Request for Proposals – Exhibit Design Services Fort Calgary – October 6, 2020

APPENDIX E: Knowledge Landscape and Approach

Fort Calgary Knowledge Landscape and Approach, August 20201

As Fort Calgary begins work under a new strategic plan with the ultimate goal of building a new, community-relevant and visitor-oriented museum, a new way of understanding the history of the Fort and this site was required to inform exhibition development and organizational knowledge. There are many layers here, and this initial history landscape review helped us to follow the roots of the people and the place we call Fort Calgary. Following these roots will show the complex, wide-ranging, and sometimes unexpected sources of how this place changed over time and will situate visitors as temporary occupiers of a site that will continue to evolve for centuries to come. In approaching Fort history, we have often cited the confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers as a constant that links past and present. However, it is important to critique the notion of “constant” and understand that in the long history and long future of this place, we cannot confine the confluence as a constant.2 It shifts east to west, north to south. Water levels rise and fall. Contents of the water contain nutrients, silt, and elements from the tip of the Rockies through this territory, contributing the spiritual and material deposits that feed and sustain life here. The water, its sources, and its contributories are part of the roots of this site; the animal, plant, and human lives it has and continues to sustain have and will continue to influence this place.

This approach to a more holistic understanding of space and history is a way to decolonize the way we understand the past and its interactions with the present and the future. Rather than a timeline that selects vignettes to show a teleological line of progress, it emphasizes the connection between people, plants, and animals and situates our current state as not the pinnacle of all that has come before but rather as a brief time in between past and future that we must steward. Troy Patenaude mentions a story shared to him by a Choctaw/Cherokee teacher of his that helps develop the concept of holistic knowledge and understanding the fullness of things, the ways that we are “interwoven.” Sequoyah Trueblood, in a personal communication to Troy, stated:

Some people think that by looking at the different parts of a flower—noticing the ways they work together and how each grows, right back to that first cell—they know the flower. They don’t really know it though. To really know it you have to know about everything that went into it all the way back to the creation of the sun, and then even further.3 This knowledge emphasizes exploring the layers and roots of what can be “seen” and how it can be “understood.” This place is a site of complements and contradictions. Sacred and secular. Celebratory and sorrowful. Peaceful and violent. Extraordinary and mundane. That complexity deserves responsible exploration, which is what Allison Graham and Troy Patenaude began as they prepared subject-based

1 This document is still in development. It includes work completed by Troy Patenaude, Allison Graham, Nancy Kimberley Phillips, Kelsie Walker, and Shannon Murray. 2 In the interest of transparency, this is a note about the process of this thinking. As work is done to decolonize historical thinking, concepts that seem “natural” or “ingrained” need to be re-evaluated. The notion of “constant” is one of those things. Working from feedback Troy Patenaude provided regarding the idea of the confluence being a constant marker of this place, this introductory paragraph was reconsidered and reconstructed to acknowledge that though it is familiar to those living and working here today, the intersection of the Bow and Elbow rivers is ever-changing and those changes have broader regional roots that are critical for understanding what can be seen on the site of the Fort. 3 Sequoyah Trueblood, personal communication with Troy Patenaude.

1 knowledge landscape reviews4 that could help direct and inform research and content directions going forward under the new Strategic Plan. Their work may seem distinct – Allison weaving together published academic histories that explore big ideas (crime, policing, gender, nation building) and Troy blending traditional knowledge with a multi-discipline approach that includes philosophy and oral traditions that re-frames the familiar (environmentalism, nation building) – but in fact their knowledge landscape reviews reinforced the importance of certain subjects to understanding Fort Calgary’s long history in a bigger context and demonstrates that in exploring the complexities of history, they can reveal more inclusive, richer, and relevant content.

Fort Calgary’s approach to understanding its complex, intersecting, complementing, and contradicting histories will respect the literal and figurative layers here. Storytelling at Fort Calgary will tie together the long history and the most recent developments in an effort to help contemporary people understand that current conditions have roots, and those roots have pierced many layers. This approach means that events, people, animals, and plants will have multiple interpretations. The arrival of the NWMP in 1875 marks an achievement for some and the beginning of a new phase of devastation for others. The closure of the Fort as an active site of policing in the 1910s marks the end of the NWMP’s presence as a policing force but the beginning of the city of Calgary developing and implementing its own policing strategies that enforce a certain perspective on orderliness. Planting imported flowers and food marks beautification and food security for some but the erasure of thousands of years of land stewardship for others. Using a holistic understanding of its pasts, showing layers as distinct yet connected, and following the roots will allow Fort Calgary to develop more robust stories with multiple perspectives that will be informed by and shared with the community.

