at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site. Once visitors enter the modern building, opened in 1985 as the Fort McMurray Oil Sands Interpretive Centre, they pass by a welcome desk and expansive gift shop, run by Fort McMurray Tourism (figure 4.5). While moving toward the main exhibition hall, reopened in 2002 after substantial renovations, they encounter the virtual host or “mascot” of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, one Professor Nositall. This white male cartoon character appears on a screen to welcome visitors, speaking with a British accent and wearing a white lab coat and hard hat, with impressive machinery in the background. Accompanied by these signs of authority, Professor Nositall appears to be an educated working scientist and not an oil executive. He informs visitors that once inside the Discovery Centre exhibitions, they will learn about how the “amazing” oil sands are used to create “a plethora of popular petroleum products” and about the steps being taken to offset their environmental impact. This comical figure sets the tone for the rest of the visit, preparing visitors for scientific lessons about the oil sands that are direct and informative, imparted largely from a white male point of view, but also fun. The disarming cartoon host indicates that his target audience is children as well as visitors willing to take up the posture of eager students on a field trip rather than world-weary skeptics who might ask difficult questions. Within the exhibition hall, it becomes clear that the Oil Sands Discovery Centre draws heavily on the aesthetics of a modern science centre while retaining some aspects of a traditional science museum. The main exhibition space at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre features layers of Kee Klamp scaffolding, a structural pipe fitting created for the construction of handrails and barriers but now found in many science centres. This material was first adapted for use in the Science Museum in London in 1986 because the framework could be coloured and polished and was also sturdy enough to endure a large number of visitors physically

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4.5 Exterior view of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2018.

interacting with the space.51 The Kee Klamp structure at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre encompasses interactive exhibits with buttons to push and levers to pull, providing visitors with the active learning and immersive experiences more commonly associated with science centres than with conventional museums. A series of learning stations explain how the oil sands were formed, discovered, and mined, using diagrams and graphs to represent the local geology. The process of refining bitumen is conveyed with text alongside measured Pyrex cups and beakers arranged on stainless steel counters. At regular intervals, visitors are invited by a recurring image of Professor Nositall to observe these subjects more closely by means of magnifying devices. In one case, they are instructed to “use the microscope to get a close look at oil sand and other materials found in and around it.” Scientific models display additional information, notably a large glowing version of an asphaltene hydrocarbon, its label explaining that it is “often formed as a component of bitumen.” This sculptural portrayal of asphaltene’s 400 carbon and 500 hydrogen atoms in addition to other atoms recalls the famous dna double helix model created by James Watson and Francis Crick in the 1950s, which scholars Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee argue

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is a cultural icon now associated in popular culture with scientific discovery in general and sometimes even life itself.52 Overall, the contents of the main exhibition hall of the Discovery Centre position the mining and refining of the oil sands within a framework of scientific research and ongoing efforts to improve the human condition. The Oil Sands Discovery Centre is nevertheless more narrowly focused than most science centres, a form of educational display that emerged in the 1970s and proliferated in the 1980s to impress visitors, especially children, with the impact of science and technology on their daily lives.53 The typical science centre offers interactive lessons on the basic principles of physics, chemistry, and other scientific fields. For example, at Questacon – the National Science and Technology Centre in Canberra, Australia – which opened in 1988, large exhibition halls are filled with robots that interact with visitors, an apparatus that enables them to feel the simulated force of an earthquake, and galleries that explain the mechanics of vision, mineral formation, and gravity. Sponsored by governments and corporations, organizations like Questacon aim to equip young people with fundamental training in the stem fields – science, technology, engineering, and math – in order to prepare them for future specialization in related areas. The mandate of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, included on its official website, is similarly to “provide a unique and memorable experience that inspires a lifelong interest in science and technology,” but the exhibitions are devoted to the history, processes, and outcomes of a single industry and location: the excavation and refining of the Athabasca oil sands.54 At the Discovery Centre, science and technology are effectively conflated with the oil sands industry, and children are invited to imagine themselves in the roles of oil sands researcher, entrepreneur, and heavy equipment operator. Visitors entering the main exhibition hall of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre pass beneath a large yellow Kee Klamp arch, labelled “The Resource,” and immediately encounter what is called a “play lab” (figures 4.6 and 4.7). There, children are invited to don small blue coveralls and hard hats in order to become oil sands workers by digging in the sand provided, although a note indicates that it is “not the real stuff.” An accompanying text explains that the gigantic equipment designed in the oil sands industry uses only three scoops to fill a big truck with the resource in an open-pit mine. The costumed children playing with shovels are asked to consider a question: “How many mini-scoops of oil sand do you think would equal the weight of one elephant?” This interactive educational technique is the norm within science centres and seems like harmless fun, even as it encourages children to measure and manage the sands as a natural resource, enacting the role of (future) oil sands employees.

4.6 Top Exhibition entrance, Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2020. 4.7 Bottom Play lab, Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2020.

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Perhaps the most striking opportunity for visitors to play at being oil sands workers occurs inside an actual 150-tonne truck (figure 4.8). This spectacular installation overlooks the entire exhibition hall and is a key attraction at the Discovery Centre. Visitors can ascend several flights of stairs and sit behind the wheel to “drive” the massive machine by shifting gears and pressing buttons.55 The heavy hauler appears to move through an active open-pit mine site, with a video screen providing images and a sense of motion, accompanied by recordings of the sounds of the engine and the voices of Suncor and Syncrude drivers talking with supervisors during their shifts. This immersive experience resembles a video game, giving participants the sensation of being in control of the hulking technology as it dominates the oil sands. The heavy hauler installation provides more, however, than simulated career training or an immersive form of entertainment; it also combines understandings of childhood play, gender, and technology to represent a particular vision of the human relationship with land. Science centres, renowned for combining educational opportunities with family fun, are informed by historically and culturally specific understandings of both childhood and play. Scholars increasingly study the history of childhood, with historians in particular considering how that category has been in-

4.8 Heavy hauler installation, Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2020.

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vented and reshaped from the Middle Ages to the present day.56 Those who focus on the twentieth century generally convey a narrative of adults’ growing concern for childhood development and the creation of new categories of attention and potential marketing, from infant to toddler, preteen, and teenager, each with its own forms of consumption.57 Historian Howard P. Chudacoff contributes to this field by examining children’s play from the nineteenth to the late twentieth century, emphasizing the American context.58 According to him, children gradually lost their freedom during the late nineteenth century when parents came to fear unsupervised play, launching the American playground movement in the 1880s, which emphasized safe places with equipment and sand gardens custom built for children. Chudacoff contends that play became even more structured from the 1950s onward, when it was additionally associated with purposeful career preparation, a shift reflected in the creation of science centres, along with other interactive play spaces.59 Many scholars view these increasing efforts to manage children’s play and make it useful as marking an unfortunate decline in children’s freedom, a position reinforced by Edensor when he praises the potential for unfettered and imaginative play at industrial ruins.60 In this light, the actions of pushing buttons, following instructions, and playing prescribed roles at science centres, and at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, might serve to limit rather than expand children’s futures. At the same time, a number of scholars, including Erica Rand, who has studied how children play with Barbie dolls, argue that children are relentlessly creative in their play, often finding ways to resist and bypass the rules and regulations put in place by adults or specialists.61 Children who are no doubt resourceful and inventive are asked to negotiate dominant messages as they play in the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, including those informed by gender. The main exhibition hall is largely coded as a male space, despite the inclusion of one female voice in the immersive driving experience featuring the 150-tonne truck. Those installations discussing the history of the oil sands highlight male scientists and entrepreneurs, and the voice and image of Professor Nositoll recurs throughout the space. Many areas in the exhibition hall resemble an episode of Trucktown, an animated children’s program featuring personified colourful trucks with giant wheels embarking on adventures.62 The Oil Sands Discovery Centre is filled with models of dump trucks, heavy haulers, cranes, and other machines, which look like toys in contrast to the massive heavy hauler that dwarfs both them and all of the visitors. The gendered aspect of this content is overwhelming, noticed even by the most enthusiastic reviewers of the centre. For example, joking about a family visit in

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2015, Joanne Elves writes in an online report for Travel Alberta, “I’ve come to the conclusion that boys never grow up. Both the boys and the toys just get bigger. That realization became clear in the Dr. Karl A. Clark Exhibit Hall when I stood looking up at the big yellow 150-ton heavy hauler truck (and I have no idea how they got that behemoth inside the building). Up in the cab was my husband – pretending to drive while the kids waited their turn.”63 Elves describes the Oil Sands Discovery Centre as a massive male playground but frames her family’s response as natural, a form of “boys will be boys.” She also makes it clear that the installations are impressive and frankly enjoyable to children and adults alike, which is indeed the case. Driving the heavy hauler is appealing in part because it provides a simulated experience of an oil sands mine, recreating the physicality and sensations of that encounter. Such efforts to allow visitors to experience phenomena that are otherwise known to few inform the installations at many science centres, which recreate encounters with forces such as earthquakes and volcanoes, if not the emotions or destruction that these events produce.64 An example more closely related to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre is found at the Leduc No. 1 Energy Discovery Centre, an exhibition space that was opened in 1997 in Leduc, Alberta, to celebrate the discovery of crude oil nearby in 1947 and to provide information about the oil industry in Canada. For the most part, the Leduc No. 1 Energy Discovery Centre employs conventional museum methods of display, with printed information describing collections of objects and models enclosed within glass cases. This centre, however, also allows visitors to step inside “the world’s largest simulated drill bit” and take a virtual tour beneath the earth’s surface to locate oil in the Devonian Formation. Participants are able to identify with the drill bit, feeling its vibrations and hearing the noise that it makes while breaking through geological layers that appear on the screens above and around them. Like in a science fiction fantasy film, the visitors inside the drill bit are literally part of the process of discovering the unknown. In a similar way, the heavy hauler experience at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre places visitors within industrial technologies and enables them to identify with those technologies as they tear through the earth and claim it physically. The videos screened inside the heavy hauler installation also resemble science fiction landscapes because the open-pit mines that they show are dark and barren and seem extraterrestrial. Yet the images portray actual oil sands sites, revealing the terrain located a relatively short distance from the virtual driver inside the massive truck. This emphasis on knowing, claiming, and transforming the local landscape links the Oil Sands Discovery Centre with nineteenth-century museum prac-

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tices and ways of thinking about nature that stem from the Victorian era.65 During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries throughout Canada, members of natural history societies collected, arranged, and displayed regional specimens – minerals, ores, fossils, plants, insects, shells, birds, mammals – in the museums that they created. These early museums were adorned with glass cases filled with labelled objects and taxidermy animals, a display method still evident in many museums today, including the Redpath Museum in Montreal and the Australian Museum in Sydney.66 The exhibitions in the Oil Sands Discovery Centre do not feature specimens, although historic machinery related to the oil fields, notably Cyrus, an 850-tonne bucket-wheel excavator once used in open-pit mining operations, is displayed on the grounds outside the building. The connection of the Discovery Centre with past museum practices is found more strongly in the educational opportunities that the curators and volunteers of nineteenth-century natural history museums offered to the public, especially children. These societies took children on organized adventures – which included hiking and camping in the nearby wilderness, collecting fossils, identifying minerals, and even undertaking amateur archaeological digs at historic Indigenous sites – so that they could enjoy and classify their surroundings while also learning about the economic potential of the region.67 Despite employing modern technologies in an indoor setting, the simulated driving experience (and indeed the overall experience) offered at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre promotes similar goals, combining pleasure and offering mastery over a landscape visibly associated with economic ambitions. It encourages children to see nature and land as resources to be made use of for play and profit, in keeping with the broader ideals of both capitalism and colonialism informing early museum practices. These ideals are so imbricated within the fabric of colonial settler societies, and so closely linked with Victorian-era arguments about the progress of civilization, that they may seem obvious and unremarkable. Another iteration of nineteenth-century themes occurs during the demonstrations that take place about five times per day in a theatre located just outside of the exhibition hall in the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. Visitors are first invited to view a short film called Oil Sands, which provides an overview of the efforts made by individual engineers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and government agencies to survey, sample, understand, and develop the oil sands. Once the film ends, an interpreter at the centre pushes a mini-laboratory table into the theatre to perform a ten-minute “simplified” demonstration of the hot water separation method patented by Dr. Karl Clark in 1928.68 When I was there, a young student dressed in a lab coat invited us to touch and smell a sample of oil sands scooped

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into a Pyrex cup. She then added boiling water to the container, stirring the mixture with a metal spoon already worn down from the sheer coarseness of the oil sands during previous demonstrations. She explained how this efficient and effective method quickly separated out a layer of bitumen, which she then scooped up and placed on a serviette for all visitors to hold and observe (figure 4.9). We also engaged with samples of the resulting tailings sands, as well as additional samples of refined bitumen, light gas oil, heavy gas oil, and kerosene. This hands-on demonstration allows visitors to touch and feel “real” oil sands, in contrast to the replacement versions, models, and simulated experiences provided in the exhibition hall. The demonstration provides a physical encounter with oil sands, yet it is contained within the scripted scientific discourse of the theatre. The theatrical display is unlike the sensory experience of an altered ecosystem offered by the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site. We are not guided through encounters with the unexpected results of industrial technology in the Discovery Centre; we are presented with a predictable and deliberate transformation of the oil sands, one that results in useful products and is accompanied by little smell, noise, or mess, save for the fine tailings sands that appear to be harmless, especially when visitors run their fingers through the samples provided. In the end, the demonstration presents the hot water separation process as easy and natural, offsetting images of the extraction of bitumen from the oil sands by industrialists as aggressive, toxic, and dangerous. Like efforts to view the landscape in terms of economic potential and structured play, such hands-on scientific demonstrations ultimately stem from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when similar public events were held in museums as well as lecture halls and theatres for educational, economic, entertainment, and social purposes. Administrators of early science and natural history museums, for example, invited members of their organizations and the broader public to lessons during which experts spoke on topics ranging from geology to botany and entomology, passing specimens around for the group to observe, touch, and contemplate.69 These exchanges of knowledge often highlighted the distinctive natural features of the region, noting its potential for forestry or mining activity, although exotic objects were sometimes considered. Even though these advertised events promoted science and an entrepreneurial spirit, they were a form of popular entertainment.70 Spectacular demonstrations could attract large crowds, such as when geologist Abraham Gesner displayed the effects of electricity by attaching electrodes to the severed head of an ox,

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4.9 Oil sands sample at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2017.

making it grimace and blink, much to the delight of the audience gathered in the Mechanics’ Institute in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1843.71 Portrayed as an amusing form of education, these events were respectable and could even raise the social status of the city or town in which they were held. Historian Christina Burr argues that a popular culture of science emerged in the Enniskillen Township of southwestern Ontario during the 1860s, with lectures and debates about the extent and supply of local oil resources helping to transform Petrolia from a rough and tumble oil town into a place of Victorian respectability.72 Often credited as being the birthplace of the oil industry in Canada, if not North America, Petrolia was founded when oil wells were dug by hand and oil was pumped in liquid form, creating a disorganized and hastily built boom town in the 1860s.73 Although wealthier citizens gradually cultivated a middle-class identity for Petrolia, the Petrolia Discovery heritage site, opened in 2006, conveys the strong smell, sounds, and feel of a messy, rugged, and “authentic 1860s oil field,” complete with a jerker line powered by the Fitzgerald Rig engine, in contrast to the modern, clean, and odourless Oil Sands Discovery Centre. Within this larger picture, the “simplified” hot water demonstration in the theatre is not simple at all; it functions to represent oil sands extraction as natural and safely managed by science, while also implying that Fort McMurray is not a dirty boom town but a respectable place that fosters innovative ideas.74

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The hot water demonstration encapsulates the broader messages conveyed by the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, yet like the simulated heavy hauler experience, it offers a limited encounter with the oil sands. At one time, visitors to Fort McMurray could get closer to the oil sands by purchasing a combined tourist package called “Experience the Energy Tour,” which included entry to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, a guided bus tour of a Suncor Energy mine site, and entry into the Heritage Shipyard, which celebrates the history of Fort McMurray as a transportation hub for trains as well as vessels along the Athabasca River.75 When I first visited Fort McMurray in 2013, this package was highly recommended by the staff at the Discovery Centre as providing a fuller picture of the oil sands, one that would complement a visit to the centre. I readily agreed to participate in the Suncor tour because, like many other visitors to northern Alberta, I was eager to see the mining sites for myself, after having viewed aerial photographs of them that showed what appeared to be either the utter devastation of the earth or the surface of another planet. Scholars analyzing petrocultures argue that this fascination with the altered landscape created by the oil industry is fuelled by the “toxic sublime” – a thrilling feeling of both horror and awe invoked by the overwhelming scale of intervention in the land.76 Visitors to Fort McMurray as well as local people want to see, smell, understand, and touch the landscapes affected by mining activity in order to achieve a first-hand, embodied knowledge of them that goes beyond the more distant and abstract awareness offered by reading newspaper articles or government reports. Those museums and discovery centres catering to the toxic sublime by featuring massive machinery and immersive technologies may not be “authentic” enough for such visitors. Before boarding the bus tour that began in the parking lot of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, I was asked to sign a waiver promising not to publish or otherwise distribute any photographs that I might take of the Suncor Energy site. As we drove through the site, looking at heavy hauler trucks moving up and down barren hills and seeing the camps that housed the workers, we stopped for a staged “photo opportunity” beside the gigantic wheel of one of the massive haulers. Each participant in the tour, including me, dutifully had our picture snapped standing next to the wheel after we were informed that only this picture could be publicly displayed (figure 4.10). The guide on the bus began and ended his discussion with the ways that Suncor Energy was managing the environmental impacts of its activities. The tour finished with a scheduled visit to a reclaimed tailings pond, recently transformed by Suncor Energy employees into a delightful park with a walking trail and increasing signs of bird life. Our ex-

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4.10 Lianne McTavish posing near the officially authorized “giant photo op wheel,” Suncor Energy site near Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2013.

tended stay outside the bus at the green and vibrant area was perhaps meant to replace, or even erase, the barren scenes of technological intervention that we had just seen, as well as the aerial photographs of dangerous tailings ponds rife online and in the media. The “Experience the Energy Tour” of the oil sands insisted that the damage caused by industrial activity could be repaired, in contrast to the signs of ruin still evident at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site. The guide in Fort McMurray told a story of carefully managed changes that involved scientists and environmental experts working together to correct damage and restore the local ecosystem. There was no recognition of surprises, unexpected results, or failure, unlike the experience offered at the Brooks Aqueduct. Although, as described by Edensor, the oil sands are in some ways a kind of “ruin,” providing an exotic and thrilling sense of adventure because of the association with danger, the tour portrays the oil sands as entirely managed and productive, suggesting that they ultimately provide a new habitat for wildlife and a relaxing place of reflection for visitors. When I and other participants on the tour exited the bus to walk around the reclaimed tailings pond, we helped to transform the

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former “wasteland” into a landscape linked with leisure and tourism. Our presence provided evidence of the site’s recuperation by proving that the former tailings pond was now safe, useful, and enjoyable, recalling the way that visitors who undertake the self-guided tour at the Brooks Aqueduct help to mark the importance and value of that place by claiming the land yet again. The environmental damage caused by the oil sands industry is not ignored during the “Experience the Energy Tour” or at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. On the contrary, it appears to be addressed in an open and frank manner. Environmental issues are mentioned almost immediately within the exhibition hall when children in the play lab are asked, “Who is responsible for protecting the environment?” The possible answers are (a) the government, (b) the oil sands companies, and (c) everyone, with the latter being the right answer, and it is difficult to argue with that, even though environmental responsibility is framed as an individual rather than primarily corporate concern. Working together to repair this damage is the main message of the final section of the exhibition hall, which emphasizes efforts to restore tailings ponds, including photographic displays of the newly green and vibrant areas that echo the Suncor tour. An accompanying pamphlet at the Discovery Centre, meant to summarize the key messages of the exhibition hall, notes that the goal of such reclamation is to “return disabled land to a productive area, as required by all lease agreements,” even though “huge challenges remain.” In the end, “protecting the environment is a shared responsibility, involving industry, government and consumers of hydrocarbon products,” a perspective that implicates the visitors to the Discovery Centre in the environmental effects and urges them to share the blame.77 The conclusion to the exhibition hall is also where Indigenous voices emerge in a significant way, in contrast to the relative lack of recognition of Indigenous presence at the Brooks Aqueduct. In this section, discussions of the environment are selective and do not represent a variety of Indigenous communities or beliefs, reinforcing the Oil Sands Discovery Centre’s consistent focus on key individuals rather than on inclusive representations of the region and its population.78 The final exhibition spaces at the centre highlight Fred McDonald, an Elder from the nearby Fort McKay First Nation, comprised of five reserves with Saka-withiniwak (Woodland Cree), Denésoliné (Chipewyan), and Métis members, whose traditional lands include sections of the Athabasca oil sands.79 He talks about the necessity of protecting the environment and lands that are imbricated in the identity of his people, accompanied by footage of natural areas

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that is clearly labelled as having been provided by Ducks Unlimited, Suncor Energy, and Syncrude Canada. Although this inclusion of an Indigenous Elder is important, it is also rather narrow given the diversity of Indigenous peoples affected by the oil sands industry and their differing responses to the effects of the processes of oil extraction.80 The health issues faced by Indigenous peoples at Fort Chipewyan or the high levels of toxins in the local fish that they eat are not mentioned, nor are the ongoing lawsuits, including one brought in 2008 by the people of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation against the Canadian and Alberta governments for what they see as the destruction of their lands and their way of life due to unfettered oil sands development. In their legal challenge, the Beaver Lake Cree claim that the more than 19,000 fossil fuel projects in their traditional territory threaten to destroy their way of life by polluting and fragmenting the land and water that have sustained them for centuries.81 If the Oil Sands Discovery Centre’s aim is simply to provide factual information about the Athabasca oil sands, then updating the final area to refer to these and other pressing issues would be in keeping with its mission. Even so, it is hard to criticize the Oil Sands Discovery Centre because it appears to offer respectable family fun while educating children and adults alike. Its emphasis on learning through play can be reassuring, especially to parents anxious about their children’s futures in light of global warming, increasing pollution, and the unsustainability of petroculture. The installations and demonstrations at the Discovery Centre avoid images of ruin, insisting that the oil industry is ethical and able to manage environmental problems by relying on science to endlessly find solutions that will enable the extraction to continue. The impressive scale of the technology at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre and the authoritative nature of the scientific discourse that it promotes may seem unassailable, especially when they reinforce longstanding and conventional narratives of progress, improvement, and economic rationalism dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The repetition and rehearsal of these narratives in a modern format can also be reassuring, linking the Discovery Centre and the oil sands industry with traditional values. At the same time, analyzing the Oil Sands Discovery Centre can seem un- or even anti-Albertan because the province is closely identified with oil, even if approximately 71 per cent of the oil sands companies are foreign-owned.82 Attempts to look closely at the museum or even the oil sands industry are subject to reinterpretation as an attack on dedicated museum staff, oil sands workers, the people of Fort McMurray, or the province as a whole. This possibility has

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increased over time, with the decline in oil prices making the oil industry and its workers vulnerable. My first research trip to Fort McMurray was in 2013, when the oil boom was in full force, and the assertion made in one of the short films in the exhibition hall of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre seemed possible: that by 2020, 3 million barrels a day would be developed from the Athabasca oil sands. My second trip was in 2017, when oil prices had fallen, industrial activity had diminished, many residents had been laid off and were struggling to support their families, and others had already moved away, sometimes back to their countries of origin, diminishing the ethnic diversity of the area. Claims of continued expansion now seemed hard to believe. Signs of charred trees and empty lots remained from the wildfire that had started in May 2016 and had devastated much of the surrounding area as well as the city itself, forcing almost 90,000 residents to flee for their lives to other parts of Alberta, including to my condo building in Edmonton.83 By 2017, the continual growth of the oil sands industry was in doubt, creating a new context for interpreting the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, which revealed that its meaning is not static but dependent on the knowledge, experience, and affiliations of its visitors.

Conclusion Comparing analyses of the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site and the Oil Sands Discovery Centre reveals the diversity of each site, as well as what they have in common. It is not possible to tell a simple story or to make a single argument about these sites, which engage with the themes of, among other things, nature, technology, childhood, play, and ruins, shaping these issues within historical and contemporary museum and tourist practices that allow varying degrees of participation by visitors, whose interpretations are mediated by their own knowledge and concerns. Although the Brooks Aqueduct is informed by the legacy of industrial heritage and the Discovery Centre is modelled on a science centre, both locations were inspired by a quest for human mastery over nature, associated with nineteenth-century values that remain meaningful today. The “modern” Discovery Centre consistently adheres to this historical message, but the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site has adapted to changing ideas and a fluctuating environment, offering visitors a sensual understanding of the unexpected ecosystem that now exists at the site. The Brooks Aqueduct thus provides a more open and potentially richer experience than does the Oil Sands Discovery Centre,

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for it enables diverse interpretations rather than a consistent narrative of scientific discovery and technological innovation. Nevertheless, both representations of nature potentially discourage critical thinking about colonialism and the environment by encouraging visitors to explore the sites in directed ways. These efforts are congruent with current tourist expectations but deflect attention from past and ongoing efforts to control, claim, and colonize the landscapes of Alberta, efforts that museum spaces and heritage sites can easily and even accidentally reinforce.