What follows is a brief overview of the topics Troy and Allison covered with links to their writings. These nodes are particularly rich areas for considering new exhibits or programs. This is not an exhaustive list or even a complete exploration of the topics considered, but a highlight of some of the major themes the Fort will be engaging with in future exhibitions, research, and programs. There is not a singular Indigenous category. This decision is made for two reasons. Indigenous history and contemporary lives must be woven into the history of this place – the very existence of Fort Calgary is intertwined with Indigenous experience. Additionally, space will be provided for Kainai, Piikani, Siksika, Tsuut’ina, Iyarhe Nakoda, and Métis people to tell their own stories. Development of that research and potential exhibitions and programs that emerge from that work is underway with members of the Indigenous Advisory Committee. What follows is a high-level review intended to show avenues for further exploration and provide a framework for ways history can be understood, created, and shared under the new Strategic Plan. It is a document still in process and is considered the intellectual property of Fort Calgary.

Environment Empire and Colonialism Nation Building Policing Gender

4 Once again, as the Fort works toward decolonizing processes and frameworks the idea of “knowledge landscape” helps emphasize the many ways of knowing. While this project began with the assumption of “literature review” or “historiography” – both implicitly exclude traditional knowledge, specifically oral tradition. Using the term “knowledge landscape” is deliberate. Another phrase may emerge that is inclusive and appropriate, but at this time that is the phrase to indicate examining sources that contain information directly about this site or the Fort as well as sources that provide social, economic, political, and environmental frameworks in which to contextualize this place and the Fort.

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Environment

An environmental approach to Fort Calgary’s history provides opportunities to explore themes of stewardship, sustainability, dominance, and exploitation. In settling the Canadian West, we see the duality of plenty: enough versus bounty. Here, we should once again look to knowledge shared by Sequoyah Trueblood about knowing. To know this place, research must seek to place it “all the way back to the creation of the sun.” Over time, the physical land upon which Fort Calgary sits has changed though both human intervention and environmental changes. As the rivers roll by, they carry elements from far away that are deposited on their routes. Nutrients from an elk that dies in the Bow River near Banff could be carried and rest at the confluence, providing nutrients needed for a new tree to grow on the banks. That tree may grow tall and strong, appealing to settlers moving into the area in the late 19th century who cut it to make a home with it. Later, that home may be dismantled for firewood as the land is cleared to make room for new development. Though the newest development, the fires created, the tree that grew would not be directly tied to the elk’s body, the connection is there. The surface on which people walked thousands of years ago is not the same one we walk today; rather, their surface provides the foundation for the ground we know and experience.

In John A. Macdonald and the Conservatives’ National Policy vision, land and resources in Canada’s West would be exploited and the point of production was to produce surplus that entered the capital markets. In the Blackfoot, Tsuut’ina, Iyarhe Nakoda perspectives, plenty meant enough. Sustaining and stewarding animals and plants based on natural cycles. Though this arid climate does not immediately bring to mind a bountiful landscape, Blackfoot people were able to survive and thrive through knowing this land how seasons, animals, and plants are all interwoven. They harvested, prepared, and stored foods to sustain them through long winters and dry spells. In an Anglo-Canadian world view, to not turn over every acre in an effort to extract ever more resources, cultivate more product, and go beyond sustenance into surplus that enters the national economy was an irresponsible, even moral failure. Notions of “pristine” or “untouched” nature became popular around the turn of the 20th century as urbanization and industrialization brought contamination and pollution and people pined for an imagined pure past. As Troy points out in his review, three waves of environmentalism emerged and in each we see the colonial biases of prioritizing the environment – even its protection – based on use.

In his writings on re-framing environmental perspectives, Troy Patenaude uses the case of oxeye daisies as a non-native species that “despite their beauty, also introduces foreign influence over life and processes here that cause imbalances.” This example highlights that land cultivation, as seen in large agricultural pursuits or even a simple garden on the Fort grounds, is an environmental intervention that forever alters the land. After its RNWMP decommissioning in 1914, the Fort site became an industrial site home to railway tracks. Research into Fort Calgary as an urban site is underway, though not yet complete. While some saw this as progress and modernity, these processes contaminated the confluence. The process of recovering this land should be part of Fort Calgary’s research, exhibitions, and programs going forward and would provide an access point for people to better understand restoration and sustainability through land stewardship. For Troy Patenaude’s exploration of the environment and holistic knowing, click here.

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Empire & Colonialism

This section could provide a simple timeline that acknowledges that the Blackfoot have always been here, followed by the Tsuut’ina and Iyarhe Nakoda peoples, then came missionaries, traders, the North West Mounted Police in 1875, Treaty 7 in 1877, the railway in 1883, and then Calgary grew up around that and today it is Canada’s third largest urban metropolitan area. These dates and events are significant, but that tidy timeline ignores the complexities of place, empire, and colonialism.

This is the home territory of Blackfoot people. As Troy Patenaude explains in his section about niitawahsi, this place and the concept of time are inextricably linked. He shares elders’ knowledge about thinking of time as a lake, not a river. Where a colonial perspective sees time as an ever-progressing series of events that has a distinct past – a rock dropped in a river near a bend stays in that bend – we are instead asked to consider time in this place as a lake – we are not able to see the shores, but we are all connected in the same body of water; past coexists with present. Using contemporary maps, we understand that Blackfoot territory once reached from the Rocky Mountains in the west to the centre of what is now Saskatchewan in the east and from the North Saskatchewan River down to the Yellowstone River in Montana. Traditional knowledge and oral history explains that this land – niitawahsi – has been home for the Blackfoot people forever. Stories and legends are tied to seasons, weather, and places that are still experienced and seen.5 The site that eventually became home to Fort Calgary is one of the most sacred in Blackfoot legend. Napi created humans at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers.6 Acknowledging these places is central for Blackfoot culture to continue and thrive.

Situating this place in global history shows centuries of trade, rivalry, cooperation, and conflict among the many peoples of what is now considered the North American West. We know that the Tsuut’ina and Iyarhe Nakoda made treaties with Blackfoot people to stay in this territory. Oral traditions speak of families trading with people from the far south for materials or the other side of the Rockies to get baskets and shells used to adorn special clothing. After European arrival, these trade networks continued but also brought disruption for some and ascendancy for others. Recent academic histories complement oral tradition and contextualize empires and territories in the North American West that had shifted and existed for centuries before this land was reduced to being called the “New World” that was empty and waiting for the taking.7 Most recently, Ryan Hall’s Beneath the Backbone of the Earth argues that “Blackfoot history offers unique and essential insights into North America’s Indigenous past” because they “were among the most powerful, prosperous, and geographically expansive polities in all of North America,” and they engaged in trade, diplomacy, and conflict with neighboring Indigenous peoples as well as French, American, English, and Canadian officials.8 In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, individual traders working with the Hudson’s Bay Company spent time in Blackfoot territory, but established posts did not necessarily last long; one called Old Bow Fort had been

5 Allan Pard, John Wolf Child, Clarence Wolf Leg, Blair First Rider, Kathy Brewer, Trevor Peck, “The Blackfoot Medicine Wheel Project” Archaeological Survey of Alberta, Occasional Paper No. 36. Other things that can still be seen are Old Woman’s Buffalo Jump near Cayley or the okatok – the rock from which the town of Okotoks gets its name. 6 “Napi’s Greatest Achievement,” in Willie White Feathers and Helen Many Fingers, Napi Legends (Ninastako Cultural Centre, 2017), 1 – 9. 7 Pekka Hämäläinen, Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). 8 Ryan Hall, Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720 – 1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020): 4 – 5.

4 built in 1824 or 1826, was abandoned within the decade, and was found to be burned ruins in 1857.9 These instances scratch at the surface of a new direction for Fort Calgary exhibition content to position and understand niitawahsi without tying it to the arrival of European traders, missionaries, settlers, and colonizers. This would respect and elevate oral tradition and further work to decolonize tidy timeline understandings of this place. Allison’s essay situates niitawahsi and the NWMP within the Victorian age of empire and pulls global threads together that help situate Fort Calgary – a national historic site – in an international history. For her research, click here.

Canada’s arrival in niitawahsi came through the arrival of redcoat wearing North West Mounted Police men in the 1870s. Although the decisions of distant empires had effected Blackfoot, Tsuut’ina, Iyarhe Nakoda, and Métis lives long before then, the NWMP directly facilitated and contributed to colonizing niitawahsi as they erected forts with the intention of coaxing permanent settlement and securing this land for Canada.

Nation Building

Canada entered into confederation in 1867. Though the decision of white, male, political leaders in eastern Canada would not have an immediate effect on niitawahsi, the mission set forth to achieve a sea-to-sea nation would forever alter this place. Much like the intentional push to understand Fort Calgary in the context of global empires, it is critical to understand that Confederation did not happen in a vacuum. Recent studies place the creation of Canada in a hemispheric context that situates Confederation with Latin American political changes in addition to as a reaction to the American Civil War and period of rapid expansion that followed its 1865 conclusion.10 The British Empire’s contraction matched with the American passion for manifest destiny pushed Canadian political leaders to opt “for a model of layered sovereignty that fell well short of full independence and which involved Canada’s continued membership in the British Empire.”11

This “layered sovereignty” approach meant that Canada had to position itself as a contender with the United States to settle the lands west of Manitoba and east of the Rockies – niitawahsi included; though the territory was considered part of the new Canadian confederation, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald was aware that without settlement, industry, and putting the land “to use,” the new country was in danger of losing it. Macdonald laid out a National Plan that had three main tenets: tariffs,