 P  5

UNSETTLING THE

IONEER

Learning from Indigenous Museums and Cultural Centres

It is a hot July day in 2018, and I am driving south on a highway in Alberta. This trip is especially exciting, for my friends and I are heading to the Siksika Nation Reserve, located about one and a half hours east of Calgary in Treaty 7 territory. There, we will visit Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, founded in 2007 by the Siksikawa to celebrate their Niitsítapi (Blackfoot) identity. The impressive historical park is just one of at least eleven museums and cultural centres with primarily Indigenous content, staff, or management in Alberta. This number will soon increase, as several First Nations and Métis organizations are preparing to open new and expanded exhibition spaces to the public.1 Such Indigenous museums and cultural centres are reshaping the cultural and political landscape of Alberta by demonstrating the proud history of Indigenous peoples, as well as their legitimate claims to land, water, and self-governance. These sites challenge colonial narratives of the progressive displacement of Indigenous peoples and critique the predominantly positive accounts of settler colonialism conveyed within museums, especially the pioneer museums located in towns and villages across Alberta. During the first phase of the Alberta Museums Project – see the introduction to this book – the research team visited as many Indigenous museums and cultural centres as possible. I flew to Fort Chipewyan in northeastern Alberta and drove to sites in the central and southern parts of the province. I wanted to see the exhibition spaces in person in order to understand their representations of place through my embodied experiences, which included the trips there, usually

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along highways and back roads. I also needed to acknowledge the sheer diversity of Indigenous cultures in the province. There are currently forty-five First Nations in Alberta, with 140 reserves in three treaty territories. The nomenclature identifying First Nations has shifted historically, but today the primary tribal groups are the Daneẕaa (Beaver), Niitsítapi (Blackfoot), Denésoliné (Chipewyan), Paskwāwiyiniwak (Plains Cree), Tsuut’ina (Sarcee), Nakawē (Saulteaux/ Anishinaabe/Plains Ojibwa), Dene Tha’ (Slavey), Nakoda (Stoney), and Sakāwithiniwak (Woodland Cree).2 Many other Indigenous peoples live in Alberta, notably the Métis residing throughout the province and in eight recognized settlement areas, as well as Inuit, Iroquois, and Assiniboine, among others.3 Some of the Indigenous museums and cultural centres in Alberta address the historical connections and conflicts between these peoples, foregrounding the destructive impact of colonial settlement, whereas others concentrate on the distinctive features of individual groups to honour the survival of their cultural traditions despite centuries of colonial oppression. My approach to Indigenous museums and cultural centres was in some ways similar to that used to study other small-town and rural museums. I focused on my experience of the places, maintaining an expansive understanding of visiting that included planning, travelling, and discussions while there, among other events. I went to each site in order to engage with diverse spaces and people on their terms, not with predetermined questions in mind or set themes to explore. For example, at small-town or rural museums, including Indigenous museums and cultural centres, I did not address issues developed within large, urban museums, such as the representation of nationalism, multiculturalism, or citizenship, although I may pursue these issues in the future.4 In preparing to write this chapter, I was attentive to the goals and interests of local museum builders and to what the different sites required from me before, during, and after my interaction with the exhibition spaces. Indigenous museums and cultural centres made distinctive demands of me, ultimately changing some aspects of my approach and writing style. At these sites, my position as a settler scholar came into the foreground differently; it was challenged rather than presumed or reinforced, as it often was at settlerrun museums. I realized that my role in Indigenous museums and cultural centres was to listen to and learn from Indigenous peoples, not to reshape their knowledge for my own purposes. I was often not allowed to take photographs at the sites, for although I was welcomed as a guest on Indigenous land, the items were not mine to reproduce. Nor could I retell Indigenous stories and risk appropriating Indigenous voices. This protection of Indigenous cultures and

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knowledge can be understood in terms of the colonizing role long played by Western museums, part of the reason why the term “cultural centre” is often preferred to that of museum, as discussed below. Indigenous museums and cultural centres cannot simply be included in discussions of small-town and rural museums as a unique genre or subgenre of museums; they are in tension with other museums in Alberta, unsettling assumptions about the historical and social role of these institutions. While visiting Indigenous museums and cultural centres, I faced my own ignorance of Indigenous histories and cultures. I responded to this situation in different ways. I read, for instance, documents such as Treaties 6, 7, and 8, the Indian Act of 1876, and the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, published in 2015 to address the abusive history of the residential school system, which was designed to destroy the familial bonds, cultural ties, and languages of Indigenous children.5 I also pursued information about the repatriation of Indigenous material culture, the colonial role of museums, the Indigenization of Canadian museums, and the effort of Indigenous peoples to reclaim and protect their cultures both within and outside of museum structures.6 Indigenous resistance and resurgence are arguably the most pressing issues facing Western museums today, as examined in a wealth of sources produced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars.7 When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released its ninety-four “Calls to Action” in 2015, it included demands for the full and active participation of Indigenous peoples in the production of museums and archives.8 Canadian cultural institutions have responded in various, often positive, ways to these and earlier calls, prompting changes in policies and staffing. Fears remain, however, that a lack of funding and political will could stall any progress made or even result in museums backsliding toward their former marginalization and misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples.9 Although I learned more about these national issues, it was important for me to understand the colonial context of western Canada and Alberta in particular. My knowledge of the history of colonization in the West was inadequate, partly because I grew up in central Canada, where Ontario is still sometimes referred to as Upper Canada, its name between 1791 and 1841.10 The colonization of the land eventually known as Canada occurred from east to west, something I contemplated while driving over forty-five hours from my first job in Fredericton at the University of New Brunswick, founded in 1785, to take up my current position in Edmonton (Amiskwaciwâskahikan) at the University of

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Alberta, founded in 1908. Like those settlers in search of opportunities at the expense of Indigenous peoples, I made the trek from east to west, although in a comfortable automobile instead of a Métis Red River cart pulled by plodding oxen.11 Settlers colonized the West during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much later than eastern and central Canada. Alberta did not become a province until 1905, in part because of the region’s rapidly increasing population; between 1901 and 1921, the number of people living in Alberta rose from approximately 73,000 to 585,000.12 To consider the distinctive nature of western colonization, I relied on the work of many scholars, including some of my Indigenous and non-Indigenous colleagues at the University of Alberta. They encouraged me to explore themes such as Indigenous activism, genocidal government policies, ongoing land claims, and gender dynamics.13 This educational project is incomplete and will continue to inform my research and teaching well beyond the publication of this book. After several false starts, I decided to focus in this chapter on Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park. It is a large institution with a significant presence in Alberta but cannot represent Indigenous museums and cultural centres in general, something that I have not attempted. The first section of the chapter considers my visit to the Siksika Nation Reserve as a guest and witness, not an authoritative museum critic. I convey the experience of the place and the messages communicated in the exhibition spaces, attending to the sacred nature of the site and the land around it. Yet this section diverges from the rest of the book, my voice being less dominant as I strive to foreground the voices of Indigenous scholars and museum workers. Even as I highlight Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, I introduce other Indigenous museums and cultural centres, especially those that are currently in transition. My goal is to provide a picture of the vibrant nature of different sites while showing how they shaped my research process and impacted my understanding of pioneer museums. The second section of this chapter draws on the lessons that I learned about Indigenous resilience to consider the pioneer museums located throughout Alberta. Pioneer museums are the most common kind of museum in the province, especially in small towns and rural areas. During my research, I visited numerous such museums, finding them remarkably similar. Their exhibition spaces tend to overflow with the material culture used by settlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including agricultural tools, rifles, children’s toys, and washboards. Accompanying written texts celebrate the colonial domination of the West, drawing attention to the “civilizing” role played by local individuals,

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families, industries, and businesses. A few museums refer to non-European settlers, including the African Americans who moved from the southern United States to form small communities in rural Alberta between 1905 and 1911.14 For the most part, however, the pioneer museums in Alberta commemorate the predominantly European immigrants who settled the West, articulating the ethnic differences between British, French, Ukrainian, German, Russian, Scandinavian, and other groups within standard pioneer narratives that legitimate the white possession of the land, a topic introduced in the previous chapter.15 They are thus like the pioneer museums in other parts of the Western world, long critiqued by scholars for their positive accounts of colonization and their failure to represent the concomitant oppression of Indigenous peoples.16 Such pioneer museums create a unified vision of pioneer heritage by relocating Indigenous peoples to a distant past, where they are associated with archaeology or ancient myths. These sites rarely address the economic, social, and political roles of Indigenous peoples in either the past or the present, although they often contain collections enabling them to do so, a key argument in this chapter. Although museum scholars have explored displays of pioneer identity, few published accounts focus on the pioneer museums in Alberta.17 To consider the specificity of these sites and their dependence on historical assertions of settler colonialism, I undertook archival research on early definitions and displays of the “pioneer” in Alberta. These representations from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries set the stage for current exhibitions of pioneer heritage by producing images of “true” pioneers, those who made the arduous journey west during the late nineteenth century, before the advent of more comfortable train travel, and then cultivated the land by means of endless backbreaking labour. This characterization distinguished the earliest pioneers from later settlers, labelled “newcomers” or “tenderfeet” rather than pioneers. Although hardy, the earliest pioneers were in need of protection, for their success in laying the foundations of western industrialization enabled an influx of settlers that threatened to efface all signs of early pioneer labour. Pioneers and their descendants addressed this conundrum by collecting and displaying the material culture of the earliest settlers while organizing a range of events – dances, banquets, log cabin raisings – meant to resurrect the embodied performance of pioneer identity. Many pioneer museums in Alberta continue this legacy today, exhibiting the objects used by the first settlers in the region, especially those related to manual labour, while promoting the embodied experience of pioneer life: visitors can sew pioneer socks, bake bread in a wood stove, or don handmade aprons and bonnets, among other activities meant to renew a pioneer presence.

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More importantly, my archival research showed that some Indigenous peoples were part of early displays of pioneer identity. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pioneer groups, including the Northern Alberta Pioneer and Old Timers’ Association (napota), recognized Indigenous individuals as “Old Timers” and valued their embodied knowledge of life on the land. Preserving early experiences of the fur trade (approximately 1670–1870) necessarily included references to Indigenous peoples and material culture, embedding them within representations of the “true” pioneer. Nevertheless, the Indigenous members of napota were not easily assimilated within this category; their presence pushed against the group’s definition of the pioneer, revealing the instability of the category in ways that remain productive. My efforts to locate and analyze these shifting representations of the pioneer were inspired not only by the arguments of Indigenous museums and cultural centres but also by the groundbreaking research of scholars such as Sherry Farrell Racette, Carmen Robertson, Crystal Gail Fraser, Ruth Phillips, and Tanya Harnett.18 Their analyses of the creative ways that Indigenous peoples have negotiated coercive settler colonial structures encouraged me to look for signs of Indigenous resilience within even those representations of pioneer identity primarily disseminated by settlers. My discussion focuses on how the Indigenous descendants of the Fraser family – several of whom were members of napota – problematized representations of pioneer identity.19 I consider written accounts of how members of this prominent fur-trading family, including Henry Fraser, displayed their Indigenous identity at pioneer events but were also sometimes erased from representations of the group. Attending to the fluctuating presence of the Fraser family within napota’s display of pioneer heritage challenges monolithic visions of the “true” pioneer while suggesting ways to revisit the pioneer museums in Alberta in order to see them differently. The complicated presence of the Fraser family in representations of pioneer identity indicates that elements of Indigenous resistance remain visible within dominant pioneer narratives, including those reproduced in current pioneer museums. This final chapter of the book thus outlines a method for more fully addressing the density of pioneer museums by looking for these elements, noting how they rupture standard pioneer narratives. Even though this analysis is the culmination of my efforts to visit and think about the specificity of small-town and rural museums, it lays the groundwork for continuing research on the pioneer museums in Alberta.

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The Siksika Nation The main building complex of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park gleams in the sunshine as we pull off the highway and drive toward it down a winding road (figure 5.1). The large rounded structure is strikingly modern: an even row of windows encircles the base, and a smaller conical form rests on top, like a tent-shaped dome.20 This white form extends upward and opens into the blue sky, allowing light to enter the building. Interactions between interior and exterior spaces continue throughout the complex, which responds to the expansive landscape surrounding it. The roof is decorated with light earth tones to match the dry prairie soil and with darker browns to echo the banks of the Bow River in the background. Low ochre-coloured brick walls reach outward from the base of the building like a pair of arms meant to guide visitors toward a suite of glass entrance doors. These doors are sheltered by nine feather-shaped structures coloured blue, red, and white that fan out like a canopy. Depending on the position of the sun, the fabricated feathers cast large shadows on the walkway or walls of the cultural complex, reinforcing the inseparability of the building from its environment. As we exit the car and embark on the path created by the brick arms, we see a woman standing beside a stroller. She chats with a friend while her young child plays nearby, running freely through the prairie grass. When we pass this group, the woman raises her voice and pointedly declares, “Because we don’t want our children to be assimilated.” This explanation indicates her resolve to protect Siksika culture and is clearly directed at us, three white settlers about to visit her cultural centre. Although Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park welcomes tourists, it was created primarily for the Siksika community to instill pride, especially in youth, regarding their cultural and political history.21 In 2008, Shane Breaker, then vice-president of Marketing and Public Relations at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, argued, “Our direction is dictated by our own people and by our Board members, and they get the feedback from the community and that is where we take our direction from. There’s no Government agenda, no Federal agenda, or Provincial agenda. It’s fantastic that we are kind of free from those ties.”22 Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park celebrates Siksika sovereignty, serving the needs of the local community more than those of outside interests. Once inside, I look around the multipurpose space. The main building includes vast exhibition areas and interactive displays, along with a library and archives, conference centre, theatre, restaurant serving traditional foods, and shop selling local crafts and artwork. I approach a reception desk to pay the entrance

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5.1 Exterior view, main complex, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, Siksika Nation Reserve, Alberta, 2020.

fee, stopping to gather a handful of educational pamphlets. I read that the building in which I am standing was created as a “literal metaphor” for Niitsítapi culture after decades of planning, discussion, reflection, and debate within the Siksika community.23 I learn that every element of the building’s structure, from the semi-circular galleries to the choice of floor tiles and paint colours, is based on Niitsítapi traditions sustained in the region for over 10,000 years.24 The overall design, realized by architect Ron Goodfellow, takes the shape of a tipi cover laid out on the prairie grass during the process of setting up or moving camp, and the roof is painted with some of the designs traditionally used to decorate such covers.25 The white conical skylight on top of this roof portrays an upright, undecorated tipi. I realize that my initial interpretation of the guiding “arms” outside the building was incorrect: one of the two stone walls represents the Chief’s Walk, named by a late chief, Leo Youngman; and the opposite wall is the Winter Count Wall, named by Allan Wolf Leg. I also read that the Eagle Feather Fan installed above the entrance door portrays the sacredness of the eagle in Siksika ceremonies and religion, introducing the content found inside. Although the layers of meaning flowing throughout Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park are new to me, they would be readily understood by Niitsítapi people equipped with their own cultural knowledge.26

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I descend into the main gallery downstairs, ready to explore the installations arranged within 20,000 square feet of space. I am immediately faced, however, with a bright white curvilinear wall that sports a lengthy printed text. At first, I think that the numbered text must be a version of Treaty 7, finalized on the grounds outside this building in 1877. I soon realize that the wall is composed of an enlarged reproduction of the 1876 Indian Act of Canada, a document that, in defiance of treaty agreements, unilaterally asserted control over the status, land, resources, education, and administration of Indigenous people. I slowly read the entire document for the first time, recognizing that it defined who could be classified as “Indian” and who could not. Officious language declares that “any Indian woman marrying any other than an Indian or a non-treaty Indian shall cease to be an Indian in any respect within the meaning of this Act.” Section 72 further legislates the family structure and morality of Indigenous peoples by asserting that “[t]he Superintendent-General shall have power to stop the payment of the annuity and interest money of any Indian who may be proved, to the satisfaction of the Superintendent-General, to have been guilty of deserting his or her family,” drawing attention to any woman who “deserts her husband and lives immorally with another man.”27 The longstanding efforts of the Government of Canada to contain and oppress the cultures of Indigenous peoples, while insisting on patriarchal European structures rather than matriarchal Indigenous traditions, are starkly laid bare within the main gallery space at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park. The surrounding displays portray the devastating impacts of such policies, as well as the continual resistance by the Siksika and other Indigenous people to government control. Visitors move through four large tipi structures while exploring the themes that flow in and around them: survival, creation, celebration, and storytelling. This structure avoids a linear narrative, placing the Siksika people and their culture simultaneously in the past and the present. These spaces convey the multiple ways that the colonial project shaped and attempted to destroy elements of Siksika culture. At the same time, the displays show how dehumanizing government policies – modified versions of the Indian Act remain in place to this day – ultimately failed to assimilate Indigenous peoples. Overall, the installations reveal how Siksika traditions survived and continue to thrive; visitors are able to encounter vivid displays of material culture, listen to interactive lessons in Siksika, an Algonquian language spoken by over 8,000 people, and read about the importance of buffalo in providing ancestors with food, clothing, and shelter.

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One section of the gallery features local survivors of the residential school system, which operated throughout Canada from 1879 to 1996. Indigenous children were forced to attend decrepit and crowded schools designed to erode their family ties and languages. Many children died while under the “care” of the religious and government authorities who managed these genocidal schools, a fact re-established by the survivors who shared their stories during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which between 2008 and 2015 collected evidence about the systematic abuse suffered by Indigenous children, leading to compensation for some of the survivors.28 Inside the gallery spaces at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, residential school survivors describe their experiences in a video that is screened in proximity to a discussion of the Eurocentric misconceptions that continue to impact the Siksikawa and other Indigenous peoples.29 The organization of these installations indicates that the colonial past is not over. Despite various government commissions and apologies, colonialism pervades the present. Other gallery spaces focus on the continuation of ceremonies and traditional forms of dancing. The celebration tipi features an array of elaborate costumes and regalia, along with images of individual dancers who have won prizes at powwows. Notices placed alongside some of these displays indicate that detailed information about the secret societies linked with particular ceremonies and dances has been withheld from visitors to Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park. Such knowledge can be communicated only by the authorized members of those societies.30 This announcement indicates that elements of Siksika culture have never been fully knowable to outsiders, including tourists, anthropologists, and government agents. It also delimits the regulations about who has earned the right to access particular forms of knowledge and who has not. Tourists and other visitors like me are not privy to every aspect of Siksika culture, but we are a key audience at the site, addressed by texts in English. For the most part, we are positioned as guests who should listen attentively to the voices of the Siksikawa and actively remember what we have learned. This message is most directly conveyed within the storytelling tipi. Visitors are invited to enter a refabricated tipi scene and sit on kitchen chairs to hear a recorded story presented as if told by a Siksika father to his daughter, shown resting on a cozy bed that is covered with a buffalo hide. The circular space reshapes the diorama format long deployed by natural history and anthropology museums in their creation of detailed scenes that, according to settler scholar Pauline Wakeham, use taxidermy to conflate Indigenous people with animals and nature

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instead of culture or politics.31 In the storytelling tipi at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, however, visitors are not offered a spectacularly lifelike image of Indigenous people hunting buffalo, cooking over an open fire, or scraping hides with authentic tools. Instead, we witness a domestic setting that highlights the oral transmission of knowledge between Siksika generations. Tourists are positioned on the edges of this space as privileged participants, not voyeuristic collectors able to possess “exotic” forms of Indigenous culture. Even though I have described striking aspects of the exhibitions inside the main building at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, I have not covered their content in any detail or retold any of the stories that I heard. Those wishing to learn more about the Siksikawa and their history must visit the park in person. Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park is located within its community of origin, a crucial element that shapes the meaning and impact of many Indigenous museums and cultural centres. According to Linda Jules, director of the Secwepemc Museum and Heritage Park in Kamloops, British Columbia, the location of Indigenous cultural centres is important. Speaking of her own Indigenous museum, she argues, “We have a feeling that if you are going to study Schuswap culture you shouldn’t go to Ottawa to study it, you shouldn’t go to Victoria to study it, you should come to where the culture sprang up because then you are able to experience the climate and the environment, you are able to experience the community and you can talk to the people.”32 Along similar lines, those wishing to engage with Niitsítapi culture and history should visit the museums and cultural centres on the Siksika Nation Reserve and other reserves rather than going only to large national and provincial museums in Ottawa, Edmonton, or Calgary. Within Indigenous communities, tourists and other visitors can encounter Indigenous cultures on Indigenous terms while potentially having their presumptions about Indigenous peoples and settler colonial history challenged in productive ways, a point made in the next section of this chapter.33 Arguably, the most important part of the visit to Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park is engaging with the land that surrounds the multipurpose complex. After walking through the galleries and having tea in the restaurant, my friends and I head outside. Trails lead us to the magnificent landscape behind the building, which we had already glimpsed while dining inside through a wall of curving glass that faces onto the river valley (figure 5.2). The transparency of the back of the museum complex opens the building to the land. We gaze at the building’s exterior, noting how it appears to pay homage to the rolling hills that gently descend toward the tree-filled Bow River Valley below. This place is sacred, for Niitsítapi peoples followed migrating buffalo herds along the Bow River

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5.2 Exterior view, facing the river, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, Siksika Nation Reserve, Alberta, 2010.

Valley for thousands of years. In 1877, Treaty 7 was finalized on this land, and the location of the historic ceremony is now marked with a monument. Chief Crowfoot of the Siksika, as well as leaders of the Kainai, Piikani, Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina First Nations, concluded the treaty negotiations with representatives of Queen Victoria and the North-West Mounted Police (figure 5.3).34 Already recognized as a national heritage site, the land of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park is currently under consideration for designation as a World Heritage site.35 Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park honours the original intentions of Treaty 7, an agreement to share land and resources. Some settlers and government officials insist that the various treaty agreements made in Canada involved Indigenous peoples relinquishing both their land and their rights. Yet Indigenous

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5.3 Exterior view, riverbank, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, site of the final negotiation of Treaty 7, Siksika Nation Reserve, Alberta, 2020.

oral histories tell a different story. According to the collective memory of eighty Elders from all five nations involved in the negotiations of Treaty 7, it was a peace treaty that included an agreement by Indigenous peoples to share the land with settlers. It never addressed a surrender of their land. The written version of the treaty document is at odds with the agreements that were negotiated orally, in part because of the difficulty of translating between multiple languages and because of the vastly different worldviews of the representatives of the colonial government and Indigenous peoples.36 Although the 1876 Indian Act of Canada was in place before Treaty 7 was signed, its policies were never explained to Niitsítapi and other Indigenous leaders; their subsequent loss of agency, freedom, and rights was at odds with the treaty itself, which promised the Siksika, Kainai, Piikani, Nakoda, and Tsuut’ina peoples annuity payments, education, medical care, ammunition, assistance in farming and ranching, and the ability to hunt freely as they always had.37 Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park is a testament to these agreements, made between diverse political actors. In addition to learning about such historic events, visitors to Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park can stay overnight at the Chief Crowfoot Tipi Village, named after an esteemed chief of the Siksika who died in 1890 and is buried on the re-

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serve. A number of white canvas Niitsítapi tipis have been erected in a clearing near the river valley, complete with buffalo robes and airtight stoves for the comfort of guests, who can pay fees to sleep there between the months of May and September. Although the local community is a priority, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park was initially designed to include tourists. When the site opened, Jack Royal, its president from 2005 to the present, announced that “the total cost to open and operate the Park is estimated at $33 million, making it the largest single First Nation cultural tourist attraction in Canada.”38 Efforts to attract tourists to Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park continue into the present. In 2019, the new general manager, Stephen Yellow Old Woman, described plans to increase the cultural offerings for tourists who stay at the Chief Crowfoot Tipi Village so that they can engage with powwow dancing and traditional methods of cooking, notably “the boiling pit,” which uses red-hot rocks to heat water before meat and vegetables are added.39 Yellow Old Woman argued that an enhanced tipi village will allow visitors to pursue “hands on” learning,40 which will include opportunities to “meet our local interpreter who will discuss the flora and fauna of the area as well as demonstrate craft and survival skills,” as described on the park’s website.41 According to the new general manager, this expansion will bolster the identity of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park as an interactive cultural centre that provides broad audiences with embodied experiences of Siksika history and culture. This emphasis on interactive experiences is also designed to distinguish Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park from a museum, another goal highlighted by Yellow Old Woman. Like most Indigenous heritage organizations, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park has an ambivalent relationship with conventional museum structures, in part because of the colonial efforts of many museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to appropriate and misrepresent Indigenous cultures.42 On the one hand, the organizers of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park avoid using the term “museum” in the site’s official title and actively strive to move beyond the traditional collecting and exhibiting practices of museums. On the other hand, the site embraces certain aspects of museums by providing spectacular exhibitions within the main building complex and by rearticulating such longstanding display methods as the diorama, noted above. Although Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park is independent of government and other funding bodies, the staff continually revisit the site’s relationship with museum systems and policies, sometimes moving it farther away from an identification with museums and at other times adapting conventional museum practices for strategic purposes.

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The ambivalent relationship of Indigenous cultural centres with museums is especially evident during attempts by Indigenous peoples to repatriate items that were removed from their communities and placed in provincial, national, or international museums. In the past, many museums displayed sensitive and sacred materials that were produced within Indigenous communities.43 Some of these items were sold to collectors by Indigenous peoples under duress, such as those facing periods of financial difficulty caused by the economic restrictions imposed by the Indian Act.44 Colonial settler authorities, anthropologists, and other collectors were eager to possess such cultural items and regularly donated them to museums in order to “save” material evidence of Indigenous cultures presumed to be on the verge of disappearing.45 Other items were deliberately made for the tourist market before entering museums, attesting to the survival skills of Indigenous peoples during a dark period in their history.46 At the same time, some of the items that ended up in museums were confiscated from communities after Indigenous religious and ceremonial practices were deemed illegal by the Government of Canada as part of its efforts to suppress Indigenous beliefs and assimilate Indigenous peoples. In 1884, an amendment to the Indian Act made the distribution of goods and dancing associated with Potlatch ceremonies illegal, impacting the cultural traditions of, among other groups, the Kwakwa-ka-ʼwakw, whose territories include land on northern Vancouver Island, nearby islands, and the British Columbia mainland. After a Potlatch ceremony in 1921, members of the Kwakwa-ka-ʼwakw were arrested, and their regalia and masks were sold to museums throughout Canada, the United States, and Europe. In 1980, after years of repatriation efforts, the Kwakwa-ka-’wakw opened the U’mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, British Columbia, to feature the items returned to their community of origin, now displayed as the Potlatch Collection.47 Like other Indigenous organizations, the U’mista Cultural Centre counteracts the colonial elements of museums while adopting certain aspects of museum organization and display in order to return historically important and sacred items to their community of origin. Staff at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park are currently adapting conventional museum structures in order to repatriate the regalia worn by Chief Crowfoot during the final negotiation of Treaty 7. Chief Crowfoot’s leggings and shirt were likely purchased by or given as a gift to Cecil Denny, a British colonial signatory of the treaty, and later sold by his sister to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (ramm) in Exeter, England.48 After visiting the ramm in 2013, members of the Siksika Nation made an official request to repatriate the items related to Chief Crowfoot and return them to the Siksika Nation Reserve.

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The managers of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park subsequently renovated selected areas to meet the museum standards required by staff in England, adding an environmentally controlled display room to care for the regalia on behalf of the Siksika First Nation. In April 2020, the Exeter City Council voted in favour of this repatriation, a key step in a lengthy process that nevertheless continues. In January 2021, the website of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park noted that the repatriation was in dispute and that “there have been several roadblocks and challenges to the transaction. The current stall in negotiations by both sides has delayed the return of Chief Crowfoot’s regalia.”49 This ongoing process exemplifies the complex relationship of Indigenous cultural centres with established museums. The staff of the museum in England recognize the rights of the Siksika to reclaim the regalia but also insist on particular protocols of preservation and possession, regulations potentially at odds with those formerly practised in the community.50 Almost all of the Indigenous museums and cultural centres in Alberta have participated in the repatriation process, returning culturally important items from large, urban museums to various facilities on reserves.51 During another trip to southern Alberta in 2018, my friends and I learned about the lengthy, frustrating, and rewarding repatriation efforts undertaken by the staff and supporters of the Tsuut’ina Nation Culture/Museum, located on the Tsuut’ina Nation Reserve, just over 100 kilometres west of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park.52 The Tsuut’ina Nation Culture/Museum opened in 2018 within a purpose-built space that features hundreds of pieces either collected by Elder Jeannette Starlight or donated by the family members of other Tsuut’ina Elders. Starlight is the driving force behind this impressive cultural centre/museum, and my friends and I were lucky enough to join her for a tour of the collections. Her guidance and knowledge of the collections, arranged within large glass cases with little signage, are crucial to understanding their significance. During our visit, Starlight acknowledged various items that she had helped to repatriate from the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, an art and history museum founded in 1966 that is internationally known for its conflicts as well as collaborations with Indigenous peoples, as discussed at length in many published sources.53 Starlight explained that the rug of Chief Bull Head of the Tsuut’ina Nation, made more than one hundred years ago, tells the story of the chief, his warriors, and his people. “He used to have this in his teepee as a curtain” before it entered the collections of the Glenbow Museum. Now the rug is featured within the new spaces of the Tsuut’ina Nation Culture/Museum, attesting to the continuity of Tsuut’ina knowledge.54

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The new Tsuut’ina Nation Culture/Museum is part of a broader resurgence of Indigenous museums and cultural centres in Alberta. Another striking example of this renewal is Métis Crossing, which I visited with my family in 2018. Designed, built, and operated by Métis people, the 512-acre site is located 120 kilometres northeast of Edmonton, near the town of Smoky Lake (figures 5.4 and 5.5). When we were there in early September, the tourist season was winding down. We spent most of our time outside, learning about the grounds, without experiencing the theatre, music, and artistic events that usually “encourage [the] active participation of visitors in activities that promote appreciation of our people, customs, and celebrations.”55 In keeping with the diverse offerings at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, Métis Crossing combines gardens, a campground complete with trapper’s tents for visitors to rent, performance areas, and meeting places along the banks of the North Saskatchewan River on lots held by Métis settlers in the late 1800s.56 Described as a “place of pride” for the Métis people, the site is also a tourist attraction designed to educate non-Indigenous peoples about the diverse layers of Métis heritage, with cultural offerings that extend beyond those of a conventional museum. Métis Crossing was under construction during our visit, and a temporary museum housed a relatively small display of Métis culture. Inside a former barn, didactic panels explained the history of work (highlighting Métis participation in the fur trade), socializing, religious practices, and celebrations with music and dancing, alongside collections of historic clothing, handmade objects, and religious items. A key section of this display placed the Métis people of Alberta firmly in the twenty-first century, alongside photographs of individuals currently active in diverse areas of economic, cultural, and political life in the region. Most striking, however, was the wood-panelled board room located on the ground floor of the barn beneath the temporary museum space. There, a table with chairs signified that the large room was used for important meetings related to the advancement of the Métis people, and on the walls were historic photographs of Batoche, one site of Métis forbearance during the Riel Resistance of 1885, alongside black and white images of early leaders such as Ambroise Lépine, Gabriel Dumont, and Louis Riel.57 This room clearly aligned the Métis people with a continuing political legacy. The Métis people have long defended their unique identity and right to self-governance, which was finally recognized by the Government of Canada in 2019 after decades of political work by the Métis Nation of Alberta.58 Perhaps more clearly than any other Indigenous museum or cultural centre, Métis Crossing reveals how exhibitions of Indigenous cultures and political lobbying are aligned.

5.4 Top Grounds and performance stage, Métis Crossing, Alberta, 2020. 5.5 Bottom Barn with new Gathering Centre in the background, Métis Crossing, Alberta, 2020. The Gathering Centre opened in 2020.

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Indigenous museums and cultural centres are growing in number, size, and impact even as I write this chapter. When I revisit Métis Crossing, its new 10,000square-foot Cultural Gathering Centre will be opened, showcasing modern classrooms, spaces for Indigenous Elders and youth to interact, purpose-built exhibition areas, and a restaurant serving traditional Métis foods.59 The energy of this site is already palpable, in keeping with that of other Indigenous museums and cultural centres that look toward the future as well as the past. The ongoing expansion of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, the establishment of the Tsuut’ina Nation Culture/Museum, and the transformation of Métis Crossing as well as other Indigenous heritage sites suggest that they will have an increasingly important role to play in the communication of Indigenous identities, beliefs, and politics in Alberta. Not only do these Indigenous museums and cultural centres challenge the longstanding colonial role of large, urban museums, but they also unsettle the heroic image of early settlers conveyed by the pioneer museums located throughout the province, the topic of the next section.

Pioneer Museums Many small-town and rural museums in Alberta are dedicated to the predominantly white settlers who moved from Europe and other parts of the world to colonize the province during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 2016, there were 183 such organizations in Alberta.60 The displays inside these heritage museums feature a similar array of material objects – early farming implements, rifles, telephones, military uniforms, medical equipment, musical instruments, children’s toys, crockery, newspapers – and are accompanied by stories about how early pioneers struggled to persevere in an unaccommodating environment prone to natural disasters by means of hard work, cooperation, and good humour. A number of these museums include outbuildings, usually nineteenth-century schoolhouses, churches, and log cabins, moved from nearby locations to preserve them on-site. Although some museums are recognized by the Alberta Museums Association and thus able to apply for government grants to fund minimal staffing and operations, the majority rely on donations of money, volunteer time, and objects from the community.61 Pioneer museums tend to overlook or marginalize the Indigenous presence in their respective regions. Displays often emphasize archaeological material, locating Indigenous cultures in the past rather than the present while avoiding references to conflict, oppression, or displacement. For example, the Okotoks

Sign outside the laneway of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

Toy rocking horse made from the body of a real foal, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2017.

Opposite Torso of the unrepentant thief (detail), Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2017.

Animatronic elf, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

Opposite The Kiddo, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

Above Taxidermy baboon, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

Right Taxidermy groundhog, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta, 2020.