9 Traders with the Hudson’s Bay Company like Anthony Henday (1754 - 1755), David Thompson (1787 – 1788; 1800 - 1801), Peter Fiddler (1792 - 1793), John Harriot (1822), Francis Heron (1822), Hugh Munro (1823), and Henry Fisher (1824 – 1825) each spent time with Blackfoot peoples facilitating trades and building economic relationships. Lawrence H. Bussard, “Early history of Calgary” (M.A. diss., University of Alberta, 1935), 4 – 6 http://peel.library.ualberta.ca/bibliography/5853/5.html; Richard James Green. The Architectural and Interpretive Histories of Fort Calgary and the Calgary N.W.M.P. Barracks :1875- 1914, Volume One, N.W.M.P Building of Fort Calgary 1875-1914. Binder, 1992, page 5; .E.A. Macleod, “Old Bow Fort,” (The Canadian Historical Review 12(4), 1931), 410; Richard James Green, The Architectural and Interpretive Histories of Fort Calgary and the Calgary N.W.M.P. Barracks :1875-1914, 5. On the matter of Fort La Jonquiere: Ryan Hall, Beneath the Backbone of the World: Blackfoot People and the North American Borderlands, 1720 – 1877 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020): 40. Hall states that Fort La Jonquiere was part of La Verendrye’s trading posts “between the Lake of the Woods and the lower Saskatchewan River,” placing it “near the juncture of the North and South Saskatchewan Rivers.” Verendrye’s posts were primarily sites of exchange with Cree peoples, though there is evidence of “ayahciyiniwaks – a Cree word for strangers they typically applied to Blackfoot or Gros Ventre people” visiting in 1751. 10 Jewel L. Spangler and Frank Towers, eds., Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020). 11 Andrew Smith, “Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly: Why Canada Chose a Unique Model of Sovereignty in the 1860s,” in Spangler and Towers, Remaking North American Sovereignty, 37.

5 transcontinental railway, settlers. High tariffs on American-made manufactured goods was intended to support fledgling industries in eastern Canada (specifically Toronto area and Montreal). Once the West was settled, it was to be a resource-producing hinterland that fuelled production and distribution in eastern Canada. This dovetails into the other two pieces of the policy. A transcontinental railway linking Vancouver and Eastern Canada and a generous immigration strategy that cut land into parcels to be provided to settlers without charge if they agreed to “improve” the land within three years. To achieve the National Policy’s goals, Macdonald initiated treaty

Fort Calgary provides an entry point to understanding moving geographies and competing, dynamic world views. The structure and its inhabitants were replicating an Anglo-Canadian, narrow vision of order in niitawahsi, which (as demonstrated in the empire section) already had its own civilizations and orders. The National Policy’s tenets meet at Fort Calgary. Unlike earlier trading posts, it was not a site of collaboration and exchange; it was a site of dominance and enforcement. As a home for the NWMP paramilitary national police force, Fort Calgary would assure potential settlers that niitawahsi had been brought under control, it was safe for them to come to Calgary, Northwest Territories. The NWMP presence in what is now southern Alberta did push out whisky traders and wolfers, which many First Nations peoples here had wanted. But Canada’s presence brought more than policing these intruders. In 1876, in the middle of the Numbered Treaties process, the federal government passed the Indian Act that embedded cultural genocide and structural racism. Though the treaties were signed with the British Crown (again, calling to the “layered sovereignty” system), the Indian Act defined the relationship between the federal government and Status Indians with the ultimate goal of eliminating this “special” status or eliminating the people to which it applied. Trade policies that led to overhunting of bison combined with federal policies that withheld food were used as a negotiating tactic. The NWMP dealt provisions from just outside its barriers, softening the relationship between these officers and local First Nations. By the time treaty negotiations negam in 1877, there were some who advocated for better treatment or conditions for First Nations signatories, but their voices were not often stronger than those of the Crown or the State.

By 1878, policies and police presence seemingly assured that this was niitawahsi no more; Canada had arrived in Calgary. Settlers began to arrive and, in 1883, so did the Canadian Pacific Railway. This marked the completion of the National Policy – the land had been “emptied” through treaties, settlers could come via rail to their new homeland, and rail would bring raw materials out of the West for processing and sale in the East.

Fort Calgary is tied to the Canadian experiment, and this relationship will need more research and exploration. It is incumbent upon Fort Calgary researchers, exhibition writers, and programmers to disrupt the notion that with the establishment of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, niitawahsi was replaced. We know this not to be true and will co-create and collaborate to present the period from 1875 to present day with greater complexity. Allison Graham provides a broad overview of the political and economic historiography of nation building and nationalism; Troy Patenaude complements this work in his examination of the many implications of the CPR’s 1883 arrival.

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Policing

This site was forever changed when, in 1875, it was selected to be the home of a fort for the North West Mounted Police.12 Though it operated as a fort for fewer than 40 years, its presence both physically and conceptually altered this territory’s landscape. Policing as a category of analysis situates the actions executed at or based out of Fort Calgary in a regional, national, and international context. Considering policing as a subject also supports explorations of power and concepts relating to creating/replicating social structures here. Commissioned officers had magisterial power, meaning they were able to act as judge and jury for those they arrested, blurring the lines of due process and further entrenching a singular vision of justice in the West.13 NWMP members also enforced the US/Canada border, provided services to settlers, delivered mail, and could be considered as “agents of the National Policy.”14 We know of four men who were hanged at Fort Calgary between 1884 and 1914.15 Additionally, the Fort policed the growing city of Calgary until it closed in 1914.

The events of summer 2020 have brought policing to the forefront of social and political discussions, but scholars and community members have been critical of police forces such as the RCMP since their founding. RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki has admitted that the RCMP, like other institutions, suffers from systemic racism, and it is important that Fort Calgary programs and exhibitions look at the roots of the current situation. Histories of the NWMP are difficult to assess because the force was quickly enmeshed as national symbols of virtue for young Canada. In the 1920s and 1930s, we see histories that venerate the force for taming the West. In the 1960s, that sentiment is elevated to be an integral part of Canada’s centennial celebration. However, in the 1970s, contemporary critiques about how the RCMP operated and accusations of surveillance and extra-judicial justice emerged. In 1971, Ken Liddell wrote an opinion piece for the Calgary Herald that shows how the RCMP’s reputation as a force for good was leveraged to sweep away contemporary issues:

the mounted police not only brought law and order to the plains, but also paved the way for the building of the Canadian pacific and settlement… the scarlet tunic became a respected symbol of the men who so gallantly upheld the motto Maintiens le Driot (maintain the right). They have continued in their faithfulness to that motto throughout the years. If the years have brought changes that require them to perform duties distasteful to the public (and often the Mounties themselves) it is no fault of the force. 16

In her research, Allison Graham situates policing as a power structure and specifies that the NWMP’s presence in what is now Alberta was part of the process of Canada asserting its authority in this place. She also addresses the popular concept that the NWMP brought “peace, order, and good government” here, adding that many histories of the NWMP/RCMP define the force as “improving” the

12 Using passive voice here should not be interpreted as the placement of this fort not being intentional. The federal government created the NWMP in response to what it saw as “uprisings” and the force was sent West to establish Canadian order in a place that already had its own systems. The creation of the NWMP, establishment of forts, and building of Fort Calgary in this place was done deliberately to construct both politically and literally the Canadian state in the West. 13 Amanda Nettelbeck and Russell Smandych, “Policing Indigenous Peoples on Two Colonial Frontiers: Australia’s Mounted Police and Canada’s North-West Mounted Police,” in The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 43 (2), 2010: 360. 14 L. Campbell, T. McCoy, and M. Methot, Canada’s Legal Pasts: Looking Forward, Looking Back (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2020): 188. 15 Jess Williams (1884), Ernest Cashel (1904), John Fisk (1911), and William Jasper Collins (1914); http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/hanged/others.html. 16 Ken Liddell, “Could they sound Reveille for a new age?” in the Calgary Herald (6 March, 1971):5.

7 people and land here and having the moral authority to import a new worldview. Graham rightly points out that the Fort’s programs and exhibitions should engage and critically examine the popular and historical understandings of the RCMP and policing in this territory. The early Fort policed settlers as well as Indigenous peoples and installed a legal system that provided the foundation for colonialism to take root in Mohkinstiss, Wîchîspa, Guts’ists’i, Calgary. Analyzing and contextualizing these roots will inform Fort Calgary’s programs and exhibitions. More research is needed with primary documents to better understand the NWMP’s actions in Calgary after their arrival. To read Allison’s full essay, click here.

Gender

Gender expressions, ideologies, and constructions are useful ways to understand the complex lived histories of this place as well as the constructs imported here in service of instilling a Canadian order. Historians have used gender as a category of analysis since the early 1970s to deconstruct the different experiences of men and women and the structures that implicitly and explicitly formalized these differences. It should be noted that most gender history has focused on cis men and women, and in the initial knowledge landscape knowledge sweep that was also the focus. However, future work will delve further into gender fluidity and conceptualizations of gender as understood in different cultures.

One way of gaining insight into the past is understanding gender ideals and the larger structures those ideals supported. Allison Graham reviewed literature and assessed the intersectionality of gender and nineteenth century imperialism as one way to follow the roots of gender expressions at Fort Calgary. Gender and policing intersect, as she points out, because NWMP men – especially officers – were supposed to demonstrate ideal British masculinity while in this outpost. Additionally, their wives and children were held to the same expectations as they imported a settler model of family relationships. Exploring these models and contrasting them with primary sources that show the ways lived experience diverged from the ideals will provide future Fort Calgary programming and exhibitions a different lens through which to examine the Fort’s role in importing Canadian culture to this place.

Future research in this area will speak to traditional gender ideas in the Blackfoot, Tsuut’ina, and Iaryhe Nakoda worldviews, conceptualizations of family as well as childhood, fatherhood, and motherhood, in addition to the ways that Calgary as a gathering place for settlers from around the world affected and altered gender concepts over time. Gender intersects with many other concepts and categories of analysis, so while work specifically on gender will continue, it will always be a factor in assessing the past at Fort Calgary. For Allison Graham’s initial literature review of gender and nineteenth century imperialism, click here.