Exterior signage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

Overleaf Homesteading diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

Beauty shop diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta, 2020.

Exterior of the Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta, 2019.

Natural history displays, Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta, 2018.

Picturesque view of the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta, 2020.

Above Exterior view of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2018.

Left Play lab, Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta, 2020.

Interior display, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 2013.

Exterior of the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, 2013.

Exterior view, riverbank (top), and view facing the river (bottom), Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, site of the final negotiation of Treaty 7, Siksika Nation Reserve, Alberta, 2020.

Barn with new Gathering Centre in the background, Métis Crossing, Alberta, 2020. The Gathering Centre opened in 2020.

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Museum and Archives, established in 2000 in a large town located just south of Calgary, offers the usual narratives and themes, covering the businesses, pastimes, heritage buildings, and lifestyles of settlers who began coming to the town site in the 1880s. The local Niitsítapi people are recognized in a placard entitled “Beginnings,” which notes their former nomadic practices and the fact that the name of the town is derived from okatok, the Niitsítapi word for “rock.”62 A glass case with labelled Indigenous clothing rests alongside this placard, but indications of the continuing contributions made by local Niitsítapi people and accounts of their modern lifestyles are largely absent from the museum. In many pioneer museums, Indigenous peoples are represented during the distant past as well as the contact period, from the early days of fur trading until the negotiation of treaties, after which they disappear from accounts of regional history. The erasure of twentieth-century Indigenous politics, experiences, and cultures from these historical representations implies the success of Canada’s assimilationist policies. Since at least the 1980s, scholars have adeptly critiqued the colonial narratives that underpin celebrations of pioneer identity, including those in the heritage, outdoor, living history, and agricultural museums in Canada and the United States.63 According to American historian and geographer David Lowenthal, pioneer museums are especially resonant in the western parts of these countries because colonization occurred there at a later date and remains within memory, as indicated in the objects used and stories told by the relatives of settlers.64 Like other forms of heritage, this pioneer mythology refashions history to exaggerate positive elements while overlooking or actively suppressing negative aspects that could reflect badly on ancestors.65 The resulting selective narrative is part of what English scholar Robert Hewison calls “the heritage industry,” which sanitizes and commercializes the past as a golden age, particularly during periods of perceived economic and cultural decline.66 Nostalgia for an invented pioneer past is continually recreated in the present and may be a particularly Western way of managing loss and rapid economic or technological change. The widespread pioneer myth recurs in literature, in film, and at historic sites, as well as in museums. It remains “the master narrative of Canadian nationalism,” according to anthropologist Elizabeth Furniss.67 Whereas other scholars examine the ways that white settler literature and life writing use colonial visions of the prairies to replace Indigenous knowledge,68 Furniss concentrates on the stories told in Williams Lake, a small city in British Columbia, analyzing its Museum of the Cariboo Chilcotin. She finds that this pioneer heritage museum reiterates heroic portrayals of explorers and settlers, identifying them with the

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ideals of individualism, courage, and self-sufficiency, without recognizing either European economic and administrative expansion or the suppression of Indigenous resistance.69 Furniss argues that in Canada the pioneer narrative highlights cooperation and benevolence, replacing the American frontier myth of lawless gunslingers with tales of determined settlers who, aided by the NorthWest Mounted Police, struggled against the forces of nature and sometimes “hostile Indians” to permanently alter the landscape.70 In her study of community-based museums in Ontario, museum director Laura Schneider similarly observes, “Almost inevitably, the narrative in these museums was colonialist in nature, championing evolution, progress and the supremacy of British civilization in a ‘savage’ land.”71 Representations that diminish the presence of Indigenous populations in the past and erase them in the present are not unique to Alberta but persist in slightly different forms throughout Canada. The emotional attachment or even dependence on pioneer mythology of settlers in the West is difficult to challenge or redirect. When several American pioneer museums opted for more authentic and spare re-enactments of the Christmas holidays in the late 1970s, visitors demanded a return to familiar seasonal events, regardless of their inaccuracy.72 In a more recent case, the art exhibition The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, organized by the National Museum of American Art in Washington, dc (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), caused a controversy in 1991 because revered landscape paintings conflated with American national identity were shown to participate in conquest and exploitation, at odds with longstanding stories about the frontier as a mostly empty space ripe for the glorious expansion of civilization.73 Even though the museology that developed in the 1980s called for more critical and nuanced accounts of the past, along with a focus on community engagement, many settlers prefer to patronize museums that rehearse familiar heritage narratives in order to preserve a particular vision of their ancestors and thus of themselves. Museum organizers may feel the same way. According to Schneider, the traditional “past keepers in local history museums have been descendants of town founders and have had a particular stake in upholding colonialist perspectives to bolster the importance of their ancestors.”74 Efforts to change the narratives of such pioneer museums risk alienating founding members and important donors as well as visitors and may threaten accounts of the museum’s proud origins. I was initially not interested in analyzing the pioneer museums in Alberta. While visiting a countless number of them throughout the province, I grew weary. The museums seemed monotonous when compared with innovative or-

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ganizations such as the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Museum of Fear and Wonder, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, and Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, among others discussed in this book. In contrast to these sites, pioneer museums appeared to convey the same stories with similar objects arranged in a predictable manner, aside from some unusual donations, including the stuffed African mammal heads at the Barrhead Centennial Museum, described in the introduction to this book. Although pioneer museums were the most abundant kind of museum in Alberta, it also seemed unlikely that I could formulate original interpretations of them. The narratives of pioneer museums had already been analyzed at length by esteemed scholars, and I did not wish merely to repeat their critiques of the colonial content. After visiting the Indigenous museums and cultural centres discussed above, I realized that my early understandings of the pioneer museums in Alberta were unhelpful. Although they were focused on the progress of settlers and gave little attention to Indigenous displacement, some pioneer museums conveyed multiple and even contradictory narratives, and others provided opportunities for thinking more critically about the colonial past and its continuation into the present. My gradual re-evaluation of pioneer museums was encouraged by the way that Indigenous museums and cultural centres emphasized the diversity of Indigenous cultures. Perhaps settler cultures were also diverse? I started to look more carefully at pioneer museums with this question in mind. At the same time, the representation of Indigenous resilience in Indigenous museums and cultural centres prompted me to wonder whether I had missed traces of an ongoing Indigenous presence at pioneer museums. I began to see pioneer museums differently by searching for ruptures in their largely colonial narratives while looking for signs of Indigenous peoples in unexpected places. I was additionally inspired by the John Walter Museum, an important pioneer house museum located in Edmonton rather than in a small-town or rural area. During the summer of 2019, Mary Pinkoski, a scholar of museum education and former employee at the John Walter Museum, invited me to analyze the site with her, focusing on its representation of gender. In collaborative work published elsewhere, we highlighted the simultaneous presence and absence of Annie Walter, the wife of John Walter, in the house museum.75 Among other arguments, we showed how historical understandings of the ideal pioneer woman both reinforced and undermined an otherwise standard male story that celebrated the industrial and community-building achievements of John Walter, a Scottish-born boat builder who in 1875 began homesteading on land bordering the Saskatchewan River. The John Walter Museum, owned and operated

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by Edmonton City Council since 1959, offsets the rather sudden erasure of Walter’s presence in the region, for his entrepreneurial ferry service across the river was ultimately replaced by a bridge and his successful lumbering business was destroyed by a flood in 1915, leaving him in ruin.76 The three successively larger homes built by John Walter have nevertheless survived and are now preserved to commemorate the otherwise invisible legacy of this founding pioneer who helped Edmonton to develop “from a fur trade post to a Western Canadian metropolis,” according to a placard erected on the museum grounds. Our research on the John Walter Museum revealed layers of meaning within the category of the pioneer. Although my work with Pinkoski considered the gendered representation of pioneers – an aspect already examined by historians such as Sarah Carter in studies of the colonizing role of women in western Canada77 – it also raised questions about Indigeneity. I was surprised to learn from another informational placard at the John Walter Museum that a Métis man named Henry Mathias Collins, known as Muchias, was a “much beloved pioneer” during the early days of Edmonton. Originally a water hauler for the Hudson’s Bay Company, the famously strong Collins moved with John Walter in 1875 to the site now designated a museum. Described as a friend and employee of John Walter at the current museum, Collins, who died in 1942, was apparently well known in his day, being featured in a range of early-twentieth-century newspaper reports, photographs, paintings, and short stories.78 These local accounts are double-edged, often praising and patronizing Collins at the same time by noting his strength alongside references to his stature as a “dwarf ” who stood around 4 feet tall. Although Collins was mythologized in sometimes unflattering ways, these stories also indicate that he was respected, independent, and highly skilled in, for example, hunting with handmade bows and arrows.79 Collins is deserving of intensive scholarly study that would enhance historical understandings of labour, land, and disability at the John Walter Museum, research that museum staff are already pursuing. I was primarily struck, however, by how the Métis identity of Collins could be subsumed, with apparent ease, within the category of the pioneer. Was the term used to assimilate and undermine a prominent Indigenous person, or was the concept of the pioneer flexible and open to change over time? This question motivated me to research the historical definition of pioneers at both the Provincial Archives of Alberta and the City of Edmonton Archives. Records of a key organization devoted to representing pioneer identity in Alberta quickly came into the foreground: the Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota). Founded in 1894 as the Edmonton Old Timers’

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Association and renamed in 1925, this group celebrated the earliest settlers in what is now central and northern Alberta.80 napota expanded well beyond Edmonton to attract members throughout the territory, inspiring a sister organization in 1901, the Calgary Old Timers’ Association, renamed the Southern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association in 1922.81 napota strove to maintain an impressive membership – even during the Depression, when there were 1,472 names on its mailing list – and it continues to thrive to this day.82 This influential association shaped early images of the western pioneer and is worth studying at length because its legacy remains evident today, especially in the pioneer museums located throughout Alberta. Archival documents show that early members of napota produced shifting images of the “pioneer,” suggesting that the term was indeed flexible. During the late nineteenth century, the Edmonton-based group described Old Timer pioneers as the first generation of settlers in the West, namely those men and women – although women were not allowed to become members until 1924 – who had travelled west in Métis Red River carts before 1883.83 After 1883, more accessible train travel made the voyage much easier, undermining the conflation of early pioneers with a particular kind of embodied experience. The original pioneers were those who undertook a long, hard voyage to reach the NorthWest Territories before Alberta became a province. Having arrived with nothing but grit, they used their “bare hands” to transform the wilderness into an economically productive home, and they helped each other, gradually building bonds of friendship that were cemented in social organizations such as churches, clubs, and charitable associations. These ideally described pioneers were heroic and distinctive yet also potentially erased from memory by waves of subsequent settlers and even by their own children, whose “easier” lifestyle increasingly distanced them from that of the true pioneer. The members of napota soon faced a dilemma: how to redefine pioneer identity in a way that not only privileged the earliest settlers and recognized their descendants but also responded to the continual influx of new arrivals. The group regularly expanded its initial definition of the “pioneer” while striving to retain the distinction of the term. In 1924, its annual report mentioned a failed attempt to open membership in napota to anyone who had resided west of the Great Lakes for thirty years or more.84 Yet in 1926, membership was extended to embrace all settlers who had arrived in Manitoba by 1890 or in Alberta, Saskatchewan, or British Columbia before 31 December 1895, including any family members over the age of twenty-one.85 This inclusion of the descendants of pioneers was a practical measure designed to increase both revenue

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and participants. The annual report of 1930 noted the need for about 100 to 150 new members to replace those delinquent in paying their dues as well as those who had died and thus been “released from the cares of Pioneer Life.”86 Calls to amend napota’s constitution in order to extend the dates to 1898 and beyond were ongoing but always fraught with anxiety about diluting the pioneer identity. Such concerns are visible even today in the membership categories offered by the current version of napota, renamed the Northern Alberta Pioneers and Descendants Association in 1983. This group distinguishes between founding members, those able to trace their family lineage to pioneers who settled in Alberta prior to 1905, and associate members, those who “solely have an interest in the heritage and history of this area or are the spouse of, or adult child of, a founding member.”87 The latest definition of the Albertan pioneer includes settlers who arrived by train before 1905 – although that date excludes later settlers such as the African Americans mentioned above – while recognizing their descendants as having inherited a pioneer identity. In addition to incorporating shifting dates of arrival and geographical limitations, the identification of the true pioneer has gradually moved from an emphasis on the first-hand experience of pioneer life to a title bestowed by ancestors. My archival research showed how the definition of the pioneer in Alberta had been slowly broadened and altered, but it did not initially reveal much about the relationship of the category to Indigenous peoples. I could not, for instance, find any official recognition of Henry Mathias Collins as a pioneer in the records. To the best of my knowledge, Collins was never a member of napota or its precursors, although both John and Annie Walter were involved in the group.88 Nor did Collins partake in the social and cultural events regularly hosted by the organization. Yet while I searched for references to Collins, other Indigenous participants began to emerge, both as early members of the Edmonton Old Timers’ Association, later renamed napota, and in the organization’s representations of early pioneer life. The following overview of my findings is deceptively clear, covering the material in a chronological order that belies the messy and confusing (albeit inspiring) process of working within archives. The sources I have thus far used are admittedly limited, having been largely produced by white settlers of the region rather than by Indigenous peoples. They nevertheless show how Indigenous peoples were central to early displays of pioneer life well into the twentieth century, especially when representations of the pioneer retained an emphasis on embodied experience rather than on inheritance. Exploring this Indigenous presence suggests ways to reconsider the exhibitions

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currently installed in many of the pioneer museums in Alberta by pursuing their layered and sometimes contradictory understandings of the pioneer. During the late nineteenth century, the Edmonton Old Timers’ Association was primarily dedicated to organizing social events, especially pioneer dances and banquets. Although few traces of these entertainments remain in the archival sources, the proceedings were described in contemporary newspaper accounts, helpfully assembled and published in 1983 by historians of napota.89 One clipping from 1882 describes “another ball” organized by the old settlers, with men and women dancing from 6:00 in the evening until 5:00 the next morning.90 The only intermission, according to the report, was for “a supper served at Colin Fraser’s.” Fraser was the son of Colin Fraser Sr, a Scottish settler best known as the bagpiper of Sir George Simpson, the colonial governor for the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1820 to 1860. The senior Fraser left his position with Simpson to manage Jasper House, a Hudson’s Bay Company fur-trading post in the Rocky Mountains, where he remained from 1835 to 1850, and in this rugged place, Colin Jr was born to Nancy Beaudry, a woman of Métis ancestry. The host of the supper in 1882 was thus an Indigenous man from a prominent fur-trading family.91 The younger Fraser had homesteaded in the Edmonton region during the 1870s before moving to Fort Chipewyan, but he returned to Fort Edmonton on a regular basis to trade furs.92 The participation of Fraser in an Edmonton pioneer event was not unusual, for Métis and other Indigenous peoples were among the first to settle the river lots near Fort Edmonton, lands long inhabited by various First Nations peoples, including the Papaschase. Many Métis and other Indigenous peoples were actively trading and intermarrying with settlers and had long outnumbered the newcomers.93 This glimpse into the activities of the early Edmonton Old Timer’s Association reveals a notable Indigenous presence in its founding events, and such participation continued in the later activities of the pioneer group, even though it is more challenging to detect in the surviving records. Another member of the Fraser family appears in the newspaper report of a ball held in 1900. In this case, Henry Fraser, the younger brother of Colin Jr, contributed to a social gathering that featured “old time” music and dance, including favourites such as the Duck Dance and the Red River Jig, “with Henry Fraser taking part in the latter, attired in Indian costume.”94 Although the published account lacks detail, it suggests that Fraser jigged on his own. According to cultural anthropologist Sarah Quick, the Red River Jig could be performed by male and female dancers; it was also danced in a competitive way by young

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men “showing off their stepping prowess,” especially during the festivities and negotiations associated with the fur trade system.95 Fraser was in his late forties at the time, and his jig may have recalled those early fur-trading events while highlighting the continuing role of Indigenous peoples in the culture of the region. The Red River Jig is a form of Métis heritage, one that emerges through social interaction, but it was also danced by people identifying as First Nations and French, among other groups.96 Henry Fraser’s wife, Margaret Ann Pruden, born at the Red River Settlement, was presumably among the diverse group performing jigs and other dances at the ball in 1900.97 Although her husband’s costume is not described, the work of Métis scholar Sherry Farrell Racette on the history of Métis and “Half Breed” clothing – the term “Half Breed” was commonly used during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to describe the descendants of Anglo-Saxon and Indigenous parents – encourages me to think that either Pruden or other women in Henry Fraser’s family helped to create his attire, allowing him to demonstrate a distinctive Indigenous identity at the event.98 The Fraser brothers did more than participate in entertainments; they were recognized members of the pioneer society. Among the evidence of their membership is a composite photograph made in 1905 entitled “Edmonton’s Old Timers’ Association, Organized 1894.”99 The large document features small black and white headshots of each of the 120 male members, accompanied by a numbered list that notes the name of each man pictured. The oval portraits of the Fraser brothers appear side by side as numbers 37 and 38. Their images are surrounded by an array of other men, and despite differences – some men sport moustaches, others do not, and a few wear hats – the figures begin to blend together, making an argument about group rather than individual identity. Colin and Henry Fraser are dressed similarly to all of the other members and appear on an equal footing with them, including early presidents of the association such as Frank Oliver, an Anglo-Saxon settler from Ontario who in 1880 founded the first newspaper in Edmonton – the Edmonton Bulletin, which published the reports of the associations’ balls – before becoming involved in politics. In 1905, Oliver was the minister of the interior and the superintendent-general of Indian Affairs for Alberta and Saskatchewan. He was a controversial figure in the past and remains so in the present, both for his opposition to the immigration of Ukrainians, African Americans, and other peoples he deemed undesirable and for his efforts to remove the Papaschase from their treaty lands.100 During the early twentieth century, however, Oliver was regularly celebrated as a pioneer who contributed to the creation of Edmonton society, and he is positioned

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alongside important businessmen, religious leaders, and fur traders in the composite photograph, including the Fraser brothers. Colin and Henry Fraser nevertheless stand out from the other pioneers when the written classification of the numbered photographs is considered. A date accompanies the name of each member of the Edmonton Old Timers’ Association, indicating when he “came west,” a point of pride also linked to eligibility for membership in the group. Frank Oliver, for example, is listed as coming west in 1876, whereas John Walter “came west” in 1875. Their dates are typical, as most pioneer men in the association settled in the West during the 1870s and ’80s, with only three on the list having arrived during the 1860s. The much earlier dates written beside the names of Colin Fraser (1849) and Henry Fraser (1852) are therefore striking, especially within a pioneer group that favoured the earliest settlers. In fact, it was this disjuncture in the arrival dates that initially drew my attention to the Fraser brothers, leading me to seek out their histories. After some searching, I realized that the dates given for the Fraser brothers were in fact their birthdates; both men had been born in the region to Colin Fraser Sr and his wife, Nancy Beaudry. As Indigenous men, the Fraser brothers never “came west” like the others. Their presence thus confounds the group’s official definition of the pioneer as someone who had undertaken arduous travel to move west from elsewhere. As original Old Timers who were born in the West, Colin and Henry Fraser were both within and outside of the group, undermining the Indigenous-settler dyad. The challenging presence of these Indigenous Old Timers was acknowledged, albeit in covert ways that are difficult to document. One instance is associated with a newspaper article published in 1917 entitled “Edmonton Residents Fifty Years Ago Numbered about Fifty Men; Reminiscences of Henry Fraser.”101 The lengthy report features “the good old days” at Fort Edmonton, focusing on the physicality of settler life during the fur trade, including past hunting practices, food preparation, popular entertainments – mainly horse racing – and the constant threat from “marauding bands of Blackfeet.”102 The reporter for the Edmonton Bulletin relied on Henry Fraser for information, praising “the successful pioneer” as “one of the largest taxpayers in the city of Edmonton” when describing his extensive property holdings and impressive farm just outside of the city. The small photograph of Fraser that accompanied the article seems to confirm his favoured position as an Indigenous person with strong links to the AngloSaxon experience of a Hudson’s Bay Company fur trade post. Yet the image of Fraser was a source of anxiety at the time, at least for the reporter. The author of the article later recalled having “tipped the photographer to make Henry’s

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face paler,” noting that the esteemed Old Timer was “a half breed descendent of Fraser the explorer.”103 In the 1917 article, Henry Fraser was publicly celebrated as a pioneer who embodied the heritage of the region even as his appearance was altered to make him look more like a white settler than an Indigenous man. The effort to deny Fraser’s Indigenous identity suggests that during the early twentieth century the definition of the Old Timer pioneer was falsely conflated with whiteness. This incident is in keeping with scholarly work documenting the ways that colonial settlers increasingly distanced themselves from Indigenous peoples, rejecting longstanding relationships and interdependencies to invent a more distinctive colonial settler identity.104 The attempt to erase Fraser’s identity as a “half breed” was not entirely effective. Over twenty-five years later, the author of the 1917 article vividly recalled tipping the photographer to make Fraser’s face paler, communicating this information in a personal letter. I came across the letter from 1944 when reading the Ella May Jacoby Walker fonds at the City of Edmonton Archives.105 Walker, an artist, writer, and local historian, conducted interviews during the 1940s to gather information for a novel based on old Fort Edmonton.106 The letter in question is revealing, for it shows how Henry Fraser continued to be an important source of knowledge about life in Fort Edmonton long after his death in 1927. It also indicates that Fraser’s Indigenous identity was remembered and conveyed to Walker during the 1940s, even if it was visually altered in the 1917 publication. The letter exchanged between settler scholars conveys nothing about Fraser’s own perceptions of his position, although it is possible that like other European-Indigenous peoples, he and his family sought to reframe their identities as early settlers by rehearsing pioneer narratives in some circumstances and displaying Indigenous connections in others.107 In any case, the letter provides evidence of the persistence of Fraser’s voice in both creating and complicating the pioneer narrative, despite an attempt to remove his Indigenous identity from public display. This persistence offers a key way to rethink the pioneer narratives produced in Alberta, including those communicated in pioneer museums. One of the earliest and most influential collections of “pioneer relics” was created by the members of napota. At first, they exhibited hunting, trapping, and mining implements, luxurious furs, buffalo robes, and the heads of majestic mammals on a temporary basis, hanging them alongside reconstructed tipis and log shanties to decorate rented banquet and dance halls.108 In 1926, however, the members established a more permanent setting for their collection, stripping and assembling logs to build a cabin by hand, in keeping with the pioneer ethos of hard

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work.109 This clubhouse, located on the grounds of Edmonton’s annual exhibition, was multipurpose, but in many ways it functioned as an early pioneer museum. Objects were carefully arranged and adorned with brief captions for the edification of audiences, including members of napota, their guests, and the public. In 1928, the members added a rustic gun rack and glass cabinets to organize the expanding collection, with locks to protect it from visitors, especially those flooding into the log cabin during exhibition week.110 An inventory produced in 1941 lists over 600 objects decorating the cabin, some of them similar to those long displayed at social events: the mounted heads of moose, deer, and buffalo, a large ox yoke, and a gold-washing pan from the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–99. The succinct inventory also features a “stump cut by beaver, key to Old Fort Edmonton, high wheeled bicycle, cannon ball (1862), iron hook (very old), Edmonton’s first letter mailbox, early type gramophone, policeman’s billy, Indian tom, birch bark basket, bow and eleven arrows (Eskimo or Indian), Indian stone throw, Indian snow shoes, head of tomahawk, Eskimo razor, and Babiche, used by Indians for thread.”111 By 1946, the collection had outgrown the space of the cabin, and it was transferred to a nearby “relics building.”112 When napota’s pioneer collection was donated to the City of Edmonton in 1960, it was exhibited at various sites before coming to rest in Edmonton’s Archives and Artifact Centre. Selected objects are now on loan to the John Walter Museum and Fort Edmonton Park, a heritage theme park that opened in 1974, ensuring that the early collection continues to shape the image of the pioneer in Alberta.113 napota’s collection of pioneer relics apparently sent mixed messages about Indigenous peoples, although to my knowledge no records survive to document exactly how early-twentieth-century audiences perceived the exhibition. Some of the newspaper reports, speeches, poems, and songs produced by members of napota nevertheless convey their relationship with Indigenous material culture, highlighting the sensual and embodied experiences of the true pioneer. The description of the ball held in 1896, for example, featured the memorable smell of “a very smoky Indian teepee” reconstructed in the hall.114 At a similar event in 1901, a former president of napota, Donald Ross – a Scottish settler who had moved to Edmonton in 1872, panning for gold, among other activities, before constructing the first hotel in the region – continued to highlight the physical intimacy of pioneers with Indigenous technologies. In a song he wrote about the “Passing of the Old Timer,” Ross asked listeners to “turn back to those days of our soft Indian shoes,” noting that “the days of the Red-River Cart [and] the skin teepee – sure shield from the blast” were gone.115 Ross emphasized the

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tactile nature of living in the West, highlighting sensations echoed in the 1917 newspaper article featuring Henry Fraser, who delighted in recalling the flavour of buffalo soup seasoned only with salt and the taste of sap freshly scraped from the bark of a poplar tree.116 The continued focus on embodied experience sheds light on the collection of pioneer items, suggesting that they were part of broader efforts to preserve sacred “relics” directly linked with the physical sensations of pioneer life, including tools, utensils, furs, clothing, and thread.117 Many of these memorable sensations were intimately connected with Indigenous cultures and knowledge. Yet the seeming respect for Indigenous material culture within napota coexisted with romantic and dismissive representations of Indigenous peoples. Immediate physical experiences with smoky tipis and buckskin clothing were placed firmly in a past that was lost to seemingly inevitable forms of modernization and colonization. A newspaper report about the ball held in 1900 noted that the moccasin had been replaced by the dancing pump and the buckskin by the swallowtail coat.118 This displacement of Indigenous clothing by European textiles was linked with a loss of comfort and freedom, especially when Ross sang in 1901 about starched cuffs and high collars while lamenting that “our brave buffalo hunters” now “follow the plow.” His song positioned both Indigenous and non-Indigenous men alike as slowly plodding behind domestic technologies instead of leading hunts on horseback, alluding to the decline of a masculine ideal long associated with Indigenous men and emulated by settlers.119 This masculine ideal was pictured within the collections of napota, most obviously in four reproductions of late nineteenth-century paintings by Frederic Remington, an American artist famous for disseminating mythical images of the West, usually Indigenous men buffalo hunting or on horseback within otherwise empty landscapes. These imaginary images of the frontier, critiqued in the 1991 exhibition in Washington mentioned above, were invented in the eastern United States and were not connected with the pioneer experience of Alberta.120 Their position inside napota’s cabin reinforces both the somewhat haphazard nature of collections formed primarily through donation and the inaccurate representations of Indigenous peoples increasingly conveyed by settlers. The vague references to “Indian” and “Eskimo” material culture in the 1941 inventory reinforce an imprecise image of Indigenous peoples, for the entries lack specific information about the origins, dates, makers, and donors of the items. This record-keeping practice reframes the Indigenous material as stemming from unknown and “other” cultures that were easily dismissed rather than intimately experienced and necessary for survival. It further insists that

5.6 Colin Fraser’s Boats Leaving Athabasca Landing, undated.

various forms of Indigenous material culture were “white possessions,” owned as property by a group of pioneers.121 Nevertheless, references to Indigenous individuals and signs of their economic and cultural contributions remained evident within napota’s exhibition of pioneer relics. Several male members of the Fraser family were identified in the captions of photographs – by 1941 there were over 200 photographs in napota’s collection – including composite images of Old Timers like the one described above. One undated black and white photograph, entitled Colin Fraser’s Boats Leaving Athabasca Landing, shows Colin Jr’s boats loaded with people and trade goods (figure 5.6).122 Even more striking, however, is an item noted in the inventory as “Buckskin Beaded Bag (donated by Mrs. Colin Fraser).”123 The donor must have been Flora Rowland, the “Half Breed” wife of Colin Fraser, the man whose prominent role in trading furs and other goods was pictured in the collection. Mrs Fraser’s donation of what was presumably

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her own artistic work (or that of a female family member) insisted that buckskin textiles were far from lost to a distant past but remained relevant in the present. This bag displayed the skills that Métis and “Half Breed” women learned from their mothers, specifically highlighting women’s economic contributions to sustaining Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike.124 Although archival records do not indicate Mrs Fraser’s motivations for donating to napota’s collection, her beaded buckskin bag effectively counteracted the predominant focus on the male members of the Fraser family within the pioneer association. The donation may also have been a form of strategic gift giving, practised by women in other early Canadian museums to insert their values and knowledge into structures that otherwise marginalized them.125 Preserved within a pioneer collection to this day, the beautiful beaded buckskin bag confirms the continuing importance of Indigenous material culture within representations of pioneer life while pushing against narrow definitions of the pioneer as a white man born elsewhere.126 Researching napota and its collection of pioneer relics provided me with a more informed way to approach later pioneer museums in Alberta, including those inspired by the displays stemming from napota. In 2019, for example, I visited the Rocky Museum in the town of Rocky Mountain House, about 215 kilometres southwest of Edmonton.127 I walked up the ramp leading to a white house with green trim equipped with the knowledge that the historically shifting category of the pioneer was actively produced rather than reproduced in predictable ways within such museums. After learning about Indigenous participation in both creating and expanding early definitions of the pioneer, I was ready to consider how Indigenous material culture was deployed to shape the pioneer narrative at this site, and I was looking for both the presence and the absence of Indigenous peoples. Almost immediately after entering the museum building, which opened in 1999, I saw a wooden case filled with carefully labelled stone tools that had been unearthed in the fields of local farmers, attesting to the longstanding activity of Indigenous peoples in the area. Similar to the displays at other pioneer museums, collections of Indigenous clothing and headdresses were exhibited near the entryway, marking the beginning of a loosely chronological narrative that would continue throughout the museum. Yet the Rocky Museum included a greater variety of Indigenous material culture and more extensive signage than did most other pioneer museums in Alberta, perhaps because Rocky Mountain House was established as a fur trade post in 1799 and remained home to the Hudson’s Bay Company and other traders until 1875, a long period of continuing settler interaction with and dependence on