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WRITINGS BY TROY PATENAUDE AND ALLISON GRAHAM

THE ENVIRONMENT

Troy Patenaude

Daisies and the Picturesque Frontier

Daisies (Oxeye Daisies), are now a part of the environment in southern Alberta, and for many people are a beautiful wildflower. They are also non-native (arriving here relatively recently from Europe), which, despite their beauty, also introduces foreign influence over life and processes here that cause imbalances. For example, some native grazing animals avoid them, effectively decreasing the available forage within the safety of open meadows. Moreover, those native grazers that have taken to eating it can get tainted milk, and ecologically, daisies “decrease plant diversity and increase the amount of bare soil in an area.”17 Similar imbalances occur socially when foreign influences enter into a region and introduce new ways of understanding history, governance, praying, and relating to the land. In the above section, Niitawahsi: Blackfoot Territory, we saw how the Blackfoot way of life has unfurled in dynamic, circular ways with the land here since time immemorial. This has also animated a certain way of understanding history. In the early 1870s, however, with the coming of the missionaries and North West Mounted Police (NWMP) to the region, foreign processes, behaviours, and understandings began to introduce imbalances that now have to be attended to when relating to the land and telling history here.

The most thorough account of the kind of relationship to the land that would have been imported to southern Alberta in the early 1870s is David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.18 It is a deeply philosophical read, which can sometimes be dense, but this is also levelled out by a poetic thread that attempts to perform what the book says while saying it. Abram discusses the roots of European relationships to the land and some of their expressions and consequences today. The crux of his argument is that European ways of relating to the land are based on the illusion of separation between humans and the more-than-human world. This is traced back to the transition of human societies from oral language to written language using the alphabet. In this transition, for Abram, the ultimate referent or animator of language shifted from the more-than- human world of invisible winds, eroded rock, bird calls, and the human senses needed to relate to these things, to the individual human mind now emphasized in the decoding of abstract lines on separate page. Abram demonstrates how this shift from holistic, embodied life to privileged, separate human mind can account for, to name just three things, the duality and human-nature separation inherent in Judeo-Christian religions, European scientific and technological thought, and even the European approach to history. Abram’s arguments also reverberate in more disciplinary ways through, for example, the groundbreaking work of Tim Ingold in anthropology, Nancy Turner in Canadian ethno- botany, and Karim-Aly Kassam in Canadian human ecology. 19

17 Alberta Invasive Species Council. 2014. “Oxeye Daisy.” Last modified January 2014. https://abinvasives.ca/wp- content/uploads/2017/11/FS-OxeyeDaisy.pdf. 18 David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage), 1996. 19 Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London and New York: Routledge), 2000; Nancy Turner, The Earth’s Blanket: Traditional Teachings for Sustainable Living (Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre), 2005; Karim-Aly Kassam, Biocultural Diversity and Indigenous Ways of Knowing: Human Ecology in the Arctic (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009).

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With regard to history, the privileging of time over space in written language, as demonstrated by Abram, is a way that European thought and language reinforce the illusion of human-nature separation, effectively disempowering and devaluing Indigenous expressions of connectivity and belonging.20 This is an important consideration when thinking about the approach Fort Calgary takes to history because many of the Eurocentric markers identified by Abram are easy to repeat, even unintentionally, within our colonial society. This is not to say that writers—whether of history or society—who take this Eurocentric approach are wrong or bad. Rather, it is to point out that other approaches to history need also to be accounted for, in order for a rebalancing against foreign influences to be able to occur here. What makes this particularly difficult sometimes is that thinkers can apply Eurocentric understandings in projects about relating to the land better, even though these methods may inherently maintain a separation from it. The extreme consequence of this can be seen in the failures of environmental resistance movements. In the words of environmental theorist Peter Quigley, these can be ineffective because “traditional and contemporary postures of ecological resistance share too many features with the power structure they wish to oppose.”21 Similarly, when historians discuss the history of places—however revisionist, culturally sensitive, and pluralistic they are—the effect of their story may ultimately be limited, or at worst, even harmful. Below is a review of some of the Eurocentric approaches to this place and its history, not to point a finger, but so that later on we are better informed when exploring ways to reconcile this within Niitawahsi.