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Indigenous peoples.128 Although the individual maker of each item was not recorded in the signage of the Rocky Museum, recalling the general categories used in the 1941 inventory of the napota collection, the exhibition of Indigenous cultures included an extensive discussion of the crucial role of Métis peoples in the region. Archival and other forms of research would no doubt reveal the contributions to the collection of specific Indigenous individuals, especially since many Métis and First Nations families continue to live in the region. The strong presence of Indigenous material culture nevertheless began to fade away within the Rocky Museum as its pioneer narrative continued. Subsequent spaces were filled with an almost overwhelming number of colonial settler objects, including the usual implements but also an antique telephone switchboard and post office wicket, items from the local general store and creamery, and shelves full of radios, musical instruments, and sporting equipment.129 The museum seemed to demonstrate the increasing displacement of Indigenous peoples by modern progress and “civilization,” in keeping with standard pioneer narratives. There was, however, an abrupt rupture within that story on the lower level of the Rocky Museum. A handcrafted display of barbed wire, donated by collector Ken Qually, stood independently, sending messages that conflicted with the displays of furniture, tools, and schoolbooks surrounding it.130 Hundreds of samples of sharp wire, affixed to a white backdrop, were painstakingly named and dated in handwritten labels. While conveying the obsessive collecting practices of a local individual, the exhibit was aesthetically startling, featuring a sharply dangerous and unattractive technology. Nearby text explained that barbed wire was a key instrument for “taming” the West during the late nineteenth century; it was also subject to ongoing legal battles over patents and deadly disputes between homesteaders and ranchers. This remarkable installation broke from the overall message of peaceful settlement in the Rocky Museum to highlight conflict. It provided a stark image of settler colonialism as a profit-driven and aggressive process that claimed the land, restricted the movement of roaming animals, and divided people from each other. Whether intentionally or not, the barbed wire display suggested that the Indigenous cultures featured near the entryway of the Rocky Museum were deliberately severed from the ongoing colonial settler project and had not inevitably faded into the background. My interpretation of the Rocky Museum was informed by research on the historical representations of pioneer identity produced in Alberta, but it complements longstanding efforts to reconsider the settler colonial museums in Canada. In her important early work on the Indigenous material culture of the

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Great Lakes region, Ruth Phillips shows that wall pockets and other decorative items produced for sale by Indigenous women during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were often dismissed as mere souvenir goods and excluded from display in museums. These items, Phillips argues, were devalued primarily because many of them featured messages of Indigenous resistance, countering the narratives of assimilation and settler dominance otherwise conveyed in the museums.131 A more recent project similarly recovers evidence of Indigenous political and economic activities – in this case, within the collections of Library and Archives Canada. An exhibition entitled Hiding in Plain Sight: Discovering the Métis Nation uses historical research and the knowledge of members of the Métis Nation to highlight the presence of previously ignored – or, as with the altered photograph of Henry Fraser, deliberately erased – Indigenous individuals in paintings, prints, and photographs.132 My own research accords with such efforts to see settler colonial collections more fully by searching for the ongoing presence of Indigenous peoples, noting how they complicate, refuse, and are contained within different arguments about pioneers. Participating in this broader project is both a welcome challenge and an obligation for settler scholars like me. In Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (2010), Paulette Regan, a settler scholar and former residential schools claims manager, calls for the pursuit of a “less dialogical and more uneasy, unsettled relationship, based on learning (about difference) from the Other, rather than learning about the Other.” Regan further contends that settlers have an “obligation to act” and to “question the myth, to name the violence, to face the history.”133 Along similar lines, Dylan Robinson, a Stó:l scholar, argues that settler Canadians have a responsibility to redress the colonial past and its enduring impact, but he questions the political limitations of the discourse of reconciliation. According to him, the ninety-four “Calls to Action” issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2015 focus on government policies and practices, effectively diminishing the accountability of individual settlers to reflect critically on their implication in the colonial project and to take individual action in the pursuit of redress.134 Robinson insists that the continued ignorance of settler Canadians of Indigenous histories, cultures, and politics is not part of an innocent or passive “misunderstanding” but is a form of intergenerational perpetration of the colonial legacy.135 My historical reconsideration of an early pioneer society and its collections in Alberta makes a small contribution toward highlighting the continuing role that Indigenous peoples have played in redefining the category of the pioneer. This chapter encourages settlers to visit

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Indigenous museums and cultural centres in order to learn more about Indigenous resilience and the impact of settler colonialism, context that allows for more careful analyses of the pioneer museums located throughout Alberta. Although these sites often rehearse heroic pioneer narratives, they also support diverse and contradictory messages that can enable visitors to come to a fuller understanding of how these sites either perpetuate or contest accounts of the “true” pioneer.

Conclusion This chapter is in some ways different from the previous four because the Indigenous museums and cultural centres that I visited made distinctive demands of me. Sites such as Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park and Métis Crossing asked me to learn more about the history of western colonization and to respond to their critiques of the positive representations of settlers present throughout Alberta, including in many of its pioneer museums. Indigenous museums and cultural centres demonstrated the resilience of Indigenous peoples in Alberta and their continual resistance to settler colonial oppression, urging me to see pioneer museums differently. Inspired to undertake archival research on the concept of the pioneer, I came to grasp it as an unstable category that could both misrepresent and include Indigenous peoples. By focusing on the continuing presence of the Indigenous Fraser family within napota and its pioneer collections, I considered the ways that Indigenous individuals remained key sources of knowledge about the embodied experience of early pioneer life but also reshaped narrow definitions of the Old Timer and “true” pioneer. This knowledge led me to look more carefully for signs of Indigenous peoples within pioneer museums, as well as for inconsistencies in the museums’ pioneer narratives. Although I demonstrated the relevance of this approach at a pioneer museum in Rocky Mountain House, I did not spend much time describing the experience of visiting that site. This brevity was strategic, for it placed Indigenous museums and cultural centres such as Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park as foundational for thinking about settler colonialism, giving them prominence in the chapter. At the same time, I wanted to indicate that the pioneer museums in Alberta are deserving of further analyses that respect their distinctive histories. My discussion enables thinking about how a range of pioneer museums throughout the province either reinforce or diverge from the arguments made by napota and its early collections; it encourages paying attention to the

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unique elements of specific pioneer collections and histories, and it promotes investigating their relationship with diverse Indigenous peoples in the region. This process is ongoing and collaborative, at odds with attempts to provide conclusions in this section. I am eager to continue this research by exploring other pioneer museums in Alberta. Will the people currently working in those museums be equally interested in reconsidering the category of the pioneer and the displays of settler colonialism within their organizations? It may seem unlikely, given the negative reactions to critiques of the pioneer narrative during the 1970s and ’90s, outlined above. There is nevertheless reason to be optimistic. It is increasingly common for large, urban museums to directly address the negative impact of settler colonialism, including the new Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, which now includes expansive Indigenous galleries highlighting the voices and cultures of Indigenous peoples, as well as a sensitive installation addressing the legacy of residential schools in the province, curated by Tanya Harnett.136 At the same time, staff at small pioneer museums such as the John Walter Museum are currently researching the historical contributions made by Henry Collins and other Métis people. Those who work at small-town and rural museums are certainly interested in pursuing similar projects, at least according to my discussions with them. Their enthusiasm is nevertheless tempered by economic realities, for many small-town and rural museums strive to maintain basic operations and staffing. In this light, highlighting an Indigenous presence in the collections may seem like a secondary rather than a primary concern.137 Yet the process that I modelled in relation to the pioneer collections of napota and the Rocky Museum does not require a great investment of material resources. It does not involve renovating the museum, reorganizing its collections, or following a set of professional guidelines to otherwise “improve” it. On the contrary, the approach I used focuses on appreciating the collections more fully by researching their unique histories and by looking at narrative ruptures not as a problem to correct but as an opportunity for productive thought. This flexible process respects the idiosyncrasies of the installations and the individuals who produced them, in keeping with arguments made at the Museum of Fear and Wonder, examined in chapter 2. The method that I employed requires looking differently at what is already there; it involves thinking critically both about representations of Indigenous peoples and their ongoing presence in (or absence from) the exhibitions and about the layered or even contradictory images of pioneers. This process would vary according to the needs of different

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sites and would be generated from within any museum interested in participating, involving museum staff as well as others from the local and scholarly community committed to exploring the rich potential of small-town and rural museums. Intensely reflecting on the political, cultural, and social roles of pioneer museums relies on an investment of time as well as emotional labour, for as both Regan and Robinson have pointed out, it would not always be a pleasant undertaking. This investment would nevertheless show how pioneer museums remain important sites for the production of knowledge about settler colonialism in ways that do not reconcile the past so much as grapple with it to actively rethink the present and perhaps even the future of Alberta.

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I want to conclude by thinking about what this book accomplishes. In each chapter, I pay close attention to small-town and rural museums, approaching them as sites of knowledge production on their own terms, not as mere shadows of large, urban museums. I strive to identify their specificities and the differences between them, in part by looking at them intently and listening carefully to the people who created and continue to support them. Despite visiting as many of the small-town and rural museums in Alberta as possible, I do not generalize about them. Nor do I recommend ways of modernizing or expanding them. My chapters outline a range of methods, theories, and arguments that draw attention to the value of these small-town and rural museums, as well as the complex issues that they raise. This work should facilitate further study of small-town and rural museums, providing case studies to compare with and test at a range of other sites. This book does more, however, than provide a broader image of the museum by addressing the kinds of small-town and rural museums often overlooked by scholars. My research makes critical interventions that are capable of reshaping the study of museums, an active and interdisciplinary pursuit, in ways that are outlined below. My arguments expand the definition of the museum visit. Regardless of the museums analyzed in each chapter, visiting them involves more than rushing toward a particular building to examine the contents inside. My discussions encompass an array of activities occurring before, during, and after an engage-

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ment with particular exhibition spaces. Sometimes my visits include learning about amusing collections from friends or scheduling an appointment for a guided tour. All of the visits described in this book feature the trip to the museum, usually by car and occasionally by airplane, a voyage that can be exciting but also rather dull. This emphasis on the travel undertaken to reach museums is especially relevant to small-town and rural or otherwise remote museums, as argued in chapter 1, but it also enables ways to think differently about the specificity of visiting any number of urban museums while helping us to understand the diverse experiences of visitors by considering their mode of arrival at each site. I also reflect on what happened after I left selected museums to explore the grounds around them, especially the sacred land comprising Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, or the towns in which the museums are located, and I respond to what various sites asked me to think or learn about. This enlarged conception of the museum visit opens a number of research opportunities, requiring qualitative methods of study that go well beyond the administration of visitor surveys. This book develops the concept of the detour as a way to understand museums. The importance of the “voluntary detour” was revealed by the research process, which entailed literally driving along back roads to find museums, getting lost, and then turning around. Searching for museums in this way was part of the adventure of my visits. Yet my arguments position the detour primarily as a conceptual tool for thinking about the particularities of visiting small-town and rural museums. By agreeing to take an intellectual detour, visitors to these sites often turn away from standard museum scripts and expectations; they are open to thinking differently about what museums are and what they can offer. This argument is made most strongly in relation to the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in chapters 1 and 3, but it holds for many of the sites that I have visited. The detours experienced at different small-town and rural museums do not provide direct or efficient learning experiences. Interacting with them involves delays and can be time-consuming, a point that I communicate by the pace of my writing, most evidently in the second chapter when readers wait with me on the front porch of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, anticipating the dreadful delights inside. Valuing such detours and the profound experiences that they enable is crucial to thinking about the impact of any number of other museums, including large, urban ones, where educators might be required to deliver knowledge in more efficient, directed, and easily digestible ways. The case studies in this book explore the complexity of the museum visitor. I portray audiences that actively negotiate the expanded definition of the visit

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described above. They are thus producing knowledge before, during, and after their encounters with particular collections or displays. The diversity of these visitors is explored in my attention to the local or “insider” audiences at smalltown and rural museums, whose perceptions contrast with those of tourists or “outsiders” like me. Local museum visitors are equipped with their own knowledge; the former or current residents of Torrington are able to identify the origins of the heritage scenes portrayed in the Gopher Hole Museum, and the Siksika woman described in chapter 5 argues that Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park provides one way to protect her children from assimilation into settler colonial structures of domination. My book appreciates the reactions and needs of local audiences, recognizing that they are far from uniform. Remote museums such as the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum serve a disparate but relatively small community, as noted in chapter 1, and the museum’s importance cannot be judged in terms of the number of visitors it attracts, the tourists it brings into the hamlet, or even its adherence to the current museological practices of collections management. Prioritizing the specific needs of these visitors would allow such museums to apply for provincial and federal funding with their communities in mind. Although my arguments about museum audiences do not directly address contemporary museum policies, they indicate that small-town and rural museums should not be forced to adhere to the regulations and modes of evaluation developed in relation to urban museums. My chapters also consider theories of place in relation to small-town and rural museums. Many of these museums attempt to anchor a place that has shifted, referring to a time in the past when the small-town or rural area in question was economically and culturally central to the region. Other sites strive to retain a distinctive sense of place in the face of absorption by a growing population centre, usually comprised of “outsiders” from other parts of the province, country, or world. In both cases, the town or rural area is no longer where it used to be, and the local museum participates in the ongoing process of negotiating its new place. In chapter 4, I consider how visitors participate in such place-making activity, sometimes by unwittingly reinforcing settler colonial practices as they walk though sites as if to reoccupy and claim the land. This impulse is nevertheless undermined by Indigenous museums and cultural centres, which defy settler possessiveness to demonstrate the continuity of Indigenous peoples and cultures as well as their resilience in the face of colonial oppression. My arguments about how small-town and rural museums actively respond to and reshape understandings of place are based on examples

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in Alberta but can be explored at other sites, perhaps most effectively at those outside of urban areas or newly encompassed by them. My research makes another contribution to the critical study of museums, one that is rather practical. I wrote this book to facilitate teaching the rich subject of museums to different learners. I wrote each chapter with students in mind, providing material that they might read with both interest and enjoyment. My writing is meant to be engaging rather than overtly didactic, even as it covers museum histories, debates, and theories, weaving them into compelling case studies. While addressing different kinds of institutions, notably natural history, science, Indigenous, wax, and pioneer museums, among others, I explore topics such as tourism, travel, the environment, heritage, childhood, identity, and colonialism to spark discussions of how these crucial issues impact museums today. The case studies featured in this book encourage learners to evaluate my arguments in relation to the heritage sites and museums in their regions, thereby favouring readers located in small-town and rural areas instead of the usual urban ones. As an alternative textbook, this publication ultimately reinforces the role of small-town and rural museums as sites of knowledge production, providing learners with resources for analyzing such museums according to their own interests and concerns. Finally, this book celebrates small-town and rural museums, conveying the pleasure to be had during visits that are broadly defined. I wrote each chapter to communicate my enthusiasm for many of these museums, including the challenging intellectual transformations that they enable. I described the adventures experienced while driving down country roads toward the collections assembled by local people eager to share their stories. Addressing a range of museums, I crafted this book carefully, with different audiences in mind, hoping to inspire learners, tourists, museum volunteers, and scholars with my commitment to thinking seriously about these sites. This publication insists that small-town and rural museums, often haunted by historical museum practices and filled with unusual collections, are deserving of careful examination. Studying small-town and rural museums can be fuelled by the sheer joy and surprise that so many of them provide, sensations that promote rather than undermine critical analysis, especially if one is willing to detour away from expected questions and outcomes.

TABLE AND FIGURES

Table 0.1 Themes and subthemes in Alberta Museums. Courtesy of Misa Nikolic, 2016. 14

Figures 0.1 Sign outside the laneway of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2020. 2 0.2 Jude and Brendan Griebel standing on the front porch of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2020. 4 0.3 Toy rocking horse made from the body of a real foal, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2017. 5 0.4 Exterior signage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 8 0.5 Interior of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 8

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0.6 Homesteading diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 9 0.7 Map of Alberta showing cities, towns, and major roadways. Copyright Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, 2020. 12 1.1 Roadside image near Torrington, Alberta, while driving to the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by Lianne McTavish, 2016. 38 1.2 Exterior signage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 48 1.3 Exterior of the Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta. Courtesy of the Blackfalds and Area Historical Society, 2019. 55 1.4 Interior of the Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta. Courtesy of the Blackfalds and Area Historical Society, 2017. 57 1.5 Natural history displays, Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta. Courtesy of the Blackfalds and Area Historical Society, 2018. 58 1.6 Exterior of the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. Photo by Lianne McTavish, 2013. 62 1.7 International visitor map, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 67 1.8 Mary Wadey’s organ, Wadey Centre, Blackfalds, Alberta. Courtesy of the Blackfalds and Area Historical Society, 2020. 71 1.9 Interior display, Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Fort Chipewyan, Alberta. Photo by Lianne McTavish, 2013. 73 2.1 The Kiddo, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2020. 78 2.2 Front door of the Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2020. 86 2.3 Chess set carved by an inmate on death row in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2018. 89 2.4 Engraving from Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale (1599). Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. 91 2.5 Facade of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art, and Natural History. Wikimedia Commons, photo by Ewan Munro of London, United Kingdom, cc by-sa 2.0. 92

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2.6 Facade of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, California. Wikimedia Commons, photo by Tore Danielsson, cc by-sa 4.0. 94 2.7 Overall view of the interior, featuring the repentant thief and rows of wax heads, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2020. 97 2.8 Animatronic elf, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2020. 99 2.9 Taxidermy baboon, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2020. 101 2.10 Taxidermy groundhog, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2020. 101 2.11 Wax torsos, installation shot, Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Photo by Lianne McTavish, 2017. 107 2.12 Torso of the unrepentant thief (detail), Museum of Fear and Wonder, near Bergen, Alberta. Courtesy of Brendan and Jude Griebel, 2017. 107 3.1 Exterior of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the Bank of Canada Museum, Ottawa. Photo by Graham Iddon, 2015. 114 3.2 Fire hall diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 115 3.3 Beauty shop diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 115 3.4 Fishing diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 115 3.5 g.a.g.s. diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 118 3.6 Lion diorama, Akeley Hall of African Mammals, American Museum of Natural History, New York City. Wikimedia Commons, photo by Daniel Mennerich, cc by-nc-nd 2.0. 122 3.7 “Indian Village” diorama, World Famous Gopher Hole Museum, Torrington, Alberta. Courtesy of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. Photo by McKinna Elliott, 2020. 133 4.1 Picturesque view of the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta. Wikimedia Commons, photo by Wilson Hui, cc by 2.0. 144

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4.2 View of the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta, showing signage and historic plaque. Wikimedia Commons, photo by Grapher78, cc by 3.0. 146 4.3 Map displayed by a student guide at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta. Photo by Lianne McTavish, 2015. 149 4.4 Brace still in place for repairs, Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, near Brooks, Alberta. Photo by Lianne McTavish, 2015. 149 4.5 Exterior view of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta. Courtesy of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, 2018. 159 4.6 Exhibition entrance, Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta. Courtesy of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, 2020. 161 4.7 Play lab, Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta. Courtesy of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, 2020. 161 4.8 Heavy hauler installation, Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta. Courtesy of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, 2020. 162 4.9 Oil sands sample, Oil Sands Discovery Centre, Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo by Lianne McTavish, 2017. 167 4.10 Lianne McTavish posing near the officially authorized “giant photo op wheel,” Suncor Energy site, near Fort McMurray, Alberta. Photo courtesy of Lianne McTavish, 2013. 169 5.1 Exterior view, main complex, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, Siksika Nation Reserve, Alberta. Courtesy of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, 2020. 181 5.2 Exterior view, facing the river, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, Siksika Nation Reserve, Alberta. Courtesy of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, 2010. 185 5.3 Exterior view, riverbank, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, Siksika Nation Reserve, Alberta. Courtesy of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, 2020. 186 5.4 Grounds and performance stage, Métis Crossing, Alberta. Courtesy of Métis Crossing, 2020. 191 5.5 Barn with new Gathering Centre in the background, Métis Crossing, Alberta. Courtesy of Métis Crossing, 2020. 191 5.6 Colin Fraser’s Boats Leaving Athabasca Landing, undated photo. Item ea-10-3, City of Edmonton Archives, Edmonton. 205

NOTES

My references to Indigenous peoples and cultures follow many of the style elements adopted in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which capitalizes “Elder,” for example, to recognize it as an official title linked with honour. See http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trcfindings.html. I thank all of the editors and colleagues who helped me to understand both the importance and ongoing development of respectful writing practices when discussing Indigenous content.

i n t ro d u c t i o n 1 Josh Wong, “Fear! Wonder! At This Alberta Museum Mysterious Objects Come to Rest (in Peace, We Hope),” cbc Arts, 8 May 2018, http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html. See also Eve Thomas, “Haunted House,” Canadian Art, 31 October 2017, https://canadianart. ca/features/haunted-house/. 2 Amy Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities (New York: AltaMira, 2007); Fiona Candlin, Micromuseology: An Analysis of Small Independent Museums (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); Tammy S. Gordon, Private History in Public: Exhibition and the Settings of Everyday Life (Lanham, md: AltaMira, 2010). 3 André Desvallées and François Mairesse, eds, Key Concepts of Museology, trans. Suzanne Nash (Paris: Armand Colin, 2010), 7. On the changing

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Notes to pages 6–9

understanding of museums and their practices during the past decades and for a discussion of the ways that professional practice has changed over time and differs according to nationality, see also ibid., 19–20. For an early critique of museums as institutions that reinforce class distinctions, see Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L’Amour de l’art: Les Musées européens et leur public (Paris: Minuit, 1969), or in English, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1990). For a groundbreaking work on the role of museums in creating rituals of citizenship, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). For critiques of the colonizing function of museums, see Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Alison K. Brown, First Nations, Museums, Narrations: Stories of the 1929 Franklin Motor Expedition to the Canadian Prairies (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2014); and Gerald T. Conaty, ed., We Are Coming Home: Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2015). For archival approaches to critical museum theory, see Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2009); and Jeffrey Abt, Valuing Detroit’s Art Museum: A History of Fiscal Abandonment and Rescue (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). On the museum as process, see Chris Gosden and Frances Larsen, Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton, and Monica E. Patterson, Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places (Houndmills, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Candlin, Micromuseology, 75–92. For example, see Lianne McTavish, “Shopping in the Museum? Consumer Spaces and the Redefinition of the Louvre,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 168–92; and Lianne McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study in the Challenges of Exchange (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). A similar method for gathering data was used by the research project

Notes to page 11

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13 14 15 16

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“Mapping Museums: The History and Geography of the uk Independent Sector 1960–2020,” http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/mapping-museums/ about/. An interdisciplinary research team led by Fiona Candlin documented, visualized, and analyzed some 4,000 independent museums in the United Kingdom, including any that had closed since 1960. Its mandate was particularly ambitious because defunct museums founded by special interest groups or individual collectors rarely leave careful archival records, in contrast to the bureaucracy that surrounds public museums. Addressing a far greater number of museums than the Alberta Museums Project website, “Mapping Museums” also aimed to “produce the first authoritative database of museums that opened and closed during a period of rapid expansion and change, and … provide the first evidence-based history of independent museums and their links to wider cultural, social, and political concerns.” See http://www7.bbk.ac.uk/museum-cultures/research/. Some of the issues already being examined by the “Mapping Museums” team in talks and on the project’s blog site (http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/mapping-museums/) include the reasons why data on the museum sector are so incoherent, the regional variations of the “museum boom” that occurred during the late twentieth century in the United Kingdom, and how understandings of the museum sector change when it is expanded to include unaccredited museums. For the history of Fort Chipewyan, see Patricia A. McCormack, Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788–1920s (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2011). For a discussion of the challenging process of compiling a list of all of the active museums in Alberta, see Misa Nikolic, Alberta Museums Project: A Final Report on Phase I of the Research (2017), http://alberta museumsproject.com/images/AlbertaMuseumsProject_FinalReport. pdf. For more information about the Alberta Museums Association, see https://www.museums.ab.ca/. See “List of Museums in Alberta,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/List_of_museums_in_Alberta. On the Central Alberta Regional Museum Network, see http://www. unlockthepast.ca. See chapters 1 and 3 for in-depth analyses of the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum in Torrington.

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17 See Nikolic, Alberta Museums Project. 18 For a critical account of the Banff Park Museum, see Pauline Wakeham, “Reading the Banff Park Museum: Time, Affect, and the Production of Frontier Nostalgia,” in Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality, 41–86 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 19 For example, see Orest T. Martynowych, The Ukrainian Bloc Settlement in East Central Alberta, 1890–1930: A History (Edmonton: Alberta Culture, 1985); and Ineke J. Dijks, “Rails to ‘The Great Inland Empire’: The Canadian National Railway, Colonization and Settlement in Alberta 1925–1930” (ma thesis, University of Alberta, 1994). 20 There is a vast literature on the subsequent waves of immigration to Alberta. For example, see Jennifer R. Kelly and Mikael Wossen-Taffesse, “The Black Canadian: An Exposition of Race, Gender, and Citizenship,” Journal of Canadian Studies 46, no. 1 (2012): 167–92; and Sandeep Agrawal and Nicole Kurtz, “Ethnic Spatial Segmentation in Immigrant Destinations – Edmonton and Calgary,” Journal of International Migration and Integration 20, no. 1 (2019): 199–222. The policy of multiculturalism remains popular in Canada, but its definition has changed over time, and the concept is associated more with government policies than with critical museum theory. See Jeffrey G. Reitz, “Multiculturalism Policies and Popular Multiculturalism in the Development of Canadian Immigration,” in The Multiculturalism Question: Debating Identity in 21st-Century Canada, ed. Jack Jedwab, 107–26 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014). For a critical discussion of multiculturalism in relation to large, urban Canadian museums see Caitlin Gordon-Walker, Exhibiting Nation: Multicultural Nationalism (and Its Limits) in Canadian Museums (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2016). 21 Stephen Bann, “Art History and Museums,” in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, 230–49 (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Paula Findlen, “The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology, ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell, 23–45 (London: Blackwell, 2012); and Anthony Alan Shelton, “Cabinets of Transgression: Collections and the Incorporation of the New World,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 177–203 (London: Reaktion, 1994). 22 For a recent account of the British Museum, see Chris Wingfield, “Plac-

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ing Britain in the British Museum: Encompassing the Other,” in National Museums: New Studies from around the World, ed. Simon J. Knell et al., 123–37 (London and New York: Routledge, 2011). For a critical history of the foundations of the Louvre Museum, see Andrew McClellan, Inventing the Louvre: Art, Politics, and the Origins of the Modern Museum in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Cambridge, uk: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 91–123. The Louvre Museum is arguably more inclusive than it used to be. For example, its administration now welcomes the interventions of contemporary artists such as Wim Delvoye. On his installation, see Lianne McTavish, “Economies of Hospitality: Wim Delvoye at the Louvre,” Museum and Curatorial Studies Review 1, no. 1 (2013): 99–104. The website of the museum also features interactive elements and tours, including a response to the video Apeshit, filmed by Beyoncé and Jay-Z at the Louvre and released in 2018. Museum goers can view the artworks featured in the video at the video at https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/ visitor-trails/beyonce-and-jay-z-s-louvre-highlights. On the post-museum, see Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000). Saloni Mathur and Kativa Singh, eds, No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying: The Museum in South Asia (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), xiii. On the Fluevog shop and museum in Calgary, see https://www.fluevog. com/stores/calgary/. On the Big Valley Creation Science Museum, see http://www.bvcsm.com/. On the value of partisan museums, see Candlin, Micromuseology, 75–92. This information is based on my visit to Big Valley and all of its museums in 2017. For a discussion of the shifting definition of museums, see Candlin, Micromuseology, 6–13. This e-mailed letter was clearly not a private communication, given that it was copied to multiple people in the province as well as authorities at the University of Alberta. See https://uk.icom.museum/about-us/icom-definition-of-a-museum/. See https://icom.museum/en/news/the-extraordinary-general-confer ence-pospones-the-vote-on-a-new-museum-definition/. On the Committee on Museum Definition, Prospects and Potentials, see https://icom.museum/en/network/committees-directory/?type=140.