Some of the earliest expressions of a Eurocentric human-nature separation enter southern Alberta with artists or travelling sketchers. Henry James Warre, Paul Kane, and Pierre-Jean De Smet, as well as William Hind in 1862 and Henri Julien in 1874, all sketched scenes while on journeys across the mountains and prairies (Julien with the NWMP), in what is now south-central Alberta.22 They sketch the land, but their expressions also harbour a Eurocentric separation from it, also making it exploitable, conquerable, and ownable. This is inherent in the landscape painting genre, and the popular aesthetic thoughts of the time concerning the sublime, the beautiful, and the picturesque.23 For Gilpin, the picturesque is an agreeable form of beauty, in between “the sublime” (fear based), and “the beautiful” (highly ordered and regular), that does not exist independently in nature, but primarily in its mental perception by the viewer. This is how the separation between humans and the land—European minds and bodily sensation—manifested in years leading to the formation of Canada. Cultural memories and ideas like Burke’s and Gilpin’s inform European landscape painting and relations to the land.24 These were then imported to what is now Canada with far-reaching social consequences. Euro-Canadian artists could not help but teach Canadians to see the land as separate and exploitable, or as the foundation of a Eurocentric, White idea of nationhood, that did not include Indigenous peoples.25

20 Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 181-223. 21 Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 173. 22 Henry James Ware, Sketches in North America and the Oregon Territory (London: Dickinson & Co., 1848); Paul Kane, Wanderings of an Artist Among the Indians of North America (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859); Pierre-Jean De Smet, Life, Letters, and Travels of Father Pierre-Jean de Smet, 1801-1873 (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1905). 23 WJT Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757); William Gilpin, An Essay Upon Prints (London: J. Robson, 1768). 24 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995). 25 Marilyn McKay, Picturing the Land: Narrating Territories in Canadian Landscape Art, 1500 to 1950 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Pres, 2011); Jonathan Bordo, “Jack Pine—Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape.” Journal of Canadian Studies 27:4 (winter 1992-1993): 98-108, 125-6; Scott Watson, “Race,

10

It is these ideological underpinnings about the human-land relationship that make possible, for example, the Palliser Expedition’s scientific and geological pronouncements about infertile, semiarid soil in the middle of the prairies, or Cecil Denny’s description upon arriving at the confluence of the Bow and Elbow Rivers in 1875:

The view from the hill on the north side of the Bow…amazed us. Before us lay a lovely valley, flanked on the south by rolling hills. Thick woods bordered the banks of both streams; to the west towered mountains with their snowy peaks; beyond the Elbow, farther west along the Bow, stretched another wide, heavily timbered valley. Buffalo in large bands grazed in the valleys, but of man we saw no sign.26 He could be describing a British landscape painting. It is also these ideological underpinnings that make possible the belief that a “portion of the territory…[lying] at the south-west angle of the [north-west] territories, north of the boundary line, east of the Rocky Mountains, south of Red [Deer] River…and west of the Cypress Hills” can be “surrendered” in a treaty.27

It is also these ideological underpinnings that make possible the discussions of a place through a time-oriented approach, rather than a space-oriented one. It does not matter what academic discipline one is working in; a time-oriented approach to history inherently privileges European relationships to the land, and marginalizes Indigenous ones. This is true of archeology in southern Alberta, biography in southern Alberta—privileging individual human minds, and environmental or social history in southern Alberta.28 This is not to say, once again, that these are wrong or bad approaches. It is only to invite the consideration that on their own, like daisies, they risk decreasing knowledge diversity about this place because they promote a disembodied intellectual knowing of more-or-less homogenous space instead of a dynamic, non-linear, sensuous, animate, and vividly awake ground cover, however beautiful or informative they are.

Since at least the 1970s, writers like Ray, Friesen, Dempsey, Binnema, or Brink and Oetelaar — with regard to a more place-oriented archeologies—have indeed brought a lot of important, revisionist awareness to understandings of history and human-land relations for non-Indigenous people in Canada.29 They may indeed represent the most beautiful aspect of a foreign historical daisy. It is also true, however, as art historian Charlotte Townsend-Gault has reminded us, there is “power contained in knowing,” and “the knowledge which First Nations people hold about themselves and their cultures has been obscured for too long by another kind of knowledge constructed about Indians by others.”30 She

Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of Modern Canadian Landscape Painting.” Semiotext(e) 17 (1994): 96-104; Leslie Dawn, National Visions, National Blindness: Canadian Art and Identities in the 1920s (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006). 26 Cecil Denny, Denny’s Trek: A Mountie’s Memoir of the March West (Surrey, BC: Heritage House, 2004), 93. 27 Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories (Toronto: Belfords, Clarke & Co., 1880), 245. 28 Liz Bryan, The Buffalo People: Pre-contact Archeology on the Canadian Plains (Surrey, BC: Heritage House, 2005); Hugh Dempsey, Crowfoot: Chief of the Blackfoot (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1972); Hugh Dempsey, Red Crow: Warrior Chief (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980); Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1987); Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001). 29 Jack W. Brink, Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains (Edmonton: AU Press, 2008); Gerald A. Oetelaar and D. Joy Oetelaar, “People, Places and Paths: The Cypress Hills and the Niitsitapi Landscape of Southern Alberta.” Plains Anthropologist 51:199 (2016): 375-97. 30 Charlotte Townsend-Gault, “Kinds of Knowing.” In Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery, eds. Diana Nemiroff, Robert Houle, and Charlotte Townsend-Gault (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1992).