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34 Suyin Haynes, “Why a Plan to Redefine the Meaning of ‘Museum’ is Stirring Up Controversy,” Time, 9 September 2019, https://time.com/ 5670807/museums-definition-debate. 35 Desvallées and Mairesse, eds, Key Concepts of Museology, 58. 36 Tim McShane, “Newsletter of the Alberta Museums Association,” inform (Spring 2017). inform is a quarterly e-magazine of the ama, and members of the organization, like Misa Nikolic, can access it online. 37 Ibid. 38 Scholars of information technology, law, and the economy Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind argue that members of today’s professions share overlapping similarities, albeit to varying degrees: (1) they have specialist knowledge; (2) their admission depends on credentials; (3) their activities are regulated; and (4) they are bound by a common set of values. Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). See also Merle Jacobs and Stephen E. Bosanac, eds, The Professionalization of Work (Whitby, on: de Sitter, 2006); and Jane Broadbent, Michael Dietrich, and Jennifer Roberts, eds, The End of the Professions? The Restructuring of Professional Work (London: Routledge, 1997). 39 McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum, 129–32. For some ongoing arguments about the role and training of curators, see Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (New York: Faber and Faber, 2014); Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2012); Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds, Curating Research (London: Open Editions, 2015); and Terry Smith, Talking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2015). 40 Lianne McTavish and Joshua Dickison, “William MacIntosh, Natural History and the Professionalization of the New Brunswick Museum, 1898–1940,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 36, no. 2 (2007): 72–90. 41 Jeffrey D. Brison, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Canada: American Philanthropy and the Arts and Letters in Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005); McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum, 129–52. 42 Even officially recognized curators working within large institutions perform multiple duties that vary depending on shifting administrative

Notes to pages 20–1

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and funding structures, making it challenging for them to describe their career to others. For a list of some curatorial and museum studies programs in Canada, see http://www.canadian-universities.net/Universities/Programs/ Curatorial_and_Museum_Studies.html. The perceived threat to professional definitions of museums and museum work might be especially alarming today, when many professions are facing a decline in status and autonomy and when almost every kind of employment is becoming increasingly uncertain and insecure. For a discussion of curating and museum work within this context, see Lianne McTavish, “Curating and the End of the Professions,” in “Curatorial Studies: Situations, Issues, Prospects,” special issue, Journal of Curatorial Studies 6, no. 2 (2017): 181–93. This information stems from my extensive archival work on the Natural History Society of New Brunswick, other natural history societies in Canada, and the museum of Abraham Gesner, a commercial venture opened in Saint John in 1842. See Catalogue of Gesner’s Museum, 1842– 1843, appendix, Natural History Society fonds, S128A, F33, Archives of the New Brunswick Museum. This kind of archival research is largely impossible in relation to the more recent and much smaller museums featured in Voluntary Detours, although I return to archival research to consider pioneer museums in chapter 5. McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum, 51–2. This focus on family names continues at, for example, the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, discussed in chapter 1. Such inclusion of local family histories is crucial to the operation of this small museum and others, effectively resisting the neutralization of place that sometimes happens when more general labels are installed. On the Barrhead Centennial Museum, see https://barrheadcentennial. wixsite.com/museum. For example, see Joy Kenseth, “‘A World of Wonders in One Closet Shut,’” in The Age of the Marvelous, ed. Joy Kenseth, 81–101 (Hanover, nh: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991). Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4 (1980): 448–69. On such international exhibitions, see, for example, Marta Filipová, ed., Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840–1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins (Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2015); and Lee Davidson and Leticia

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Pérez Castellanos, Cosmopolitan Ambassadors: International Exhibitions, Cultural Diplomacy and the Polycentral Museum (Wilmington, de: Vernon, 2019). Neil Harris, “Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste: The Struggle for Influence,” in Material Culture and the Study of American Life, ed. Ian M.G. Quimby, 140–74 (New York: Norton, 1978). Philip B. Kunhardt, P.T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman (New York: Knopf, 1995). Kathleen Kendrick, “‘The Things Down Stairs’: Containing Horror in the Nineteenth-Century Wax Museum,” Nineteenth Century Studies 12 (1998): 1–35. Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1988). Norman Bolotin and Christine Laing, The World’s Columbian Exposition: The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002). Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 17–33. I gathered this information at the Museum of Fear and Wonder while on a guided tour with other visitors led by Jude Griebel and Brendan Griebel on 7 June 2018. This information was provided by Brendan Griebel during the above tour. On the former Criminals Hall of Fame Museum in Niagara Falls, Ontario, see “Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum (Closed),” RoadsideAmerica, 5 January 2014, https://www.roadsideamerica.com/ story/4493; and “For Sale: The Worst of the Worst in Wax,” Niagara Falls Review, 19 February 2016, https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/newsstory/8185949-for-sale-the-worst-of-the-worst-in-wax/. For an interpretation of the federal funding model for museums, see Canadian Museums Association, “The State of Museums in Canada Brief to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage,” June 2016, 7–8, https://museums.in1touch.org/uploaded/web/docs/Advocacy/CMA_ Recommendations_CHPC_2016_EN.pdf. See also Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada Survey of Heritage Institutions: 2017 (Ottawa: Canadian Heritage, 2018), https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/pch/ documents/corporate/publications/general-publications/about-surveyheritage-institutions/2017_GCSHI-eng.pdf. For an overview of the bud-

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get of the Museums Assistance Program from 2009 to 2017, see Julie Dabrusin, “Moving Forward – Towards a Stronger Canadian Museum Sector,” Report of the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, House of Commons, 42nd Parliament, 1st Session, September 2018, 10, https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/CHPC/ report-12/. See Kristen McLaughlin, “Close to Home: The Evolving Engagement Strategies of Alberta’s Local Museums in Canada’s Cultural Landscape” (ma thesis, University of Toronto, 2018), 19. See also Government of Alberta, Culture and Tourism Annual Report 2017–18 (2018), https://open.alberta.ca/publications/2369-2200. I refer to four other unpublished theses on small-town and rural museums in this book, an indication of both the interest in the topic and the need to support further such publications. Government of Alberta, Culture and Tourism Annual Report 2017–18, 19. Government of Alberta, Alberta Historical Resources Foundation 2017–18 Annual Report (2018), 14–15, https://open.alberta.ca/publications/25614894. Alberta Museums Association, Annual Report 2017 (2017), 14–15, https://www.museums.ab.ca/media/83739/ama_annual_report_2017.pdf. See also Alberta Museums Association, Annual Report 2018 (2018), 10–11, https://www.museums.ab.ca/media/95441/annual_report_2018.pdf. On the Heritage Awareness Grants, which are administered by the Alberta Historical Resources Foundation, see https://www.alberta.ca/ heritage-awareness-grants.aspx. See also Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko and Stacy Klingler, eds, The Small Museum Toolkit, Book 1: Leadership, Mission, and Governance (New York and Toronto: AltaMira, 2012), 46; and Arminta Neal, Help! For the Small Museum: Handbook of Exhibit Ideas and Methods (Boulder, co: Pruett, 1973), which defines small museums as those staffed essentially by volunteers. Another way to define small museums is by the number of visitors that they attract. The “Mapping Museums” blog notes that the Association of Independent Museums uses the following categories: “Small = visitor numbers of up to 10,000”; “Medium = visitor numbers of 10,001 to 50,000”; “Large = visitor numbers of 50,001+.” See http://blogs.bbk.ac. uk/mapping-museums/2018/11/06/museum-visitor-numbers/. The successful Trekcetera Museum, which closed suddenly in December

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2018, is discussed on the Alberta Museums Project website, http:// albertamuseumsproject.com/themes/towns.html. The concept of the detour and the voluntary detour are theorized more fully in chapter 1. Matthias Hennig, “Zur Philosophie des Umwegs bei Ernst Bloch” [The philosophy of the detour by Ernst Bloch], Weimarer Beitrage 60, no. 3 (2014): 442–51. I am grateful to Misa Nikolic for translating this article from the German for my research. Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Les Lèvres Nues, no. 9 (1956), reprinted in Internationale Situationniste, no. 2 (1958), reprinted by Situationist International Online, n.d., trans. Ken Knabb, https://www. cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html. Heritage museums dedicated to pioneers will be the topic of my next major research project, currently in its preliminary stages. For example, see Alicia Elliott, “Christi Belcourt Says Indigenous Resistance Didn’t Start with Canada 150,” cbc News, 22 February 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/2017/christi-belcourt-says-indigenous-resistancedidn-t-start-with-canada-i50-1.3992226; and Michelle Cyca, “Resistance 150: Indigenous Artists Challenge Canadians to Reckon with Our History,” Chatelaine, 21 June 2017, https://www.chatelaine.com/living/ resistance-150-indigenous-artists/. See also Jennifer Henderson and Pauline Wakeham, eds, Reconciling Canada: Critical Perspectives on the Culture of Redress (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2010); Melanie Florence, Residential Schools: The Devastating Impact on Canada’s Indigenous Peoples and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Findings and Calls for Action (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2016). Susana Mas, “Truth and Reconciliation Committee Offers 94 ‘Calls to Action,’” cbc News, 14 December 2015, https://www.cbc.ca/news/ politics/truth-and-reconciliation-94-calls-to-action-1.3362258. Cited in Leah Sandals, “Art, Residential Schools & Reconciliation: Important Questions,” Canadian Art, 14 November 2013, https:// canadianart.ca/features/art-and-reconciliation/. Cited in ibid. See also David Garneau and Clement Yeh, “Apology Dice: Collaboration in Progress,” in The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation, ed. Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Sophie McCall, 72–80 (Winnipeg: arp Books, 2015).

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79 Cited in Sandals, “Art, Residential Schools & Reconciliation.” 80 Adrian Stimson and David Garneau, The Life and Times of Buffalo Boy (Calgary: Truck Contemporary Art, 2014), 13. 81 Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within, 61, 67. 82 Ibid., 87. 83 For example, see Douglas Cole, Captured Heritage: The Scramble for Northwest Coast Artifacts (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1985); and Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2016). 84 For example, see Michael Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums, 2nd ed. (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1992), 56. 85 Government of Alberta, “Types of Municipalities in Alberta,” 2020, http://www.municipalaffairs.alberta.ca/am_types_of_municipalities_ in_alberta. 86 Ibid. 87 Government of Canada, Statistics Canada, “Dictionary, Census of Population, 2016,” 8 February 2017, https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/censusrecensement/2016/ref/dict/geo049a-eng.cfm. 88 There are many theoretical discussions and applications of space and place. For example, see John C. Walsh and James Opp, Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2010); and Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires, Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993). 89 For example, see Rhianedd Smith, “Searching for ‘Community’: Making English Rural History Collections Relevant Today,” Curator: The Museum Journal 55, no. 1 (2012): 51–63; Paul Milbourne, ed., Revealing Rural “Others”: Representation, Power and Identity in the British Countryside (Washington, dc: Pinter, 1997); Michael Woods, Contesting Rurality: Politics in the British Countryside (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2005); Judith Brett, “The Country, the City and the State in the Australian Settlement,” Australian Journal of Political Science 42, no. 1 (2007): 1–17; Jocelyn Davies, “Contemporary Geographies of Indigenous Rights and Interests in Rural Australia,” Australian Geographer 34, no. 1 (2003): 19– 45; and Joanna Finkelstein and Lisa Bourke, “The Rural as Urban Myth: Snack Foods and Country Life,” in Rurality Bites: The Social and Environmental Transformation of Rural Australia, ed. Stewart Lockie and Lisa Bourke, 45–51 (Sydney, Australia: Pluto, 2001). 90 For information on Escape to the Country, which first aired on bbc One

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and is now internationally syndicated, see https://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b006vb2f. For a description and sample episodes of Still Standing, which airs on cbc Television, see https://www.cbc.ca/ stillstanding/. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2001), 16–28. Canadian Press, “Devastating Fort McMurray Wildfire Declared Out 15 Months Later,” cbc News, 1 September 2017, https://www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/edmonton/fort-mcmurray-fire-beast-extinguished-out1.4271604. “Fort McMurray,” Still Standing, season 3, episode 1 (2017), https://gem. cbc.ca/season/still-standing/season-3/773f5538-1352-466e-af1d-e4baf3f3 b583. Erica Alini, “Trans Mountain Pipeline: Some of the Main Arguments For and Against It,” Global News, 25 April 2018, https://globalnews.ca/ news/4149689/trans-mountain-pipeline-arguments-pro-against/. McLaughlin, “Close to Home,” 49. Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, “bchp Staff Message,” September 2017, http://www.blackfootcrossing.ca/about-us.html#sm. David Suzuki, “Healthy Debate Emerges from Honorary-Degree Controversy,” Edmonton Journal, 22 May 2018, https://edmontonjournal. com/opinion/columnists/david-suzuki-healthy-debate-emerges-fromhonorary-degree-controversy.

ch a p ter o n e 1 The travel taken to large or urban museums is distinct but remains significant. Elsewhere, I have considered the relationship of the Louvre Museum in Paris with the metro system, although my primary interest was in consumer spaces. See Lianne McTavish, “Shopping in the Museum? Consumer Spaces and the Redefinition of the Louvre,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 168–92. 2 For a definition of the rural, see the introduction to this book as well as chapter 3. 3 For an introduction to this literature, see, for example, Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry, eds, Automobilities (London: Sage, 2005). 4 On the Guggenheim Bilbao, see Joseba Zulaika, Guggenheim Bilbao Museoa: Museums, Architecture, and City Renewal (Reno: Centre of Basque Studies, University of Nevada, 2003).

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5 Most of the online reviews used as source material below are from Tripadvisor Canada, https://www.tripadvisor.ca. 6 Please see the discussion that follows in this chapter for these arguments, as well as Matthias Hennig, “Zur Philosophie des Umwegs bei Ernst Bloch” [The philosophy of the detour by Ernst Bloch], Weimarer Beitrage 60, no. 3 (2014): 442. I am grateful to Misa Nikolic for translating this article from the German for my research. 7 Chris Gosden and Frances Larson, Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Joshua Bell, “Museums as Relational Entities: The Politics and Poetics of Heritage,” Reviews in Anthropology 41, no. 1 (2012): 70–92. 8 For introductions to this literature, see Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2004); and Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, “Introduction,” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, 1–15 (Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2011). 9 For discussions of small-town, community, or grassroots museums, see Amy Levin, “The Camping Hall of Fame and Other Wonders: Local Museums and Local Histories,” Studies in Popular Culture 19, no. 3 (1997): 77–90; Fiona Candlin, Micromuseology: An Analysis of Small Independent Museums (London: Bloomsbury, 2016); and Liisi Taimre, “Do It Yourself (diy) Museums: Study on Small Museums in Estonia and the People behind Them,” Museological Review, no. 17 (2013): 26–35. 10 See http://albertamuseumsproject.com/map.html. 11 Some key sources about automobilities and car culture include Mike Featherstone, “Automobilities: An Introduction,” Theory, Culture and Society 21, nos 4–5 (2004): 1–24; Tim Edensor, “Automobility and National Identity: Representation, Geography and Driving Practice,” Theory, Culture and Society 21, nos 4–5 (2004): 101–20; David Thoms, Len Holden, and Tim Claydon, eds, The Motor Car and Popular Culture in the 20th Century (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 1998); and Sean O’Connell, The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring, 1896–1939 (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 1998). 12 Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, and Matthew Paterson, “Introduction: Impossibilities of Automobility,” in Against Automobility, ed. Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, and Matthew Paterson, 3–16 (Malden, ma: Blackwell, 2006), 3. See also John Urry, “Inhabiting the Car,” in Against Automobility, ed. Böhm, Jones, Land, and Paterson, 17–31, at 26.

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13 For example, see Nigel Thrift, “Driving in the City,” Theory, Culture and Society 21, nos 4–5 (2004): 41–59. 14 Urry, “Inhabiting the Car,” 19. 15 Travelling on Route 66 in the United States was often associated with freedom. See Zbornik Radova, “Route 66: The Pop-Cultural Trip to the West,” Geografski institut “Jovan Cvijić” 62, no. 1 (2012): 103–23. On the risks of automobility, see Per-Anders Forstorp, “Quantifying Automobility: Speed, ‘Zero Tolerance’ and Democracy,” in Against Automobility, ed. Böhm, Jones, Land, and Paterson, 93–112. 16 Daniel Miller, “Driven Societies,” in Car Cultures, ed. Daniel Miller, 1–34 (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 2. See also Mimi Sheller, “Automotive Emotions: Feeling the Car,” Theory, Culture and Society 21, nos 4–5 (2004): 221 42. 17 Edensor, “Automobility and National Identity.” See also Lindsey GreenSimms, Postcolonial Automobility: Car Culture in West Africa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). 18 Urry, “Inhabiting the Car”; Eric Laurier et al., “Driving and Passengering: Notes on the Ordinary Organization of Car Travel,” Mobilities 3, no. 1 (2008): 1–23; Stephen G. Stradling, Michelle L. Meadows, and Susan Beatty, “Identity and Independence: Two Dimensions of Driver Autonomy,” in Behavioural Research in Road Safety, ed. Graham B. Grayson, 7–19 (Crowthorne, uk: Transport Research Laboratory, 2001); Francis A. Whitlock, Death on the Road: A Study of Social Violence (London: Tavistock, 1971). 19 Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (New York: Free Press, 1991); Gertrude Stoltz, “The Colonizing Vehicle,” in Car Cultures, ed. Miller, 223–44; Winfried Wolf, Car Mania: A Critical History of Transport (London: Pluto, 1996); Jane Holtz Kay, Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Michael Bull, “Soundscapes of the Car: A Critical Ethnology of Automobile Habitation,” in Car Cultures, ed. Miller, 185–202; Tim Edensor, “Commuter: Mobility, Rhythm and Commuting,” in Geographies of Mobilities: Practices, Spaces, Subjects, ed. Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman, 189–203 (Farnham, uk: Ashgate, 2011). 20 For example, see John Heitmann, The Automobile and American Life (Jefferson, nc: McFarland, 2009); Mike Michael, “The Invisible Car: The Cultural Purification of Road Rage,” in Car Cultures, ed. Miller, 59–80; and Deborah Lupton, “Monsters in Metal Cocoons: ‘Road Rage’ and Cyborg Bodies,” Body and Society 5, no. 1 (1999): 57–72.

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21 Dianne Kurta, interview with author, 2016, approved by the Research Ethics Review Board at the University of Alberta (Study MS2_Pro000 83988). 22 Edensor, “Commuter”; Paul Graves-Brown, “From Highway to Superhighway: The Sustainability, Symbolism and Situated Practices of Car Culture,” Social Analysis 41, no. 1 (1997): 64–75. 23 For online reviews of the Gopher Hole Museum, see https://www. tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g3404958-d3397419-Reviews-or10World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_Museum-Torrington_Alberta.html. 24 Matthew J. Beck, Sunday Drive: Review of Automobile Ownership, Societal and Environmental Impacts and Behavioural Change (Sydney, Australia: Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, University of Sydney, 2013). 25 See https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g3404958-d3397419Reviews-or10-World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_Museum-Torrington_ Alberta.html. 26 Jennifer Bonham, “Transport: Disciplining the Body That Travels,” in Against Automobility, ed. Böhm, Jones, Land, and Paterson, 59–74. 27 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995). 28 Peter Merriman, “Driving Places: Marc Augé, Non-Places and the Geography of England’s M1 Motorway,” Theory, Culture and Society 21, nos 4–5 (2004): 145–67. See also Tim Edensor, “M6 – Junction 19-16: Defamiliarizing the Mundane Roadscape,” Space and Culture 6, no. 2 (2003): 151–68. 29 See https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g3404958-d3397419Reviews-or10-World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_Museum-Torrington_ Alberta.html. 30 Ron Eyerman and Orvar Löfgren, “Romancing the Road: Road Movies and Images of Mobility,” Theory, Culture and Society 12, no. 1 (1995): 53–79. 31 See https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g3404958-d3397419Reviews-or10-World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_Museum-Torrington_ Alberta.html. 32 For discussions of these tourist sites, see Courtney W. Mason, “The Construction of Banff as a ‘Natural’ Environment: Sporting Festivals, Tourism, and Representations of Aboriginal Peoples,” Journal of Sport History 37, no. 2 (2008): 221–39; Courtney W. Mason, Spirits of the Rockies: Reasserting an Indigenous Presence in Banff National Park (Toronto:

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University of Toronto Press, 2014); Laurie Meijer Drees, “Making Banff a Wild West: Norman Luxton, Indians, and Banff Tourism, 1902–1905” (ma thesis, University of Calgary, 1991); and Robin Digby, The Drumheller Badlands (East Coulee, ab: Groundwork Natural Science Education, 1991). Max Foran, Icon, Brand, Myth: The Calgary Stampede (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2008). “The Homestretch: World Famous Gopher Hole Musuem,” interview with Chelsea McMullan, cbc News, 17 November 2015, http://www.cbc. ca/news/canada/calgary/programs/homestretch/world-famous-gopherhole-museum-1.3323623?__vfz=tc%3D1q3LeoeRm5p. Merriam Webster Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/ dictionary/detour; Cambridge English Dictionary, https://dictionary. cambridge.org/dictionary/english/detour. Michael, “Invisible Car”; Lupton, “Monsters in Metal Cocoons.” Ernst Bloch, The Principal of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1991). Hennig, “Philosophie des Umwegs” [Philosophy of the detour], 442. Ibid. Lucy R. Lippard, “Foreword,” in Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, ix–xiv (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990), 3. Jonas Larsen, “Tourism Mobilities and the Travel Glance: Experiences of Being on the Move,” Scandinavian Journal of Hospitality and Tourism 1, no. 2 (2001): 80–98. David Louter, Windshield Wilderness: Cars, Roads, and Nature in Washington’s National Parks (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). See also Ben Bradley, British Columbia by the Road: Car Culture and the Making of a Modern Landscape (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2017). Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (1967; reprint, New York: Zone, 1995). See also Guy Debord and Malcolm Imrie, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London: Verso, 1998); and Richard L. Kaplan, “Between Mass Society and Revolutionary Praxis: The Contradictions of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 4 (2012): 457–78. See also David Banash, “Activist Desire, Cultural Criticism, and the Situationist International,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, no. 19 (2000): 2–17.

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45 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive,” Les Lèvres Nues, no. 9 (November 1956), reprinted in Internationale Situationniste, no. 2 (December 1958), reprinted by Situationist International Online, n.d., trans. Ken Knabb, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html. 46 Ibid. 47 Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” Les Lèvres Nues, no. 6 (September 1955), reprinted by Situationist International Online, trans. Ken Knabb, https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/ presitu/geography.html. 48 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1998), 94. 49 Brian Elliott, “Debord, Constant, and the Politics of Situationist Urbanism,” Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations, no. 19 (2009): 1–38, http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/phl_fac/19. 50 See https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g3404958-d3397419Reviews-or10-World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_Museum-Torrington_ Alberta.html. 51 Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, L’Amour de l’art: Les Musées européens et leur public (Paris: Minuit, 1969), or in English, Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 1990); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); Norman Trondsen, “Social Control in the Art Museum,” Urban Life 5, no. 1 (1976): 104–19; Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). 52 Lucy R. Lippard, On the Beaten Track: Tourism, Art, and Place (New York: New Press, 1999), 6. 53 See https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g3404958-d3397419Reviews-or10-World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_Museum-Torrington_ Alberta.html. 54 Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, 91–110 (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1984). For a discussion of how the idea that walking at a slow pace rather than running was cultivated in early galleries and museums, see Helen Rees Leahy, “Walking the Museum,” Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing (London: Routledge, 2012), 73–96. 55 Alan Bewell, “Romanticism and Colonial Natural History,” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 1 (2004): 5–34.

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56 The classic discussion of gift exchange is Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1970). 57 See https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g3404958-d3397419Reviews-or10-World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_Museum-Torrington_ Alberta.html. 58 See ibid. 59 Ashli Barrett, “Blackfalds Dedicates Wadey Centre,” Lacombe Globe, 5 July 2017. 60 For the official Wadey Centre website, see https://www.blackfalds.com/ tourism-recreation/wadey-visitor-information-centre. 61 Paul Cowley, “Blackfalds’ Wadey Centre Nearing Completion,” Red Deer Advocate, 6 April 2017, https://www.reddeeradvocate.com/news/ blackfalds-wadey-centre-nearing-completion/. 62 Judy Carleton, interview with author, 2017, approved by the Research Ethics Review Board at the University of Alberta (Study MS2_Pro000 83988). 63 Lianne McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study in the Challenges of Exchange (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). See also Lianne McTavish and Joshua Dickison, “William MacIntosh, Natural History and the Professionalization of the New Brunswick Museum, 1898–1940,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 36, no. 2 (2007): 72–90; and Lianne McTavish, “Learning to See in New Brunswick, 1862–1929,” Canadian Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2006): 553–81. 64 McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum, 59–65. 65 Lianne McTavish and Lisa Given, “What’s Old Is New Again: The Reconvergence of Libraries, Archives and Museums in the Digital Age,” Library Quarterly 80, no. 1 (2010): 7–32. 66 Ibid. 67 Lianne McTavish, “Curating and the End of the Professions,” in “Curatorial Studies: Situations, Issues, Prospects,” special issue, Journal of Curatorial Studies 6, no. 2 ( 2017): 181–93. 68 This information was posted on a placard in the Wadey Centre. 69 For example, see Jackie Dunham, “Resistance 150: Why Canada’s Birthday Celebrations Aren’t for Everyone,” ctv News, 27 June 2017, https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/resistance-150-why-canada-s-birthdaycelebrations-aren-t-for-everyone-1.3478004; and Dakshana Bascaramurty, “‘A Horrible History’: Four Indigenous Views on Canada 150,”

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Globe and Mail, 30 June 2017, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/ national/canada-150/canada-day-indigenous-perspectives-on-canada150/article35498737/. Marty Klinkenberg, “Where an Icy Road Is a Blessing: White-Knuckle Driving on the Frozen Lifeline to Fort Chipewyan,” Edmonton Journal, 27 February 2015, https://edmontonjournal.com/news/insight/wherean-icy-road-is-a-blessing-white-knuckle-driving-on-the-frozen-lifeline-to-fort-chipewyan. Ibid. Ibid. Jerry Neville interviewed Oliver Glanfield at the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum in 2014. See the video at https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=knz9OAvkKdQ. Patricia A. McCormack, Fort Chipewyan and the Shaping of Canadian History, 1788–1920s (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2011). See also Patricia A. McCormack, Northwind Dreaming: Kiwetin Pawâtamowin Tthísį Níłtsi Náts’єte, Fort Chipewyan 1788–1988 (Edmonton: Provincial Museum of Alberta, 1989). Maureen Clarke, interview with author, 2017, approved by the Research Ethics Review Board at the University of Alberta (Study MS2_Pro000 83988). Ibid. See https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g796995-d13570847Reviews-Fort_Chipewyan_Bicentennial_Museum-Fort_Chipewyan_ Alberta.html. Eric W. Morse, Fur Trade Canoe Routes of Canada: Then and Now (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979). Jen Gerson, “‘Indianthusiasm’: Romanticized Ideas about First Nations Life Offer Escapism for Germans,” National Post, 17 October 2012, http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/indianthusiasm-romanticizedideas-about-first-nations-life-offer-escapism-for-germans; Drew Hayden Taylor, “Should We Be Offended That Germans Are Obsessed with North American Indigenous Culture?” cbc Docs pov, 1 June 2018, http://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/blog/should-we-be-offended-thatgermans-are-obsessed-with-north-american. “Things to See in Fort Chipewyan,” Frommer’s, https://www.frommers. com/destinations/fort-chipewyan/attractions/overview. Ibid.

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82 “A Day in the Athabasca Delta,” Globe and Mail, 30 July 2005, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/a-day-in-the-athabascadelta/article1122080/?page=all. 83 Ibid. 84 Michael Tyas, “Health Study in Fort Chipewyan 2014 – Full Report,” One River News, 7 July 2014, http://onerivernews.ca/health-study-pressrelease-2014/; Ian Willms, “Fort Chipewyan Lives in the Shadow of the Alberta Oil Sands,” This: Progressive Politics, Ideas and Culture, 1 November 2011, https://this.org/2011/11/01/fort-chipewyan-photo-essay/. 85 “Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Roman Catholic Church,” Canada’s Historic Places, http://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg/place-lieu. aspx?id=5915. 86 “Alberta Residential School Reunion Brings Together Memories, Pain,” cbc News, 4 August 2007, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/ alberta-residential-school-reunion-brings-together-memories-pain1.636065. For the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, see http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html. 87 Alexandra Zabjek, “Stories, Art, Help Students Explore Legacy of Residential Schools,” Edmonton Journal, 1 June 2015, http://edmontonjour nal.com/news/local-news/stories-art-help-students-explore-legacyof-residential-schools. 88 For more about this international dispute, see chapter 3. 89 Kurta, interview with author, 2016. 90 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History 1890s–2015 (Altona, mb: Friesens, 2016), 42–8. 91 See Diana M. Lapp, The Structure of Alberta Farms, 1941–1974 (Edmonton: Alberta Land Use Forum, 1974); Efren J. Tamayo, ed., America’s Family Farms (New York: Nova Science, 2010); and Harold Brookfield and Helen Parsons, Family Farms: Survival and Prospect, a World Wide Analysis (Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 2007). 92 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History. 93 Forth Junction Heritage Society, “The Calgary and Edmonton Trail (C & E Trail),” April 2015, http://forthjunction.ca/c-and-e-trail.htm. 94 “Blackfalds Releases 2017 Municipal Census Results,” 9 August 2017, https://www.blackfalds.com/living-here/news/post/blackfalds-releases2017-municipal-census-results. 95 For discussions of the long history of demolishing and replacing buildings in Blackfalds, see Judy Carleton, Blackfalds Recollections (Blackfalds, ab: Judy Carleton, 2003).

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96 Carleton, interview with author, 2017. 97 Carleton, Blackfalds Recollections. 98 Barrett, “Blackfalds Dedicates Wadey Centre”; Troy Gillard, “Wadey House Restoration to Begin in Blackfalds,” rdnewsnow, 22 July 2016. 99 Carleton, interview with author, 2017. See also Maria Johnson, “Alberta Century Home Set to Be Hub of Activity,” Western Producer, 13 April 2017, https://www.producer.com/2017/04/alberta-century-home-setto-be-hub-of-activity/. 100 Ibid. The name Wadey Centre was chosen over Wadey House to reflect its varied functions rather than strictly historical restoration. See Ashli Bennett, “Blackfalds Settles on Name for Canada 150 Project,” Lacombe Globe, 29 March 2017. 101 Barrett, “Blackfalds Dedicates Wadey Centre.” For the Blackfalds and Area Historical Society website, see http://www.blackfaldshistorical society.com/. 102 For a discussion of how the ritual of visiting museums can become a lesson in citizenship, see Duncan, Civilizing Rituals. 103 The mandate of the Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum is framed and hung inside the museum for all to see. 104 Cited in Carol Christian, “Fort Chip Museum Like a Step Back in Time,” Fort McMurray Today, 2 September 2008. 105 Oliver Glanfield, guided tour, 2013. 106 Clarke, interview with author, 2017. 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. 109 See the Saddle Lake Cree Nation website, https://saddlelakecreenation. ca/slcn-home.html; and http://www.kalynacountry.com/saddle-lakemuseum/. 110 Clarke, interview with author, 2017. 111 On sponsorship by petroleum companies, see chapter 4. 112 Clarke, interview with author, 2017. 113 Two of the books in the substantial library were Larry Loyie, Residential Schools: With the Words and Images of Survivors (Brantford, on: Indigenous Education, 2014); and John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999). 114 Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

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115 Bryony Onciul, “Decolonising Representation,” in Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonizing Engagement, 163–98 (New York: Routledge, 2015). 116 Clarke, interview with author, 2017.

ch a p ter t wo 1 Brendan and Jude Griebel, “About,” Museum of Fear and Wonder website, https://www.fearandwonder.ca/. 2 Jude Griebel, e-mail exchange with author, 11 November 2019. 3 This information was provided by Brendan and Jude Griebel when I was at the Museum of Fear and Wonder in 2018, but I later found Meyer’s discussion of the doll online. See https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uw2mbg8PnRQ. 4 Professional museum standards have changed historically and continue to change. See the introduction to this book for a discussion of the debates surrounding professionalization. See also some current professional standards on the website of the International Council of Museums, https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/ standards/. 5 Brendan and Jude Griebel, “Small Museums,” Museum of Fear and Wonder website, https://www.fearandwonder.ca/small-museums/. 6 For example, see Brendan Griebel, “Building from the Ground Up: Reconstructing Visions of Community in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut,” Études Inuit Studies 37, no. 1 (2013): 37, as well as an account of the installation in Ottawa on the website of the Pitquhirnikkut Ilihautiniq/ Kitikmeot Heritage Society, https://www.kitikmeotheritage.ca/themaking-of-inuinnauyugut. 7 For the themes and exhibitions of Jude Griebel’s artistic work, see his website, https://www.judegriebel.com/. 8 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 7. 9 Ibid., 8. 10 Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, “From Introduction: The Spectral Turn,” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, ed. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 61–8 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 63. 11 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 10.

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12 Although I highlight the defunct Criminals Hall of Fame Museum, the waxes at the Museum of Fear and Wonder were also sourced from many other wax museums and displays, including Ripley’s, the now closed Plymouth National Wax Museum in Massachusetts, the Follow the Leaders Wax Museum in Georgia, the Gettysburg Museum in Pennsylvania, and the Christus Gardens, discussed in this chapter. The collection also includes various nineteenth-century wax mannequins. Brendan Griebel, e-mail communication with author, 13 January 2020. 13 For example, see Eve Thomas, “Haunted House,” Canadian Art, 31 October 2017, https://canadianart.ca/features/haunted-house/; Doug Horner, “The House in the Field,” Swerve Magazine/Calgary Herald, 6 July 2018, https://www.pressreader.com/canada/calgary-herald/ 20180706/283175789251960; Helen Gregory and Kirsty Robertson, “No Small Matter: Micromuseums as Critical Institutions,” racar: Revue d’art canadienne/Canadian Art Review 43, no. 2 (2018): 89–101; and the radio broadcasts and videos listed on the Museum of Fear and Wonder’s website under “Museum News,” https://www.fearandwonder.ca/. 14 On the flux exhibition, see Pamela Brett-MacLean and Lianne McTavish, eds, Art-Medicine Collaborative Practice: Transforming the Experience of Head and Neck Cancer (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2019); and Lianne McTavish, “flux: Responding to Head and Neck Cancer,” Canadian Medical Association Journal 191, no. 3 (2019): E80– E81, https://www.cmaj.ca/content/191/3/E80. 15 Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The Universal Survey Museum,” Art History 3, no. 4 (1980): 448–69. 16 In a personal communication during my visit to the museum on 30 January 2020, Jude Griebel informed me that the mouth could also represent a hellmouth. 17 For the history of the bocca della verità, see Fabio Barry, “The Mouth of Truth and the Forum Boarium: Oceanus, Hercules, and Hadrian,” Art Bulletin 93, no. 1 (2011): 7–37. 18 Joe McKennon, A Pictorial History of the American Carnival, 3 vols (Sarasota, fl: Carnival Publishers of Sarasota, 1972). 19 For example, see Jay Allison and Rachel May, “Lost and Found Sound: The Art of the Carnival Talker,” npr, 9 April 1999, https://www.npr.org/ 1999/04/09/1048076/lost-and-found-sound-the-art-of-the-carnivaltalker. 20 Brendan Griebel later told me that old army-issue playing cards and mementos were found inside the walls of this house during its restora-

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tion. Brendan Griebel, e-mail communication with author, 13 January 2020. This statement about the recycled nature of small-town and rural museum buildings is based on the initial research done during phase one of the Alberta Museums Project, which involved visits to hundreds of museums in Alberta. See http://albertamuseumsproject.com. The new Royal Alberta Museum building opened in 2018; it is now the largest museum in western Canada. See https://royalalberta museum.ca/. Colonialism in Canada is addressed briefly in my introduction, in chapter 4, and most fully in chapter 5, which includes a discussion of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park on the Siksika Nation Reserve. On the underground shopping mall at the Louvre and its place in the museum, see Lianne McTavish, “Shopping in the Museum? Consumer Spaces and the Redefinition of the Louvre,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 168–92. There is now an Angola Museum at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. See https://www.angolamuseum.org/history-of-angola. There are many publications on the topic of early modern cabinets of curiosities, but for an excellent discussion, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On the absorption of difference within the aesthetic of wonder in early modern cabinets of curiosities, see Anthony Alan Shelton, “Cabinets of Transgression: Collections and the Incorporation of the New World,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, 177–203 (London: Reaktion, 1994). On the biography and research of Ferrante Imperato, see Nicola Maio and Enrica Stendardo, “Pioneering Herpetological Researches of Ferrante Imperato,” Italian Journal of Zoology 71, no. 2 (2004): 209–12, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/11250000409356637. See the website of the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Natural History, http://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org/museumcuriosities#.XhFkZEdKjIU. Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art and Natural History, Museum Guide, 2, http://www.thelasttuesdaysociety.org/museumcuriosities/inside-museum/. Ibid., 3.

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32 Collections of fetal remains were arranged into poignant scenes designed to pull at the heart strings of early modern viewers by the Dutch surgeon Frederik Ruysch, whose collections are now on display in the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Saint Petersburg, Russia. See Britta Martinez, “The Cabinet of Frederik Ruysch,” Embryo Project Encyclopedia, 12 April 2013, http://embryo.asu.edu/ handle/10776/5662. 33 See the listing for the Museum of Curiosities on the Tripadvisor website, https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g186338d7610793-Reviews-The_Viktor_Wynd_Museum_of_Curiosities_Fine_ Art_UnNatural_History-London_England.html. 34 Various dandies and advertisements for absinthe tastings are featured in the Museum Guide, 12–25, 187. 35 See the Museum of Jurassic Technology’s website, http://www.mjt.org/. 36 Jonathan Shiflett, “Guided Along Like a Chain of Sound,” Ampersand, 4 April 2016, http://www.ampersandla.com/guided-along-like-a-chainof-sound/. 37 Wilson’s film work is described in a number of interviews, including Drew Denny, “David Wilson: The Museum of Jurassic Technology,” L.A. Record, 12 December 2010, https://larecord.com/interviews/2010/12/ 12/david-wilson-the-museum-of-jurassic-technology. 38 This phrase is used on the website of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, https://www.mjtgiftshop.org/products/a-gift-visit-to-the-museumof-jurassic-technology. 39 For example, see Susan A. Crane, “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum,” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 44–63; Matthew W. Roth, “The Museum of Jurassic Technology: Culver City, California,” Technology and Culture 43, no. 1 (2002): 102–9; and Andrew Howe, “la’s Diamond in the Rough: The Museum of Jurassic Technology,” International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 9, no. 1 (2015), 1–6, https://cgscholar.com/bookstore/works/las-diamond-in-the-rough. I think that the best account of the visit to the museum is Robert S. Jansen, “Jurassic Technology? Sustaining Presumptions of Intersubjectivity in a Disruptive Environment,” Theory and Society 37 (2008): 127–59. 40 There are many published interviews with David Wilson, including Tyler Stallings, “Interview: David Wilson,” Art Papers, January–February 1994, 14–18; and Tavi Gevinson, “The World Is Bound with Secret Knots:

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Interview with David Hildebrand Wilson,” Rookie, 22 November 2012, https://www.rookiemag.com/2012/11/the-world-is-bound-with-secretknots/. The best known account of Wilson and his museum, however, is Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (New York: Random House, 1995). Glenn Dixon, “A Very Curious Fellow: The Museum of Jurassic Technology’s David Wilson,” Express, 29 October 2008, https://www.washing tonpost.com/express/wp/2008/10/30/a_very_curious_fellow_the_ museum_of_jura/. See Joscelyn Godwin, Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World: The Life and Work of the Last Man to Search for Universal Knowledge (Rochester, vt: Inner Traditions, 2009); and Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004). See “Calgary,” Hudson’s Bay Company History Foundation website, http://www.hbcheritage.ca/places/places-other-institutions/calgary. Neil Harris, “Museums, Merchandising, and Popular Taste: The Struggle for Influence,” in Material Culture and the Study of American Life, ed. Ian M.G. Quimby, 140–74 (New York: Norton, 1978). Ibid., 167–71. For the continuing and even increasing role of department store holiday windows in retailing, see Kim Bhasin, “It’s the Most Desperate Time of the Year – For Retailers,” Bloomberg, 6 December 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-12-06/departmentstores-use-holiday-windows-in-the-war-on-e-commerce. On early natural history museums in Canada, see Lianne McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study in the Challenges of Exchange (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). Lianne McTavish and Joshua Dickison, “William MacIntosh, Natural History and the Professionalization of the New Brunswick Museum, 1898–1940,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 36, no. 2 (2007): 72–90. Lianne McTavish, “Learning to See in New Brunswick, 1862–1929,” Canadian Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2006): 553–81. Many of the first museums in Canada were founded to accrue profit by means of entry fees or donated objects. One such museum opened in 1842 to a paying public in downtown Saint John, New Brunswick. Its proprietor was Abraham Gesner, a medical doctor and provincial geologist intent on displaying his collection of minerals, rocks, and stuffed

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mammals to encourage the study of the natural history of New Brunswick and his native Nova Scotia. Gesner advertised his museum – located in one room of the Mechanics’ Institute, an organization dedicated to educating workers – in newspapers, suggesting that in addition to cash, visitors could pay by donating a range of specimens, including fossils, works of art, and exotic objects. In the end, Gesner’s entrepreneurial efforts failed, and his impressive collections were seized by creditors in 1846 and given to the Mechanics’ Institute. The expanded collection of the Mechanics’ Institute was in turn absorbed by a larger organization, the New Brunswick Museum, established during the 1930s. This provincial museum remains open today, conserving Gesner’s original objects, even though their role in the pursuit of profit and material exchange is no longer visible. Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1986,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, 26–58 (New York: Routledge, 1989). Paula Simons, “Classic Dioramas Brought to Life at New Royal Alberta Museum,” Edmonton Journal, 6 February 2018, https://edmontonjour nal.com/entertainment/local-arts/paula-simons-classic-dioramasbring-life-to-new-edmonton-museum. Martin Gammon, Deaccessioning and Its Discontents: A Critical History (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 2018); Meredith A. Lane, “Roles of Natural History Collections,” Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 83, no. 4 (1996): 536–45. Brendan Griebel, e-mail communication with author, 13 January 2020. Brendan Griebel indicated that there is relatively little taxidermy in the Museum of Fear and Wonder because of a discomfort with the historical practice; the museum includes only those specimens that are linked with narrative and fantasy instead of reinforcing the traditional trophy hunt and possession of animals. McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum, 35. An interest in exotic acquisitions was even present in the Rocky Mountain Park Museum (now the Banff Park Museum), founded in 1895 in the town of Banff, only 170 kilometres southwest of the Museum of Fear and Wonder. Supported by the government as a tourist attraction, this museum had a zoo behind it between 1905 and 1937, which included a polar bear, hardly local to the region. This history is no longer visible at the museum.

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56 Maria Johnson, “Alberta Pioneer Sells Fleas to Supplement Income,” Western Producer, 20 April 2017, https://www.producer.com/2017/04/ alberta-pioneer-sells-fleas-to-supplement-farm-income/. Judy Carleton of the Blackfalds and Area Historical Society has done extensive research on the Gregson family and is in the process of writing a book about its members. 57 The Trustees of the British Museum placed the collection in the Natural History Museum. See “The Rosthchild Collection,” Natural History Museum website, https://www.nhm.ac.uk/our-science/departmentsand-staff/library-and-archives/collections/rothschild-collection.html. 58 “For Sale: The Worst of the Worst in Wax,” Niagara Falls Review, 19 February 2016, https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/news-story/8185949for-sale-the-worst-of-the-worst-in-wax/. 59 Karen Dubinsky, The Second Greatest Disappointment: Honeymooning and Tourism at Niagara Falls (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1999). 60 See the Niagara Falls, Ontario, tourism website, https://www.niagara fallstourism.com/play/attractions/. 61 The Museum of Fear and Wonder contains many objects that I have not discussed in this chapter, including material culture related to carnivals and clowns. A 1920s passé-boule (ball toss) game from a Parisian carnival, for example, is now placed just inside the entrance to the museum; its open wooden mouth and rugged appearance mirror the monstrous front door while reinforcing references to spectacular entertainment venues. 62 Kate Berridge, Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2006). 63 Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Finde-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 92–5. 64 Anita Leslie and Pauline Chapman, Madame Tussaud: Waxworker Extraordinary (London: Hutchinson, 1978). 65 See the website of the Musée Grévin in Paris, which provides information about the international locations of this wax museum, https://www.grevin-paris.com/en. See also Vanessa Schwartz, “Museums and Mass Spectacle: The Musée Grévin as a Monument to Modern Life,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 1 (1995): 7–26. 66 Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, 89–148. 67 See David G. Horn, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (New York: Routledge, 2003). The rows of criminal heads in

Notes to pages 106–8

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southern Alberta reminded me of another criminal lineup that I had seen at the Old Melbourne Jail in Melbourne, Australia, now the most popular tourist attraction in the country. At this historic site, visitors enter cells filled with the memorabilia of famous inmates, including outlaw Ned Kelly (hanged in 1880), but they can also scrutinize the wax and plaster casts of their heads, made after the inmates were hung on-site. The site of the former Christus Gardens has been replaced by a new attraction, Christ in the Smokies Museum and Garden. See “Christ in the Smokies Museum and Gardens (Closed),” RoadsideAmerica, 10 June 2012, https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/22991. On the techniques of Auzoux, see Anna Maerker, “Between Profession and Performance: Displays of Anatomical Models in London, 1831–32,” Histoire, médecine et santé, no. 5 (2014): 47–59. For the history of anatomical models, see Michel Lemire, Artistes et Mortels (Paris: Chabaud, 1990); and Renato Mazzolini, “Plastic Anatomies and Artificial Dissections,” in Models: The Third Dimension of Science, ed. Soraya de Chadarevian and Nick Hopwood, 43–70 (Stanford, ca: Stanford University Press, 2004). For a history of the La Specola collection, see Anna Maerker, “Anatomy and Public Enlightenment: The Florentine Museo ‘La Specola,’” in Medical Museums: Past, Present, Future, ed. Samuel J.M.M. Alberti and Elizabeth Hallam, 88–101 (London: Royal Council of Surgeons in England, 2013). For a history of how wax models were used, see Anna Maerker, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775– 1815 (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2011); Samuel Alberti, “Wax Bodies, Art and Anatomy in Victorian Medical Museums,” Museum History Journal 2, no. 1 (2009): 7–36; and Roberta Panzanelli, ed., Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure (Los Angeles, ca: Getty Research Institute, 2008). See Lucia Dacome, “Women, Wax and Anatomy in the ‘Century of Things,’” Renaissance Studies 21, no. 4 (2007): 522–50. See also Lucia Dacome, Malleable Anatomies: Models, Makers, and Material Culture in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). On Susini, see Martin Kemp and Marina Wallace, Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). On efforts to temper the

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violence of anatomical imagery, see Jonathan Sawday, “Execution, Anatomy, and Infamy: Inside the Renaissance Anatomy Theatre,” in The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture, 54–84 (London: Routledge, 1995). As indicated in note 61, the Museum of Fear and Wonder features an antique passé-boule (ball toss) game originally used at a fair in Paris; it allows players to throw a ball through the open mouth of a figure painted on wood. See the website of the Donalda and District Museum, http://donalda museum.com/. For a discussion of the challenges faced by small-town and rural museums in Alberta, see the introduction to this book, as well as Kristen McLaughlin, “Close to Home: The Evolving Engagement Strategies of Alberta’s Local Museums in Canada’s Cultural Landscape” (ma thesis, University of Toronto, 2018). “Trekcetera Museum Closes,” Drumheller Mail, 19 December 2018, https://www.drumhellermail.com/news/31474-trekcetera-museumcloses. Misa Nikolic undertook research on the history of this museum, and it will be available in a forthcoming publication by him. At several locations in Alberta, I observed that such efforts to modernize or professionalize small-town and rural museums had resulted in the loss of museum history rather than in the recognition of it, although I do not wish to name the museums in question here. This outcome is understandable when the staff of small heritage museums employ professional curators and attempt to adhere to current museum standards in order to pursue grant funding that could ensure the future preservation of their museum.

ch a p ter t h re e 1 Dianne Kurta, interview with author, 2016, approved by the Research Ethics Review Board at the University of Alberta (Study MS2_Pro000 83988). This chapter was previously published as “Middle of Nowhere: Contesting Rural Heritage at the World Famous Gopher Hole Museum,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 24, no. 7 (2018): 764–80. It is republished in a slightly revised form here with permission from the Taylor & Francis Group, as indicated in my acknowledgments. 2 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History 1890s–2015 (Altona, mb: Friesens, 2016), 122–3.

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3 “The Homestretch: World Famous Gopher Hole Musuem,” interview with Chelsea McMullan, cbc News, 17 November 2015, http://www.cbc. ca/news/canada/calgary/programs/homestretch/world-famous-gopherhole-museum-1.3323623?__vfz=tc%3D1q3LeoeRm5p. 4 Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2001), 16–28; Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1996); Lianne McTavish and Jingjing Zheng, “Rats in Alberta: Pest Control and Provincial Identity in the 1950s,” Canadian Historical Review 92, no. 3 (2011): 515–46. 5 John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 103–6; John Storey, Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). 6 John Fiske, “TV: Re-Situating the Popular in the People,” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 2 (1987): 56–66, http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/readingroom/1.2/Fiske.html. 7 Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (New York: Routledge, 2006), 25. 8 Lianne McTavish, “The Torrington Gopher Hole Museum: A Model Institution,” in Museums and the Past: Constructing Historical Consciousness, ed. Viviane Gosselin and Phaedra Livingstone, 60–77 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2016). 9 Cited in Evan Osenton, “The Torrington Gopher Hole Museum,” The Gauntlet: University of Calgary Undergraduate Students’ Newsweekly, 16 September 1999. 10 Alison Calder, “Why Shoot the Gopher? Reading the Politics of a Prairie Icon,” American Review of Canadian Studies 33, no. 3 (2003): 391–414. 11 Lianne McTavish and Joshua Dickison, “William MacIntosh, Natural History and the Professionalization of the New Brunswick Museum, 1898–1940,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 36, no. 2 (2007): 72–90. See also Lianne McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study in the Challenges of Exchange (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 12 Thomas D. Isern, “Gopher Tales: A Study in Western Canadian Pest Control,” Agricultural History Review 36, no. 2 (1988): 188–98. 13 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History, 571. 14 Pauline Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 15 Osenton, “‘Torrington Gopher Hole Museum.”

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16 Lianne McTavish, “Strategic Donations: Women and Museums in New Brunswick, 1862–1930,” Journal of Canadian Studies 42, no. 2 (2008): 1–24. 17 Steven Conn, “Naked Eye Science: Museums and Natural History,” in Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926, 32–73 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 18 Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs. 19 Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1986,” in Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, 26–58 (New York: Routledge, 1989); Karen Wonders, “Habitat Dioramas as Ecological Theatre,” European Review 1, no. 3 (1993): 285–300. 20 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History, 122–3. 21 McTavish, “Torrington Gopher Hole Museum.” 22 P.A. Morris, Walter Potter and His Museum of Curious Taxidermy (London: mpm, 2008). 23 Susan Stewart, “The Miniature,” in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 37–69 (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1992). 24 Ibid., 46. 25 David Lowenthal, “Fabricating Heritage,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (1998): 5–24. 26 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History, 55–84. 27 Ibid., 65. 28 Ibid., 63. 29 Ibid., 62. 30 Ibid., 231–54, 130–2. 31 Ibid., 255–629. 32 Ibid., 43. 33 Ibid., 442. 34 Stewart, On Longing, 23. 35 Amy Levin, Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America’s Changing Communities (New York: AltaMira, 2007), 94. 36 Joe Moran, “Childhood and Nostalgia in Contemporary Culture,” European Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2002): 155–73. 37 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History, 171–230, 442.

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38 Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” Hedgehog Review 9, no. 2 (2007): 13–14. 39 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History, iv. 40 Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” 14–16. 41 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History, iv. 42 Lowenthal, “Fabricating Heritage,” 7–8. 43 See the Tripadvisor website, https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_ Review-g3404958-d3397419-Reviews-World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_ Museum-Torrington_Alberta.html; and the Yelp website, https:// www.yelp.ca/search?find_desc=torrington+gopher+hole+museum& find_loc=Torrington%2C+AB&ns=1. 44 Rueben Tschetter and Jeff Collins, dirs, The Gopher Hole Museum, documentary short (Cache Project Productions, 2013), https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=w1z5rSgGQes. 45 “Torrington Gopher Hole Museum: Alberta’s Most Insane, Hilarious Destination,” Huffington Post Alberta, 9 June 2013, http://www.huffing tonpost.ca/2013/06/09/torrington-gopher-hole-museum_n_3308 305.html. 46 See https://www.tripadvisor.ca/Attraction_Review-g3404958-d3397419Reviews-World_Famous_Gopher_Hole_Museum-Torrington_ Alberta.html. 47 Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 48 Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 49 Paul Cloke and Jo Little, eds, Contested Countryside Cultures: Otherness, Marginalization and Rurality (New York: Routledge, 1997). 50 Alexander R. Thomas, Brian M. Lowe, Gregory M. Fulkerson, and Polly J. Smith, Critical Rural Theory: Structure, Space, Culture (Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2011). 51 Ibid., 27. 52 Ibid., 64. 53 Paul Cloke, Terry Marsen, and Patrick Mooney, eds, Handbook of Rural Studies (London: Sage, 2006); David Crouch, “Tourism, Consumption and Rurality,” in Handbook of Rural Studies, ed. Cloke, Marsden, and Mooney, 355–64; Brian Short, “Idyllic Ruralities,” in Handbook of Rural Studies, ed. Cloke, Marsden, and Mooney, 133–48. 54 David Bell, “Rural Horror,” in Contested Countryside Cultures, ed. Cloke and Little, 94–108.

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55 Tim Edensor, “Performing Tourism, Staging Tourism,” Tourist Studies 1, no. 1 (2001): 73. 56 Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, eds, Tourism: Between Place and Performance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002); John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (New Delhi: Sage, 1990). 57 Urry, Tourist Gaze. 58 Jorgen Ole Baerenholdt, Michael Haldrup, Jonas Larsen, and John Urry, eds, Performing Tourist Places (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2004). 59 Rob Drinkwater, “Indian Village at Calgary Stampede Will Change Name to Elbow River Camp,” ctv News, 15 July 2018, https://www.ctv news.ca/canada/indian-village-at-calgary-stampede-will-change-nameto-elbow-river-camp-1.4014133. 60 The use of stereotypical Indigenous imagery is scattered throughout many small-town and rural museums, including the Museum of Miniatures, a commercial display founded by owners Carol and Roy Whittman in Nanton, a town located about 40 minutes south of Calgary (see http://www.museumofminiatures.ca/). Paying visitors “experience the Old West” by viewing tiny figures meticulously arranged within large glass cases to portray what on-site placards describe as “Native villages, active western towns, farming and logging communities, wildlife scenes, a circus, African jungle animals, prehistoric animals, [and] fossils.” One elaborate setting recreates a miniature version of Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, a unesco World Heritage Site located about an hour’s drive south of Nanton (see https://heads mashedin.ca/). Model animal and “Indian” figurines combine to portray Indigenous people running the buffalo over a cliff, invoking the scene described by local Pikanii guides at the famous heritage site. Like the diorama at the Gopher Hole Museum, this superficial reference to Indigenous culture links the Museum of Miniatures with the authority of a respected heritage site and a popular tourist destination, adding an aura of legitimacy to the commercial museum. 61 See the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology website, http://www. tyrrellmuseum.com/. 62 Fiske, “TV: Re-Situating the Popular.” 63 See http://www.cbc.ca/shortdocs/shorts/world-famous-gopher. 64 “Homestretch,” interview with McMullan. 65 Torrington Historical Society, Torrington and District History, 123.

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66 See http://gopherholemuseum.ca. 67 See http://manonthelam.com. 68 Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandross, and C. Lee Harrington, Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Louisa Ellen Stein, Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015).

ch a p ter f o u r 1 For a full list of museums in Alberta, see http://albertamuseumspro ject.com, as well as the interactive map on that site, designed by Travis Holmes. The Frank Slide Interpretive Centre in Crowsnest Pass, Alberta, for example, educates visitors about how the collapse of Turtle Mountain buried the mining town of Frank in 1903, but it also provides information about coal mining. The Scandia Eastern Irrigation District Museum in southern Alberta has been excluded from my list of extraction museums in this chapter because, although it includes material related to irrigation, it is primarily a heritage museum, with a historical park that includes a blacksmith shop, barn, and general store, among other exhibition spaces. 2 The Government of Alberta groups coal, conventional oil, natural gas, oil sands, electricity, and alternative energy together as part of the province’s “Energy Heritage,” labelling them energy resources rather than natural resources. See http://www.history.alberta.ca/energyher itage/. For a discussion of why companies such as Shell like to be called “energy companies” instead of “petro-chemical companies,” see Jeff Nesbit, “Shell and the London Science Museum,” U.S. News, 1 June 2015, https://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/at-the-edge/2015/06/01/sciencemuseum-exhibit-funded-by-shell-under-fire. 3 Both this context and the field of study known as petrocultures are discussed below. 4 For some examples of the current issues surrounding irrigation and water politics, see Veronica Strang, “Water Sports: A Tug-of-War over the River,” in Tourism, Power and Culture: Anthropological Perspsectives, ed. James Carrier and Donald Macleod, 27–46 (Bristol, uk: Channel View, 2009); and Kenichi Matsui, Native Peoples and Water Rights: Irrigation, Dams, and the Law in Western Canada (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009). Hydroelectric projects continue

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to be highly contested in Alberta, with Indigenous peoples in the Fort Chipewyan area suffering from the impact of dams built in British Columbia, including the Bennett Dam in 1968 and the Peace Canyon Dam in 1980. They are demanding input into the Site C Dam project, currently underway in British Columbia, for it will impact the water supply in northern Alberta. Although under construction, the Site C Dam is opposed by many, including First Nations and Métis leaders. See Andrea Ross, “Cost of Site C Dam Spiralling amid Construction Challenges, Says Open Letter Urging Halt to Project,” cbc News, 28 September 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ site-c-letter-1.5741443. Tim Edensor, Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics and Materiality (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 4. These goals were not seen as contradictory by members of early natural history societies in Canada. See Lianne McTavish, “Learning to See in New Brunswick, 1862–1929,” Canadian Historical Review 87, no. 4 (2006): 553–81. For a discussion of the impact of this process on Canadian museums, see Lianne McTavish, Susan Ashley, Heather Igloliorte, Kirsty Robertson, and Andrea Terry, “Critical Museum Theory/Museum Studies in Canada: A Conversation,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 46, no. 2 (2017): 223–41. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995); Mieke Bal, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (London: Routledge, 1996). For a discussion of the site of representation, see Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2001), 16–28. Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 66. Ibid., 11. For discussions of ruins and the picturesque in art history, see Iain Gordon Brown, “The Picturesque Vision: Fact and Fancy in the Capriccio Plates of Robert Adam’s Spalatro,” Apollo: The International Magazine for Collectors 136, no. 366 (1992): 76–82; Nina L. Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth-Century Paris and the Art of Hubert Robert (Los Angeles, ca: Getty Research Institute, 2010); and John A. Pinto, Speaking Ruins: Piranesi, Architects, and Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). Edensor, Industrial Ruins, 10. Simon Coleman and Mike Crang, eds, Tourism: Between Place and Performance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002).

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13 Mark Neumann, “Wandering through the Museum: Experience and Identity in a Spectator Culture,” Border/Lines (Summer 1988): 24; Jorgen Ole Baerenholdt, Michael Haldrup, Jonas Larsen, and John Urry, eds, Performing Tourist Places (Aldershot, uk: Ashgate, 2004). 14 For more information about the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, see the Parks Canada website, https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/ culture/clmhc-hsmbc. There are currently fifty-nine designated sites in Alberta. 15 This information, featured in a Government of Alberta brochure from 2015 that was handed out on-site, is also available on the official Brooks Aqueduct website, https://www.pc.gc.ca/apps/dfhd/page_nhs_eng. aspx?id=10. 16 Ibid. For histories of the cpr, see Robert Chodos, The Canadian Pacific Railway: A Century of Corporate Welfare (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1973); Sandra Dooling, The Last Spike in the cpr (Calgary: Weigl Educational, 2012); and Hugh A. Dempsey, The cpr West: The Iron Road and the Making of a Nation (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1984). 17 Hilary Orange, “Industrial Archaeology: Its Place within the Academic Discipline, the Public Realm and the Heritage Industry,” Industrial Archaeology Review 30, no. 2 (2008): 85. 18 Ibid., 87. 19 This information is provided on a placard at the historic site, but see also the Brooks Aqueduct website, https://www.pc.gc.ca/apps/dfhd/ page_nhs_eng.aspx?id=10. 20 John Franklin Garden, The Palliser Triangle: A Tale of the Canadian Grasslands (Revelstoke, bc: Footprint, 1999); Irene M. Spry, The Palliser Expedition: The Dramatic Story of Western Canadian Exploration, 1857– 1860 (Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1995). 21 This information was provided at the historic site, but see also the Brooks Aqueduct website, https://www.pc.gc.ca/apps/dfhd/page_nhs_ eng.aspx?id=10. 22 This information was provided at the historic site, but see also Renie Gross, Groundwork: Carl Anderson, Farm Crusader (Wardlow, ab: Badlands Books, 1998), 203–19. 23 The free Brooks Aqueduct Trail Guide was acquired from the kiosk at the Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site in August 2016. 24 Laurajane Smith argues that heritage is a cultural construction both embedded within and regulated by powerful professions, institutions, and government departments. “Authorized heritage discourse” privileges

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expert knowledge about the past, fetishizing its material manifestations and tending toward a conservative identification with the nation and reassertion of dominant identities. See Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (New York: Routledge, 2006), 25–8. Nevertheless, she contends that identity is not simply represented by heritage places but is actively and continually recreated and negotiated as people, communities, experts (such as archaeologists), and institutions reinterpret, remember, forget, and reassess the meaning of the past in terms of the social, cultural, and political needs and aspirations of the present. David Crouch and Nina Lubbren, eds, Visual Culture and Tourism (Oxford: Berg, 2003); Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman, eds, Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City (Bloomington: Indianapolis University Press, 2014), 7. Setha Low, “Placemaking and Embodied Space,” in Making Place, ed. Sen and Silverman, 19–43, at 21. This quotation is repeated in pamphlets and online. For example, see the discussion of the Brooks Aqueduct on the website of Alberta Culture and Tourism, https://brooksaqueduct.ca/about. For more information about centipedes, see https://www.orkin.com/ other/centipedes. Strang, “Water Sports,” 32. Barry Potyondi, In Palliser’s Triangle: Living in the Grasslands 1850–1930 (Saskatoon: Purich, 1995). Ibid., 23. P.M. Saunder, Irrigation in Southern Alberta (Edmonton: Department of Agriculture, 1971), unpaginated introduction. Ibid., 10. The Water Resources Act of 1930 transferred water rights to the Government of Alberta. Joseph W. Dellapenna and Joyeeta Gupta, eds, The Evolution of the Law and Politics of Water (New York: Springer, 2009). Saunder, Irrigation in Southern Alberta, 63. Matsui, Native Peoples and Water Rights, 17. Industry and government have produced many sources of information about the oil sands. For a volume stemming from an international symposium on air pollution, see Kevin E. Percy, ed., Alberta Oil Sands: Energy, Industry and the Environment (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2012). For more information about tailings ponds and their toxins, see Mohd

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Faidz Mohamad Shahimin, “Anaerobic Biodegradation of Hydrocarbons in Different Oil Sands Tailings Ponds: Key Microbial Players and Main Activation Pathway of Hydrocarbon Biodegradation” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2016). Cited in Marty Klinkenburg, “Discovery Centre Brings Oil Sands to Life,” Edmonton Journal, 1 July 2014. Ibid. On the early promotion of the Red Rose Tea Company in a museum, see Lianne McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum: A Case Study of the Challenges of Exchange (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 60. For histories of corporate museums, see James B. Lane, “Oral History and Industrial Heritage Museums,” Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (1993): 607–18; and Ksenia Katarzyna Piatkowska, “The Corporate Museum: A New Type of Museum Created as a Component of Marketing Company,” International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 6, no. 2 (2014): 29–37. David J. Rhees, “Corporate Advertising, Public Relations, and Popular Exhibits: The Case of Du Pont,” in Industrial Society and Its Museums, 1890–1990: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, ed. Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, 67–75 (Paris: Harwood Academic, 1993). Brenda Longfellow, “Extreme Oil and the Perils of Cinematic Practice,” in Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, ed. Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, 27–35 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), 30. See also Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil: Petrocultures Research Group (Edmonton: Petrocultures Research Group, 2016). Geo Takach, Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2017), 3, 118. Clint Burnham, “Photography from Benjamin to Žižek, via the Petrochemical Sublime of Edward Burtynsky,” in Petrocultures, ed. Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman, 458–75; Dawn Walton and Nathan Vanderklippe, “Ottawa and Alberta Charge Syncrude in Death of 500 Birds in Tailings Pond,” Globe and Mail, 10 February 2009, https://www.theglobeand mail.com/news/national/ottawa-and-alberta-charge-syncrude-indeaths-of-500-birds-in-tailings-pond/article1153704/; Leslie Iwerks, dir., Downstream, documentary (2008), http://www.downstreamdoc.com/; “Oil Sands Pollution Linked to Higher Cancer Rates in Fort Chipewyan

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for First Time,” Financial Post, 8 July 2014, http://business.financial post.com/news/oil-sands-pollution-linked-to-higher-cancer-rates-infort-chipewyan-study-finds. Takach, Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image, 77. I could not find any extended critical analyses of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre. Cited in Takach, Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image, 100. Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, “Part One: Rigs, Platforms, and Pipelines,” in Petrocultures, ed. Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman, 21–6, at 23. Amanda Boetzkes, “Plastic Vision and the Sight of Petroculture,” in Petrocultures, ed. Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman, 222–41; Kirsty Robertson, “Oil Futures,” in Petrocultures, ed. Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman, 242–63; Graeme Macdonald, “Containing Oil: The Pipeline in Petroculture,” in Petrocultures, ed. Wilson, Carlson, and Szeman, 36–77, at 37. For a historical account of the “waves” of contestation at large, urban museums in Canada, some of them in response to the activities of resource extraction industries, see Kirsty Robertson, Tear Gas Epiphanies: Protest, Culture, Museums (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). Stella V.F. Butler, Science and Technology Museums (Leicester, uk: Leicester University Press, 1992), 93. On the continuity of natural history museums and science museums, see Karen A. Rader and Victoria E.M. Cain, “From Natural History to Science: Display and the Transformation of American Museums of Science and Nature,” Museum and Society 6, no. 2 (2008): 152–71. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, The dna Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Butler, Science and Technology Museums, 122. See also Victor J. Danilov, America’s Science Museums (New York: Greenwood, 1990), 291. For this mission statement, see https://oilsandsdiscovery.ca/about-us. Various oil sands developers have begun using self-driving heavy haulers, potentially changing the meaning of this immersive experience in the future. Canadian Press, “Suncor to Introduce Driverless Haul Trucks on Oilsands Sites,” Global News, 30 January 2018, https://global news.ca/news/3996736/suncor-to-introduce-driverless-haul-trucks-onoilsands-sites/. For example, see Colin Heywood, A History of Childhood: Children and

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58 59 60

61 62 63

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Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times (Cambridge, uk: Polity, 2001). For example, see Daniel Thomas Cook, “The Rise of ‘The Toddler’ as Subject and as Merchandising Category in the 1930s,” in New Forms of Consumption: Consumers, Culture, and Commodification, ed. Mark Gottdiener, 111–29 (Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000); and Kent Baxter, The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2008). Howard P. Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (New York and London: New York University Press, 2007). Ibid., esp. 165 and 215. For example, see Matthew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1995). Trucktown is a children’s television show created in Canada and broadcast since 2014. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3860928/. Joanne Elves, “Oil Sands Discovery Centre Is Big Fun,” Travel Alberta, 16 December 2015, https://www.travelalberta.com/us/articles/oil-sandsdiscovery-centre-is-big-fun—154/. Earthquakes and volcanoes are recreated at the Natural History Museum in London, England, and visitors can experience a simulated earthquake at Questacon in Canberra, Australia. Such efforts to create immersive experiences for the public are not new and could be part of, among other events, the world’s fairs regularly held during the nineteenth century. One surviving example is the “hall of mirrors” that originally entertained visitors at the 1900 World’s Fair in Paris and is now functioning at the Musée Grévin in the same city. See Alison Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Victorian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983). On the Redpath Museum at McGill University in Montreal, see https://www.mcgill.ca/redpath/about/history. On the Australian Museum in Sydney, see https://australianmuseum.net.au/the-australianmuseum-collections.

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McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum, 48–70. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gLW9Tcj3GE. McTavish, Defining the Modern Museum, 66–7. Ibid., 76. Martin Hewitt, “Science as Spectacle: Popular Scientific Culture in Saint John, New Brunswick, 1830–1850,” Acadiensis: Journal of the History of the Atlantic Region 17, no. 1 (1988): 107–8. See also Joe Kember, John Plunkett, and Jill A. Sullivan, eds, Popular Exhibitions, Science, and Showmanship, 1840–1910 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012). Christina Burr, Canada’s Victorian Oil Town: The Transformation of Petrolia from a Resource Town into a Victorian Community (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 7. See the history of Petrolia outlined on the website of the Petrolia Discovery historic site, http://www.petroliaheritage.com/discovery.html. Ibid. For information on this tour, which I took in 2013 before returning in 2017 to revisit all of the sites in Fort McMurray and to visit the Heritage Shipyard, see https://explorewoodbuffalo.ca/articles/athabasca-oilsands-discovery-center. According to an e-mail message sent to me by Fort McMurray Tourism on 15 March 2018, this bus tour is no longer offered. I was instead encouraged to take an aerial tour either with McMurray Aviation, which offers views of the Syncrude/Suncor tailings ponds as well as sulfur piles, or with Phoenix Heli, a company offering customized tours of the oil sands. For a discussion of the toxic sublime, see Takach, Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image, 63. Government of Alberta, Oil Sands Discovery Centre: Welcome to the Story of Alberta’s Amazing Oil Sands, fold-out brochure acquired at the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in August 2017. The Oil Sands Discovery Centre makes no effort to represent the region of the northern oil sands broadly or to portray the diverse populations inhabiting it. Unlike large provincial museums such as the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, the Discovery Centre is not the kind of “survey museum” described in the introduction to this book, those that make claims for inclusiveness or coverage that are inevitably incomplete and thus open to critique. According to cultural theorist Tony Bennett, “Rather than calling the museum to task in accordance with the principles of representational adequacy – thereby generating a politics, which,

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since its goal is unachievable, is insatiable – political effort would be better devoted to transforming the relations between museum exhibits, their organizers and the museum visitor.” Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 103. 79 For information about the Treaty 8 First Nations in Alberta, see http://www.treaty8.ca/. On the Fort McKay First Nation, see https://www.fortmckay.com. See also Charles Mair, Through the Mackenzie Basin: An Account of the Signing of Treaty No. 8 and the Scrip Commission, 1899 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1999). Some of the ongoing tensions between the Indigenous peoples of northern Alberta and resource extraction industries are discussed in the sources in note 80. 80 Veronica Davidoff, “Social Lives and Symbolic Capital: Indigenous ‘Oil Lawsuits’ as Sites of Order and Disorder Making,” Social Analysis 60, no. 3 (2016): 57–75. See also Clinton N. Westman, “Assessing the Impacts of Oilsands Development on Indigenous Peoples in Alberta, Canada,” Indigenous Affairs 2, no. 3 (2006): 30–9; Gabrielle Slowey, Navigating Neoliberalism: Self-Determination and the Mikisew Cree First Nation (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2008); Chief Bernard Ominayak with Kevin Thomas, “These Are Lubicon Lands: A First Nation Forced to Step into the Regulatory Gap,” in Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada, ed. Julian Agyeman, Peter Cole, Randolph Haluza-DeLay, and Pat O’Riley, 111–22 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2009); Alison Taylor and Tracy Friedel, “Enduring Neoliberalism in Alberta’s Oil Sands: The Troubling Effects of Private-Public Partnerships for First Nation and Métis Communities,” Citizenship Studies 15, nos 6–7 (2011): 815–35; Sara Dorow and Sara O’Shaughnessy, “Fort McMurray, Wood Buffalo, and the Oil/Tar Sands: Revisiting the Sociology of ‘Community,’” Canadian Journal of Sociology 38, no. 2 (2013): 121–40; Brenda L. Parlee, “Avoiding the Resource Curse: Indigenous Communities and Canada’s Oil Sands,” World Development 74 (2015): 425–36; Jon Gordon, Unsustainable Oil: Facts, Counterfacts, and Fictions (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2015); Laurie E. Adkin, ed., First World Petro-Politics: The Political Ecology and Governance of Alberta (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016); Janelle Marie Baker and Clinton N. Westman, “Extracting Knowledge: Social Science, Environmental Impact Assessment, and Indigenous Consultation in the Oil Sands of Alberta, Canada,” Extractive

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Industries and Society 5, no. 1 (2018): 144–53; Clinton N. Westman, Tara L. Joly, and Lena Gross, eds, Extracting Home in the Oil Sands: Settler Colonialism and Environmental Change in Subarctic Canada (London: Routledge, 2020). 81 For more about this lawsuit, see Jordan Omstead, “Supreme Court Grants Hearing for Beaver Lake Cree Nation’s Advance Cost Case,” cbc News, 22 January 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmon ton/beaver-lake-granted-leave-supreme-court-1.5884988. 82 Cited in Takach, Oil, Environment and Alberta’s Image, 3. 83 For example, see Vincent McDermott, “Fort McMurray Wildfire Finally Extinguished after 15 Months,” Edmonton Journal, 1 September 2017, http://edmontonjournal.com/news/local-news/fort-mcmurray-wild fire-finally-extinguished-after-15-months.

ch a p ter f ive 1 I am currently aware of the following museums or sites that have primarily Indigenous content, although not all of them are owned or managed by Indigenous peoples: Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, Cooking Lake Blackfoot Heritage Interpretive Centre, Samson Cree Nation Culture, Language, Archives and Museum, Tsuut’ina Nation Culture/Museum, Saddle Lake Cree Nation Iyiwakes Cultural Centre, Métis Crossing, Buffalo Nations Luxton Museum, Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Native Cultural Arts Museum, and Museum of Aboriginal Peoples’ Art and Artifacts. For the location of these museums and cultural centres and for more information about them, see their official websites as well as the map on the website of the Alberta Museums Project, http://albertamuseumsproject.com. 2 “First Nations in Alberta,” Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada website, https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100020670/11001 00020675. 3 “About Metis Settlements,” Government of Alberta website, https:// www.alberta.ca/about-metis-settlements.aspx. 4 On how large, urban museums can produce rituals of citizenship, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). For a discussion of representations of nationalism in relation to large, urban museums, including the former iteration of the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, which closed in 2015, see Caitlin

Notes to pages 176–7

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Gordon-Walker, Exhibiting Nation: Multicultural Nationalism (and Its Limits) in Canadian Museums (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2016). For the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, see http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html. See also the discussion in the introduction to this book as well as Larry Loyie, Residential Schools, with the Words and Images of Survivors: A National History (Brantford, on: Indigenous Education, 2014); and Joseph Auguste Merasty, with David Carpenter, The Education of Augie Merasty: A Residential School Memoir (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2017). For example, see Gerald T. Conaty, ed., We Are Coming Home: Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2015); Alison K. Brown, First Nations, Museums, Narrations: Stories of the 1929 Franklin Motor Expedition to the Canadian Prairies (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2014); Ruth Phillips, Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011); Laura Peers, Visiting with the Ancestors: Blackfoot Shirts in Museum Spaces (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2015); and Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers, with members of the Kainai Nation, Pictures Bring Us Messages /Sinaakssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). For example, see Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Lighting the Eighth Fire: The Liberation, Resurgence, and Protection of Indigenous Nations (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2008). Susana Mas, “Truth and Reconciliation Committee Offers 94 ‘Calls to Action,’” cbc News, 14 December 2015, https://www.cbc.ca/news/poli tics/truth-and-reconciliation-94-calls-to-action-1.3362258. Ruth Phillips, “Beyond Difficult Histories: First Nations, the Right to Culture, and the Obligation of Redress,” in The Idea of a Human Rights Museum, ed. Karen Busby, Adam Muller, and Andrew Woolford, 296–321 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015). “Upper Canada,” Library and Archives Canada website, https://www. bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/politics-government/canadian-confederation /Pages/upper-canada.aspx. The name Upper Canada is regularly used in the maritime provinces. Red River carts were simple wooden wagons with two large wheels and were pulled by oxen, horses, or mules. Developed by the Métis people

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during the nineteenth century, these carts allowed them to move goods to and from the Red River Settlement (later Manitoba) and to participate more fully in the fur trade; the carts became the primary mode of travel on land in the West before the widespread use of railways. See Nicholas C.P. Vrooman, “The Métis Red River Cart,” Journal of the West 42, no. 2 (2003): 8–20. Robert M. Stamp, “Alberta.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 26 March 2009, https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/alberta. For example, see Susan Berry, Aboriginal Cultures in Alberta: Five Hundred Generations (Edmonton: Provincial Museum of Alberta, 2004); Daniel Coleman, Countering Displacements: The Creativity and Resilience of Indigenous and Refugee-ed Peoples (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2012); Dan Eshet, Stolen Lives: The Indigenous People of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools (Toronto: Facing History and Ourselves, 2015); Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington, eds, Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (Houndmills, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Chris Andersen, “Métis”: Race, Recognition and the Struggle for Indigenous Peoplehood (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2014); and Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). The museum in Breton, Alberta, has a substantial section devoted to local pioneers who moved from Oklahoma to settle on farms. See “Legacy of Alberta’s Black Pioneers Honoured,” Alberta Farmer Express, 2 June 2017, https://www.albertafarmexpress.ca/news/legacy-of-albertasblack-pioneers-honoured/. Crystal Wylie, “Ethnicity and the Pioneer in Alberta’s Community Museums” (ma thesis, University of Alberta, 2003). See also Aileen MortenRobinson, White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). This early critique of pioneer museums remains important. See David Lowenthal, “Pioneer Museums,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, 115–27 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Although a few unpublished theses examine the small heritage and pioneer museums in Alberta, including the thesis by Wylie, noted above, I am unaware of any sustained scholarly effort to publish critical analyses of the pioneer museums in Alberta. Sherry Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together: Clothing, Decora-

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tive Arts and the Expression of Metis and Half Breed Identity” (PhD diss., University of Manitoba, 2004), https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/ xmlui/handle/1993/3304; Sherry Farrell Racette and Carmen L. Robertson, Clearing a Path: New Ways of Seeing Traditional Indigenous Art (Nanaimo, bc: Strong Nations, 2009); Crystal Gail Fraser, “T’aih k’ìighe’ tth’aih zhit dìidìch’ùh (By Strength, We Are Still Here): Indigenous Northerners Confronting Hierarchies of Power at Day and Residential Schools in Nanhkak Thak (the Inuvik Region, Northwest Territories), 1959 to 1982” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2019); Phillips, Museum Pieces. For examples of the artwork of Tanya Harnett, see Jim Ellis, ed., Water Rites: Reimagining Water in the West (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2008). I focus on representations of the Fraser family within the pioneer organization and do not claim to speak for the members of the family or to make assumptions about any agency that they may or may not have had within napota. My claim later in this chapter is that standard pioneer narratives are complicated by records related to the participation of Indigenous people within napota. See the website of Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, http://www. blackfootcrossing.ca/. “Blackfoot Crossing Tries to Tell the Truth of Native Group’s Past,” Waterloo Region Record, 13 August 2010, https://www.therecord.com/ living-story/2565120-blackfoot-crossing-tries-to-tell-the-truth-ofnative-group-s-past/. Cited in Bryony Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising Engagement (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 110. This information was gleaned from the official Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park pamphlets that I read on-site during my visit in July 2018; it is also posted on the Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park website, http://www.blackfootcrossing.ca/about-us.html. The precise date of the Niitsítapi in the region is disputed. See Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice, 141. Maria Nieves Zedeño, “Art as the Road to Perfection: The Blackfoot Painted Tipi,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 27, no. 4 (2017): 1–12. Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice, explores the cultural capital held by Indigenous visitors throughout her book. The Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park website provides details about the architecture, http://www.blackfootcrossing.ca/about-us.html.

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Notes to pages 182–5

27 The Indian Act has been continually amended. See https://www.aadncaandc.gc.ca/eng/1100100010193/1100100010194. 28 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (Winnipeg: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), http://www.trc.ca/about-us/trc-findings.html. 29 These misconceptions continue and are in constant need of rebuttal. For example, see Crystal Gail Fraser and Ian Mosby, “Setting Canadian History Right? A Response to Ken Coates’ ‘Second Thoughts about Residential Schools,’” Active History, 7 April 2015, http://activehistory.ca/ papers/paper-20/. 30 The restricted nature of the secret societies is explained in the placards displayed within the exhibition spaces at Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park. 31 Pauline Wakeham, Taxidermic Signs: Reconstructing Aboriginality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 32 Cited in Moira McLoughlin, “Of Boundaries and Borders: First Nations’ History in Museums,” Canadian Journal of Communication 18, no. 3 (1993), https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/ 761/667. 33 Ibid. Settler scholar Moira McLoughlin nevertheless contends that the remote locations of some Indigenous museums and cultural centres can pose too great a challenge for visitors, potentially remarginalizing Indigenous cultures. This possibility overlooks the central focus on local Indigenous people in these museums and cultural centres but highlights the importance of Indigenous-led exhibitions and events within national and provincial museums in larger centres, especially since more than half of all Indigenous peoples in Alberta and the rest of Canada live in urban areas. Mary Jane Norris, Stewart Clatworthy, and Evelyn Peters, “The Urbanization of Aboriginal Populations in Canada: A Half Century in Review,” in Indigenous in the City: Contemporary Identities and Cultural Innovation, ed. Evelyn Peters and Chris Andersen, 29–45 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2013). 34 For the text of Treaty 7, see “Treaty Texts: Treaty and Supplementary Treaty No. 7,” Government of Canada website, https://www.rcaanccirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100028793/1581292336658. 35 “About Us,” Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park website, http://www. blackfootcrossing.ca/about-us.html.

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36 Sarah Carter and Dorothy First Rider, The True Intent and Spirit of Treaty 7 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), xi. See also Harold LeRat, Treaty Promises, Indian Reality: Life on a Reserve (Saskatoon: Purich, 2005); and Neal McLeod, Cree Narrative Memory: From Treaties to Contemporary Times (Saskatoon: Purich, 2007). 37 For different versions of the Indian Act, see the website of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/ 1100100010193/1100100010194. 38 Cited in Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice, 19. 39 Cited in Lisa Monforton, “New Manager Has Grand Vision for Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park,” Calgary Herald, 15 June 2019, https:// calgaryherald.com/sponsored/travel-sponsored/new-manager-hasgrand-vision-for-blackfoot-crossing-historical-park/. 40 Cited in ibid. 41 “Chief Crowfoot’s Tipi Village,” Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park website, http://www.blackfootcrossing.ca/tipivillage.php. 42 For example, see Michael Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1992); Susan SleeperSmith, ed., Contesting Knowledge: Museums and Indigenous Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009); and Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). See also Anita Herle, “Museums and First Peoples in Canada,” Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 6 (1994): 39– 66; and Trudy Nicks, “Partnerships in Developing Cultural Resources: Lessons from the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples,” Culture 12, no. 1 (1992): 87–94. 43 Sacred medicine bundles were displayed in museums within Alberta for many years. On their repatriation, see Conaty, ed., We Are Coming Home. 44 Ibid. Conaty’s work with Niitsítapi elders shows how sacred items were sometimes sold by individuals in oppressive situations, not necessarily by choice. 45 For a discussion of the salvage paradigm in relation to anthropological collecting, see Brown, First Nations, Museums, Narrations, 66; and Andrew Nurse, “Marius Barbeau and the Methodology of Salvage Ethnography in Canada, 1911–51,” in Historicizing Canadian Anthropology, ed. Julia Harrison and Regna Darnell, 52–64 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2006).

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46 Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1999). 47 See the website of the U’mista Cultural Centre, https://www.umista.ca/. For the history of this potlach, see https://www.umista.ca/pages/history. See also James Clifford, “Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections,” in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 107–45 (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1997). 48 Emma Graney, “Almost 150 Years Later, the Siksika First Nation Is Getting Chief Crowfoot’s Regalia Back,” Globe and Mail, 8 April 2020, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/alberta/article-british-royalalbert-memorial-museum-agrees-to-return-indigenous/. 49 See the Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park website, http://www.black footcrossing.ca/repatraition.html. The best overview of the repatriation efforts is Doug Horner, “Crowfoot Comes Home: Repatriating a First Nation Leader’s Regalia from a British Museum to the Prairies,” Alberta Views: The Magazine for Engaged Citizens, 28 October 2020, https:// albertaviews.ca/crowfoot-comes-home/. See also Dave Dormer, “‘It Reeks of Colonialism’: Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park Frustrated over Lack of Progress Repatriating Artifacts,” ctv News, 19 February 2020, https://calgary.ctvnews.ca/it-reeks-of-colonialism-blackfootcrossing-historical-park-frustrated-over-lack-of-progress-repatriatingartifacts-1.4819122?cache=yes%3FclipId%3D375756. 50 This tension is suggested in Dormer, “‘It Reeks of Colonialism.’” 51 The repatriation policies endorsed in Alberta in 2000 were revised in 2016 but remain subject to critique. See Otiena Ellwand, “Alberta Government to Expand Policy around Return of Sacred Items to Indigenous Communities,” Edmonton Journal, 28 May 2016, https://edmonton journal.com/news/local-news/alberta-government-to-expand-policyaround-return-of-sacred-items-to-indigenous-communities/. Members of Bigstone Cree Nation, located about 325 kilometres north of Edmonton, are striving to repatriate items from the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton for installation in their new museum, a former band office that has been renovated for nearly $100,000. According to Travis Gladue-Beauregard, president of the Bigstone Cree Empowerment Society, the Repatriation Act introduced in Alberta in 2016 focuses on sacred and ceremonial objects, without recognizing “many important and meaningful artifacts that don’t fall under the ceremonial or sacred

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banner” yet are of greater concern to his people. Cited in John Copley, “Bigstone Cree Nation Seeks Repatriation of Artifacts from Royal Alberta Museum,” Alberta Native News, 24 May 2018, http://www.alberta nativenews.com/bigstone-cree-nation-seeks-repatriation-of-artifactsfrom-royal-alberta-museum/. 52 On the Tsuut’ina Nation Culture/Museum, see https://tsuutinamuseum.com/. See also Michael Franklin, “New Tsuut’ina Art and Culture Museum Open to All Visitors,” ctv News, 1 June 2018, https://calgary. ctvnews.ca/new-tsuut-ina-art-and-culture-museum-open-to-allvisitors-1.3956168. 53 The Glenbow Museum, a major collecting institution in Calgary, Alberta, was at the centre of a heated conflict with Indigenous peoples during the 1980s. The Lubicon Lake Cree First Nation, also known as the Muskotew Sakahikan Enowuk, of northern Alberta called for an international boycott of The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada’s First Peoples, an exhibition of over 650 examples of Indigenous art and culture from around the world that were displayed in Calgary by the Glenbow Museum as part of the events staged for the 1988 Winter Olympics. Members of the Lubicon Lake Cree First Nation objected primarily to the sponsorship of the exhibition by Shell Oil, one of several corporations given permission by the federal government to extract resources from their traditional lands in northern Alberta without consulting the Indigenous people impacted by the expanding oil industry. The ensuing debate was “a watershed for North American Indian/ museum relationships,” enabling progress to be made on issues such as Indigenous participation in exhibition design and the right to selfrepresentation. Karen Coody Cooper, Spirited Encounters: American Indians Protest Museum Policies and Practices (New York: AltaMira, 2008), 27. Reflecting on her role as a contributor to The Spirit Sings as well as the museological transformations that followed, settler museum scholar Ruth Phillips calls the boycott a “critical event” that facilitated social action, while noting that the exhibition was not a traditional ethnographic display, something forgotten in numerous accounts of the controversy. Ruth Phillips, “Moment of Truth: The Spirit Sings as Critical Event and the Exhibition Inside It,” in Museum Pieces, 48–70. 54 Cited in Ryan Rumbolt, “Tsuut’ina Cultural Museum Bridges Indigenous Past and Future,” Travel Alberta, 2 June 2018, https://www.travel alberta.com/ca/articles/tsuutina-cultural-museum-bridges-indigenouspast-and-future-4930/.

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Notes to pages 190–2

55 See the discussion of Métis Crossing on the website of the Métis Nation of Alberta, http://albertametis.com/affiliates/metis-crossing/. 56 The definition of Métis identity is complex and has changed over time, an issue that is not addressed in this chapter. The boundaries between First Nations and Métis peoples were often blurred due to intermarriage and changing government policies. Although the Métis people worked with and lived alongside the new settlers moving west, sometimes intermarrying with them, they remained a unique people. According to Métis scholar Chris Andersen (Michif), the repeated assertion that Métis people are hybrid, stemming from a mixture of colonial and Indigenous people, racializes Métis identity at the expense of the social, cultural, and political traits that distinguished the Métis people from related colonial and tribal communities. Instead of relying on the legitimating discourses of government categories and census results that produce Métis identity as essentially mixed, Andersen highlights the historical and political resistance of the Métis to the Canadian government’s annexation of territories in what is now western Canada. Andersen, “Métis.” See also Frank Tough, As Their Natural Resources Fail: Native Peoples and the Economic History of Northern Manitoba, 1870– 1930 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1997). On the Edmonton region in particular, see Melanie Niemi-Bohun, “Colonial Categories and Familial Responses to Treaty and Metis Scrip Policy: The ‘Edmonton and District Stragglers,’ 1870–88,” Canadian Historical Review 90, no. 1 (2009): 71–98. 57 A key example of the political resistance of the Métis people, noted by Andersen, “Métis,” is the Riel Resistance of 1885, analyzed in many sources. For example, see Albert Braz, The False Traitor: Louis Riel in Canadian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); and Thomas Flanagan, Riel and the Rebellion: 1885 Reconsidered (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000). 58 On 27 June 2019, the Métis Nation of Alberta and the Government of Canada signed the Métis Government Recognition and SelfGovernment Agreement. For the announcement and more information about this agreement, see http://albertametis.com/wp-content/up loads/2019/07/MNA-MGRSA-FAQ-DOCUMENT-V7.pdf. 59 This information was gleaned from the on-site Métis Crossing pamphlet New Cultural Gathering Centre (n.d.). This ambitious project is funded by the Métis Nation of Alberta in partnership with the Govern-

Notes to pages 192–4

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61 62

63

64 65 66 67 68

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ment of Canada and the Government of Alberta, among other sources acknowledged on a placard posted on-site. For quantitative information about these museums, see the introduction to this book as well as the Alberta Museums Project website, https://albertamuseumsproject.ca. On the Alberta Museums Association, see https://www.museums.ab.ca/. These comments are based on a visit to the Okotoks Museum and Archives in August 2013, and the installations may have changed, although the museum’s website suggests otherwise. See https://www.oko toks.ca/culture-heritage/museum-archives. For an early example, see David Lowenthal, “Pioneer Museums,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, 115–27 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Ibid., 120. David Lowenthal, “Fabricating Heritage,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (1998): 5–24. Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Metheun, 1987). Elizabeth Furniss, The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1999). For example, see Shirley Ann McDonald, “Georgic Texts and Claims of Entitlement in the Life Writing of Alberta Settlers” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2013). Elizabeth Furniss, “The Landscape of Public History: Pioneers, Progress, and the Myth of the Frontier,” in Burden of History, 53–78. See also Cassidy Rose Ellis, “Preserving the ‘Glory of the Past’: The Native Daughters of British Columbia and the Construction of Pioneer History in the Hastings Mill Museum” (ma thesis, University of British Columbia, 2002). Lowenthal, “Pioneer Museums,” 119. See also Philip J. Kachmar, “Western Canadian Populism: Reflections on the Turner Thesis and Canada” (ma thesis, University of British Columbia, 2012). On versions of the frontier myth in Alberta, see Gloria Elizabeth Miller, “The Frontier ‘Cowboy’ Myth and Entrepreneurialism in the Culture of the Alberta Oil Industry – Professional Women’s Coping Strategies: An Interpretive Study of Women’s Experience” (PhD diss., University of Calgary, 1998), https://prism.ucalgary.ca/handle/1880/26055; and Mary-Ellen Kelm,

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72 73

74 75

76

77

78

79

80

Notes to pages 194–7

“Manly Contests: Rodeo Masculinities at the Calgary Stampede,” Canadian Historical Review 90, no. 4 (2009): 711–51. Laura C. Schneider, “Of Pioneers, Victorians and ‘Indians’: Rethinking Aboriginal Representations in Ontario’s Community History Museums” (ma thesis, Carleton University, 2008), 119. Ibid., 122–3. Alan Wallach, “The Battle over ‘The West as America,’” in Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States, 105–17 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998). Schneider, “Of Pioneers, Victorians and ‘Indians,’” 17. Mary Pinkoski and Lianne McTavish, “A Room of Her Own: Interrogating Gender in a Historic House Museum,” in Feminist Critique and the Museum: Educating for a Critical Consciousness, ed. Kathy Sanford, Darlene Clover, Nancy Taber, and Sarah Williamson, 267–83 (Leiden: Brill, 2020). “John Walter Biography,” City of Edmonton website, https://www. edmonton.ca/attractions_events/john_walter_museum/john-walterbio.aspx. Sarah Carter, Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism in the Canadian Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2016). “Muchias,” City of Edmonton website, https://www.edmonton.ca/city_ government/edmonton_archives/emwalker-capturing-contemporaryscenes.aspx. See also the Ella May Walker fonds, MS-52, City of Edmonton Archives, https://cityarchives.edmonton.ca/ella-may-walker-fonds. Some of her images of Henry Collins and his cabin have been uploaded by the City of Edmonton. For example, see Ella May Walker, Muchias’ Tiny House, item eaa-1-9, in the fonds indicated above. Muchias Park, at 3524 25 Avenue, was named after John “Henry” Collins Mathias, according to the City of Edmonton website, which also makes reference to his production of bows and arrows. See “Indigenous Place Names of Edmonton,” City of Edmonton website, https://data.edmon ton.ca/widgets/59sa-iw7i. Collins remains part of the story of Edmonton to this day, including on the website Maybe Edmonton, https://maybeedmonton.tumblr.com/post/47471241275/john-henrymathias-collins-1853-1939-was-born. Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives.

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81 See Southern Alberta Pioneers and Their Descendants fonds, glen-2153, Glenbow Library and Archives. 82 “Secretary’s Report of 1931,” in “Reports, Secretary, 1926–1939,” A81-53, box 20, file 293, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives. 83 History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers and Descendants Association, 1894–2008 (Edmonton: Northern Alberta Pioneers and Descendants Association, 2009), 140. See also “Constitution,” 1927, box 17, file 234, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives. On the admission of women in 1924 when napota was revived after being relatively dormant from 1907 to 1913 and again from 1915 to 1923, see A History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association, 1894–1983 (Edmonton: Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association, 1983), 17. 84 “Annual Report,” 1924, 37, A2010-23, box 20, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives. 85 History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers, 142. 86 “Secretary’s Report of 1930,” in “Reports, Secretary, 1926–1939,” A81-53, box 20, file 293, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives. On page 2 of the “Secretary’s Report of 1939,” in the same file, there is a motion to extend the date of the legitimate pioneer from 1895 to 1898 in order to increase membership. 87 Northern Alberta Pioneers and Descendants Association website, http://northernalbertapioneers.com/membership/. 88 John Walter was the vice-president of the Edmonton Old Timers’ Association from 1899 to 1901 and is listed as an Old Timer in multiple documents, including the 1905 composite photograph discussed in this chapter. Annie Walter is noted in multiple documents and attended napota events, as documented in Pinkoski and McTavish, “Room of Her Own.” Annie Walter was awarded a Life Membership in 1935 when she turned seventy-five, and she received gifts from napota after that. See “Xmas Cheer, 1929–1961,” A81-53, box 21, file 304, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives. 89 History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers. 90 Ibid., 1. Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 206, notes that Métis and “Half Breed” peoples often hosted balls.

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Notes to pages 199–201

91 The biography of Colin Fraser Sr is outlined on the Mountain Métis Centre website, https://mountainmetis.com/colin-fraser. 92 Colin Fraser Jr’s biography is from Colin Fraser fonds, PR0770, Hermis: Heritage Resources Management Information System, Provincial Archives of Alberta, https://hermis.alberta.ca/paa/Details.aspx?st=edmonton &cp=2051&ReturnUrl=%2Fpaa%2FSearch.aspx%3Fst%3Dedmon ton%26cp%3D2051&dv=True&DeptID=1&ObjectID=PR0770. 93 Despite such intermarriage, the Métis remained distinctive, a point made by various scholars, including Adam Gaudry and Darryl Leroux, “White Settler Revisionism and Making Métis Everywhere,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 1 (2017): 116–42. See also Adam Gaudry, “Métis,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 7 January 2009, https://www.thecanadianen cyclopedia.ca/en/article/metis. 94 History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers, 9. 95 Sarah Quick, “The Social Poetics of the Red River Jig in Alberta and Beyond: Meaningful Heritage and Emerging Performance,” Ethnologies 30, no. 1 (2008): 79–80. 96 Ibid., 78. 97 According to Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 140, Margaret Ann Pruden descended from a Cree English family and created wonderful beaded work. When Pruden died in 1956, her obituary was on the front page of the Edmonton Journal. “Pioneer in City since 1866 Dies,” Edmonton Journal, 18 April 1956, 1, 13. Pruden was awarded a Life Membership in napota in 1935, the same year as Annie Walter. 98 Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 24. 99 This composite photograph and its caption are reproduced in History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers, 4–7, but the original version is item EA-10-669, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives, https://city archives.edmonton.ca/edmonton-old-timers-association-2. 100 K. Tony Hollihan, “‘A Brake upon the Wheel’: Frank Oliver and the Creation of the Immigration Act of 1906,” Past Imperfect 1 (1992): 93–112. 101 “Edmonton Residents of Fifty Years Ago Numbered about Fifty Men; Reminiscences of Henry Fraser,” Edmonton Bulletin, 11 July 1917, 35, item Ar03502, Peel’s Prairie Provinces, http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/news papers/EDB/1917/07/11/35/Ar03502.html?query=newspapers%7Chenry+ fraser%7C%28pubyear%3A%5B1916+TO+1918%5D%29+AND+%28 publication%3AEDB+publication%3AGAT%29%7Cscore.

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102 Ibid. 103 Although no one was credited for writing the article about Henry Fraser published in 1917, the author must have been Franklin R.F. McKitrick. A letter that he wrote to Ella May Walker in 1944 indicates that he had interviewed Fraser in 1917 and subsequently tipped an unnamed photographer to lighten Fraser’s complexion. See R.F. McKitrick to Ella May Walker, 14 June 1944, box 1, Ella May Walker fonds, ms-52, City of Edmonton Archives. 104 Jennifer S.H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1980); Sylvia Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur-Trade Society in Western Canada, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Watson and Dwyer, 1980). For historical and theoretical analyses of the structures of settler colonialism, see Annie Coombes, ed., Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa (Manchester, uk: Manchester University Press, 2006); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (Houndmills, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Fiona Bateman and Lionel Pilkington, eds, Studies in Settler Colonialism: Politics, Identity and Culture (Houndmills, uk: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini, eds, The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism (Abingdon, uk: Routledge, 2017). 105 R.F. McKitrick to Ella May Walker, 14 June 1944, box 1, Ella May Walker fonds, ms-52, City of Edmonton Archives. 106 Walker was also a member of the Archives and Landmark Committee in Edmonton, to which she was appointed in 1948. 107 Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 125, explains that sometimes Métis or “Half Breed” people – a term that she respectfully rehabilitates on page 24 – chose to identify themselves with pioneer or white identities. 108 History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers, 8. 109 “Cabin, 1926–1945,” A81-53, box 17, files 230 and 231, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives. 110 “Secretary Report of 1928,” 3, in “Reports, Secretary, 1926–1939,” A81-53, box 20, file 293, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives. 111 The inventory was in “Cabin, 1926–1945,” A81-53, box 17, file 230,

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114 115 116 117

118 119 120

121

122

123

124

Notes to pages 203–6

Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives. History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers, 35–6. Adrienne Lamb and Rick Bremness, “A Peek Inside Edmonton’s Artifact Centre,” cbc News, 29 December 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/edmonton/adrienne-lamb-artifact-centre-city-of-edmontonivany-1.4956856. This article argues that “the artifact centre was established in the 1960s to preserve and maintain a supply of authentic historic artifacts for the John Walter Museum and Fort Edmonton Park.” History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers, 8. Ibid., 16. “Edmonton Residents of Fifty Years Ago.” The objects were thus appropriately classified as “relics”; like longstanding religious displays of the bodily fragments and garments of saints, they were often intimately linked with the bodies of pioneers, especially the tools, dishes, and materials that had enabled the “authentic” physical sensations of pioneers. History of the Northern Alberta Pioneers, 16. Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 231. For a recent analysis of Remington’s work, see Dennis Raverty and Dennis Dittrich, “The Demise of the Frontier and the Birth of the New ‘Old West,’” Illustration Magazine, no. 63 (2019): 82–93. On the theft of Indigenous land at the root of whiteness, whereby the land becomes property and whiteness is conflated with property rights, see Morten-Robinson, White Possessive. This photograph is now item ea-10-3, Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives, https://cityarchives.edmonton.ca/colin-frasers-boats-leavingathabasca-landing. A photograph of Henry Fraser’s house in Edmonton is item ea-10-571 (dated 1915), Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association (napota) fonds, ms-56, City of Edmonton Archives, https://cityarchives.edmonton.ca/fraser-henry-house. I completed this chapter during the global pandemic in 2020 and was unable to acquire photographs of both this bag and the barbed wire installation noted below. Farrell Racette, “Sewing Ourselves Together,” 249, argues that Métis and “Half Breed” women maintained their families as well as Indigenous

Notes to pages 206–8

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126

127 128

129

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131 132

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traditions with such artistic production. See also Jennifer Brown, “Métis Women as Center and Symbol in the Emergence of Métis Communities,” Canadian Journal of Native Studies 3, no. 1 (1983): 39–46. Lianne McTavish, “Strategic Donations: Women and Museums in New Brunswick, 1862–1930,” Journal of Canadian Studies 42, no. 2 (2008), 1–24. For accounts of other Indigenous women who complicated the category of the “pioneer,” see Doris Jeanne MacKinnon, Metis Pioneers: Marie Rose Delorme Smith and Isabella Clark Hardisty Lougheed (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2018); and Sarah Carter and Patricia A. McCormack, eds, Recollecting: Lives of Aboriginal Women of the Canadian Northwest and Borderlands (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2011). On the Rocky Museum, see https://www.rockymuseum.com/. The critique of settler colonialism enabled by the Rocky Museum is enhanced by its proximity to the Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site, which features First Nations and Métis tipis and material culture near the confluence of the North Saskatchewan and Clearwater Rivers, where forts once stood. In contrast to the vibrant representations of Indigenous cultures at this site, one fort remains an archaeological site, with some traces evident in the earth, and another is a ghostly scaffold, drawing attention to their absence as much as their former presence. This emphasis accords with the description of the Rocky Museum on its website, which promotes its dedication to “the history of the pioneers who homesteaded in this area, worked in the lumber camps and sawmills, and sent their children to one-room schoolhouses.” See https://www.rockymuseum.com/. Displays of barbed wire appear in other pioneer museums, including the Kansas Barbed Wire Museum in La Crosse, Kansas. See https:// www.rushcounty.org/barbedwiremuseum/. Ruth Phillips, “The Collecting and Display of Souvenir Arts: Authenticity and the ‘Strictly Commercial,’” in Trading Identities, 49–71. See “Hiding in Plain Sight: Discovering the Métis Nation in the Archival Records of Library and Archives Canada,” Library and Archives Canada website, https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/ metis/Pages/metis-nation-collection-lac.aspx. Paulette Regan, Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools,

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135 136

137

Notes to pages 208–10

Truth Telling, and Reconciliation in Canada (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2010), 27, 55, 237. Dylan Robinson, “Intergenerational Sense, Intergenerational Responsibility,” in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action in and beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, ed. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin, 43–65 (Waterloo, on: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016). Ibid., 63–4. Leah Sandals, “A New Royal Alberta Museum Opens to the Public,” Canadian Art, 10 October 2018, https://canadianart.ca/news/a-newroyal-alberta-museum-opens-to-the-public/. Kristen McLaughlin, “Close to Home: The Evolving Engagement Strategies of Alberta’s Local Museums in Canada’s Cultural Landscape” (ma thesis, University of Toronto, 2018), 48, 78.

INDEX

Alberta: African American settlers in, 178, 198; colonization of, 177; funding of museums in, 23–4, geography of, 10; immigration to, 15, 178; Indigenous peoples in, 28; population of, 11 Alberta Museums Association, 11, 18–19, 24, 192 Alberta Museums Project, 7–9; interactive map of museums online, 43–4; phase one of research for, 11–19 American Museum of Natural History, New York, 100, 121 American Museum of P.T. Barnum, New York, 21–2, 129–30 Andersen, Chris, 272n56 Angola State Penitentiary, Louisiana, 89 Archives and Artifact Centre, Edmonton, 203 Augé, Marc, 46 Australian Museum, Sydney, 165 authorized heritage discourse, 117, 257–8n24. See also heritage automobility: definitions of, 40, 44–7 Auzoux, Louis, 106–8 Bal, Mieke, 143 Banff Park Museum, 13, 121, 247n55 Barnum, P.T., 21–2, 129–30

Barrhead Centennial Museum, 20–1 Beaudry, Nancy, 199, 201. See also Fraser family Beaver Lake Cree Nation, 171 Bennett, Tony, 52, 262–3n78 Bigstone Cree Nation, 270–1n51 Blackfalds: history of, 68–9 Blackfoot Crossing Historical Park, 27, 31–2, 180–9 Bloch, Ernst, 49 bocche della veritá, 85 Boetzkes, Amanda, 157 Bonham, Jennifer, 46 Bourdieu, Pierre, 52 Bow River Valley, 184–5 Boym, Svetlana, 126 Breaker, Shane, 180 Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site, 139, 143–55 Burr, Christina, 167 Burtynsky, Edward, 156 cabinets of curiosities, 21, 90, 95 Canada 150 celebration, 60 Candlin, Fiona, 5, 6–7, 17, 222–3n10 Carl Akeley Hall of African Mammals, New York, 121 Carleton, Judy, 60, 69, 70

282

carnival barkers, 87 carnival funhouse, 85–6 Carter, Sarah, 196 Caverhill, Brian, 70 Caverhill, Heather, 59–60 Certeau, Michel de, 53–4 Chamber of Horrors, 104–5 Chief Crowfoot Tipi Village: Siksika Nation Reserve, 186–7 childhood: history of, 162–3; idealization of, 126; play during, 142, 145, 163–4 Christus Gardens, Gatlinburg, 106 Chudacoff, Howard P., 163 Clark, Karl, Dr, 165 Clarke, Maureen, 63, 72, 73–4, 75 Claxton, Dana, 26 Coats, Emily, 157 Collins, Henry Mathias, 196, 198 colonial legacy of museums, 27, 187–9 colonization of land, 88, 120, 142, 153–4, 207; by means of irrigation, 154; Victorian justification of, 165 commercial museums, 18, 19, 21, 83, 99 Conn, Steven, 121 Criminals Hall of Fame Wax Museum, Niagara Falls, Ontario, 104 critical museum theory: definitions of, 5, 6–7, 16–17, 30 Crowfoot, Chief, 185, 186–7; regalia of, 188–9 Curtius, Philippe, 104 dandy, 93 Debord, Guy, 51–2 definition of museum, 16–17, 18–19, 21–2; as multifunctional, 58–9; as relational, 41; as small, 24 Denny, Cecil, 188 department stores, 21, 98–9 Derrida, Jacques, 82 detour, 25, 48–9, 51–2 dioramas, 100, 101, 183–4 Donalda and District Museum, 111 driving, 46; types of, 46, 47. See also automobility Duncan, Carol, 85, 143 DuPont, 156

Index

Eastern Irrigation District, Alberta, 148 Eden Musée, New York, 22 Edensor, Tim, 44, 45–6, 131, 141, 144–5 Edmonton Bulletin, 199, 200, 201–2 Edmonton Old Timers’ Association, 196– 201. See also Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association Elliott, Brian, 52 Elves, Joanne, 164 Escape to the Country, 29 Experience the Energy Tour, Fort McMurray, 168–70 extraction museums in Alberta, 140 Eyerman, Ron, 47 Farrell Racette, Sherry, 179, 200 Fiske, John, 117, 133 Fort Chipewyan: cancer rates in, 156, 171; Convent of Holy Angels Indian Residential School, 65, 75; location of, 61, 63, 64–5; population of, 11; travel to, 61–2 Fort Chipewyan Bicentennial Museum, 11, 61–5, 71–6 Fort Edmonton, 201–2 Fort Edmonton Park, 203 Fort McMurray: economy of, 172; fire in, 172; as a “small town,” 30–1 Fraser, Colin, Jr, 199, 200, 201, 205. See also Fraser family Fraser, Colin, Sr, 199, 201. See also Fraser family Fraser, Crystal Gail, 179 Fraser, Henry, 179, 199–200, 201–2, 204. See also Fraser family Fraser family, 179, 199–202, 204, 205, 206; as members of the Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association, 200 freak shows, 129 funding: of museums in Alberta, 23–4; of small-town and rural museums, 24, 31–2 Furniss, Elizabeth, 193–4 Gesner, Abraham, 166, 246–7n50 Glanfield, Oliver, 62, 72–3 Glenbow Museum, Calgary, 15, 24, 271n53 Gopher Hole Museum, 7, 19, 113–38; drive to, 45–7, 50–1; history of, 45; international visitors to, 66–7; visit to, 52–4

Index

gophers: hunted by Albertans, 120; as nuisance to farmers, 119–20; policies against, 120 Gordon, Avery F., 81 Gregson, Arthur D., 56, 102 Gregson, Percy, 57 Griebel, Brendan, 81 Griebel, Jude, 81 Harnett, Tanya, 179, 210 Harris, Neil, 98 hauntology: theories of, 81–2 Hennig, Matthias, 49 heritage: definition of, 123; nostalgia and, 125–6 Hewison, Robert, 193 Hiding in Plain Sight: Discovering the Métis Nation, 208 Holmes, Travis, 7, 43 Imperato, Ferrante, 90 Indian Act of Canada, 182, 186, 188 Indigenous museums and cultural centres, 180–92; number in Alberta, 264n1 Indigenous peoples in Alberta: as challenging definitions of the pioneer, 196, 200–2; in exhibits of the Oil Sands Discovery Centre, 170–1; impact of irrigation technologies on, 154–5, 255–6n4; specific identities and names of, 11, 153–4; stereotypes of, 132, 254n60. See also colonization of land; Indigenous museums and cultural centres; pioneer museums; pioneer mythology; pioneers; residential school system; Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada International Council of Museums (icom), 18 irrigation technologies in Alberta, 145–7, 154–5 Jasper House, 199 John Walter Museum, Edmonton, 195–6. See also Collins, Henry Mathias; Walter, Annie; Walter, John Jules, Linda, 184

283

Kee Klamp scaffolding, 158–9 Kiddo, The, 79–80 Kirchner, Athanasius, 95 Kurta, Dianne, 66, 113, 119, 127, 134–5 Kurta, Laural, 125 Kwakwa-ka-ʼwakw, 188 Larsen, Jonas, 50 Leduc No. 1 Energy Discovery Centre, 164 Levin, Amy, 125 Library and Archives Canada, 59, 208 Lindee, Susan, 159–60 Lippard, Lucy, 52–3 Locke, John, 154 Löfgren, Orvar, 47 Lombroso, Cesare, 105 Lonetree, Amy, 75 Longfellow, Brenda, 156 Louter, David, 51 Low, Sethna, 150 Lowenthal, David, 123, 193 Lubicon Lake Cree First Nation, 271n53 MacCannell, Dean, 50 Macdonald, Graeme, 157 Mackay, Bert, 156 Matsui, Kenichi, 154 McLaughlin, Kristen, 31 McMullan, Chelsea, 48, 134–5 Merriman, Peter, 46 Métis: history in Edmonton, 199; identity of, 272n56. See also Collins, Henry Mathias; Fraser family Métis Crossing, 190–2 Métis Nation of Alberta, 190 Meyer, Rachel Marie, 79–80 miniatures, 123 Muchias. See Collins, Henry Mathias Musée du Louvre, Paris, 88 Musée Grévin, Paris, 104–5 Museo della Specola, Florence, 108 Museum of Fear and Wonder, 3, 18, 23, 79–112 Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, 82, 93–5 Museum of Miniatures, Nanton, 254n60 Museum of the Cariboo Chilcotin, Williams Lake, 193–4

284

natural history museums in Canada, 58, 121, 100, 102, 246–7n50 natural history societies in Canada, 58, 142, 164–6, 102 Natural History Society of New Brunswick, 102 Nayler, Douglas, 48, 134–5 Nelkin, Dorothy, 159–60 New Brunswick Museum, Saint John, 59, 102 New York Museum of Science and Industry, 156 Niagara Falls, Ontario, 104 Nikolic, Misa, 7, 11–13, 17 Northern Alberta Pioneers and Descendants Association, 198 Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association, 179, 196–200; and Indigenous members, 196, 200–2; log cabin, 202–3; material collections, 203–6; and women, 195–6. See also Fraser family; pioneer museums; pioneer mythology; pioneers Northwest Irrigation Act of 1894, 154 nostalgia, 125–6 Oil Sands Discovery Centre, 31, 141, 155–72 oil sands in Alberta, 141, 155, 156–7, 165–6, 168–9, 170–2 Okotoks Museum and Archives, 192–3 Old Melbourne Jail, 248–9n67 Oliver, Frank, 200–1 Onciul, Bryony, 75 open text, 117 Orange, Hilary, 147 Palliser, John, 148 Palliser’s Triangle, 148, 153–5 Papaschase, 199, 200 People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (peta), 61, 113–14, 118 petrocultures, 156–8, 168 Petrolia Discovery, 167 Phillips, Ruth, 179, 208, 271 physiognomy, 105–6 Pinkoski, Mary, 195–6 pioneer museums, 25, 110–11, 177–8, 192–209 pioneer mythology, 193–4, 197 pioneers: definitions of, 178, 197–9; and gender, 206, 195–6; in relation to Indigenous

Index

peoples, 198–202, 205. See also Northern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association place: theories of, 29, 32, 41–2, 184 Portland cement, 148 Potlatch ceremonies, 188 Potter, Walter: museum of, 123 Potyondi, Barry, 153–4 professionalization of museums, 5, 18–24, 59, 112, 226n38 Pruden, Margaret Ann, 200. See also Fraser family Qually, Ken, 207 Questacon – The National Science and Technology Centre, Canberra, 160 Quick, Sarah, 199–200 Rand, Erica, 163 Redpath Museum, Montreal, 165 Red River carts, 197, 203, 265–6n11 Red River Jig, 199 Regan, Paulette, 208 Remington, Frederic, 204 repatriation, 188–9, 270–1n51 residential school system, 26, 65, 75, 183 Richardson’s ground squirrels. See gophers Riel Resistance of 1885, 190 road trip: definition of, 47 Robertina. See Kiddo, The Robertson, Carmen, 179 Robertson, Kirsty, 157 Robinson, Dylan, 208 Rocky Mountain House National Historic Site, 279n128 Rocky Museum, Rocky Mountain House, 206–7 Ross, Donald, 203–4 Rosthchild, Lord Walter, 56–7, 102 Rowland, Flora, 205–6. See also Fraser family Royal, Jack, 187 Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, 188–9 ruins: definition of, 141, 144–5; industrial, 147. See also Brooks Aqueduct National and Provincial Historic Site rural: definition of, 28–9, 30, 130

Index

285

salvage paradigm, 27–8, 188, 204–5 Saunder, P.M., 154 Schneider, Laura, 194 science centres: aesthetics of, 158–9; history of, 160–2 Science Museum, London, 158 science museums: history of, 156, 166 Secwepemc Museum and Heritage Park, Kamloops, 184 settlers: ignorance of Indigenous history, 176–7, 208. See also Alberta; colonization of land; pioneer museums; pioneer mythology; pioneers Siksika Nation Reserve, 174, 180–9 Simpson, George, Sr, 199 small town: definition of, 28, 29–30 Smith, Laurajane, 117, 257–8n24 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, dc, 194 Southern Alberta Pioneers and Old Timers’ Association, 197 Starlight, Jeannette, Elder, 189 Stewart, Susan, 123 Still Standing, 29–31 Stimson, Adrian, 27 Strang, Veronica, 153 Suncor Energy, 162, 168–9, 171 Sunday drive: definition of, 46 Syncrude, 171

Tsuut’ina Nation Culture/Museum, 189 Tussaud, Madame Marie, 104

Takach, Geo, 157 taxidermy, 100–3, 121–3, 183–4 Torrington: history of, 67–8, 124–6 Torrington Historical Society, 124 tourism, 52–3; and ecology, 153; as embodied, 151–2; at Indigenous museums and cultural centres, 187; as scripted, 131, 145; theories of, 130, 150 tourists: as demanding, 194; as productive, 150 toxic sublime, 168 Treaty 7, 185–6 Trekcetera Museum, 111 Trondsen, Norman, 52 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 26–7, 176, 183, 208. See also residential school system

Yellow Old Woman, Stephan, 187

U’mista Cultural Centre, Alert Bay, 188 universal survey museum, 21 Urry, John, 44 Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, Fine Art, and Natural History, 82, 90–3 voluntary detour. See detour Wadey, Mary, 56, 59, 69, 70 Wadey Centre, 16, 54–60 Wakeham, Pauline, 183–4 Walker, Ella May Jacoby, 202 Wallach, Alan, 85 Walter, Annie, 195, 198 Walter, John, 195–6, 198, 201, 203 wax figures, 103–9 Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, 81 West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, 194, 204 Wilson, David, 93–5 windshield wilderness, 51 World Famous Gopher Hole Museum. See Gopher Hole Museum World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893, Chicago, 22 wunderkammer. See cabinets of curiosities