11 argues that non-Indigenous historians and people must acknowledge in their work “a final untranslatability of certain concepts and subtleties from one culture to another.”31 Most non-Indigenous historians would likely agree, but in practice, this is easier said and understood than done. This is why Indigenous writers, or writers working closely with Indigenous people on Indigenous-led projects, are continually having to iterate again and again things like: “to benefit from this collection of teachings it is necessary to suspend the Euro concept of history; the Euro reckoning of time, and the standardization of the importance of events.”32 It is good to remember that the non-Indigenous approaches to the land and history concerning Fort Calgary mentioned above, are very new here. Even when they claim to know about something here 10,000 years ago, this is new in this “lake of time”—Niitawahsi.

The environmental movement is multifarious and often broken down into three waves, each containing diverse approaches and debates. The First Wave is characterised by the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century developments around conservationist and preservationist theories. The Second Wave by twentieth-century developments related to citizen activism, legal action, and sweeping legislation. The Third by late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century considerations for an environmentalism that also accounts for socio-economic needs and collaboration. Some commentators have suggested that a Fourth Wave may also be upon us, characterized by technological and communicative advances that allow for new widespread and large scale solutions and collaborations outside the political arena.

These waves are infused with ecological thought and representations that spread through Europe in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.33 The word ecology was coined by Ernst Haekel in 1866, in order to signal a new branch of scientific study devoted to relations between organisms and environments. There is a scientific side to the concept. This is expressed in taxonomic and bio-chemical works ranging from Carolus Linnaeus’s The Oeconomy of Nature, through Jean-Baptiste Dumas’s Essai de statique chimique des êtres organisés, Justus Liebig’s Familiar Letters on Chemistry, and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.34 There is also a socio-political side to the concept. This is expressed in philosophical and political works ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract, through Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.35 The latter works coincide with political actions to preserve tracts of land and/or histories associated with them, such as the Forest of Fontainebleau in 1852-53; Yellowstone National Park in 1872; the Cave and Basin Hot Springs reserve in 1885 (now Banff National Park); Fort Lennox historic park, Quebec, in 1890; and the Quebec Battlefields Commission, to preserve the site of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, in 1907.36

31 Townsend-Gault, “Kinds of Knowing.” 32 Paul M. Raczka, A Blackfoot History: The Winter Counts: Sikaitapi Itsinniiki: Telling the Old Stories (Choteau, Montana: Blackfoot Books, 2017), 1. 33 Jean-Paul Deléage, Histoire de l’écologie: Une Science de L’homme et de la Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 2nd edition). 34 Carolus Linnaeus, The Oeconomy of Nature (Stockholm: Isacus J. Biberg, 1749); Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, 1844. Essai de statique chimique des êtres organisés (Paris: Fortin, Masson, 1884 3rd Edition); Justus Liebig, Familiar Letters on Chemistry (London: Taylor and Walton, 1844); On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859). 35 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (Amsterdam: Marc-Michel Rey, 1762); Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (London: T. Bensley, 1789); Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (Boston: James Munroe and Company, 1836); Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854). 36 David Pepper, The Roots of Modern Environmentalism (London: Routledge, 1989).

12

The scientific and political sides of ecology are further complicated by the concept’s injection of ambiguous relationships between ecological science and romanticism on one hand, and environmental politics and capitalism on the other. When the world is viewed like a continual and unified production of God, an emptying of that unified presence by science, industry and exploitation leads to feelings of loss and searches for communion. Romanticism expresses the disjunction between an infinite nature and finite human bodies. …connection of romanticism to linear understandings of history and nostalgia for a distant, disappearing past - linkages to Canada’s perception and treatment of Indigenous peoples.

13

EMPIRE AND COLONIALISM

Troy Patenaude:

Niitawahsi: Blackfoot Territory

Through decades of visiting, living, working, and traveling with many gifted Indigenous ceremonialists and storytellers, a common sentiment about navigating through complex sets of knowledge has been that “the best place to start is at the beginning.” My Western-trained mind has often retorted in silence to this, thinking things like: “well, that’s kind of impossible—the beginning is arbitrary,” or “how far back do you really need to go?" Then one day I went on a walk with a Choctaw/Cherokee teacher of mine while he was visiting me in the mountains. In our conversation he said:

Some people think that by looking at the different parts of a flower—noticing the ways they work together and how each grows, right back to that first cell—they know the flower. They don’t really know it though. To really know it you have to know about everything that went into it all the way back to the creation of the sun, and then even further.37 As any good story does, this one has resurfaced in my mind with new insights and meanings to build on and guide in new situations. I see now that my teacher was not just talking directly about how to “know” a flower. He was also teaching me about a different way to relate to it in fullness, and how this is interwoven with a different way of understanding history and time altogether.

For him, following the line of events back to the creation of the sun is not just a metaphor. It is a matter of fact and possible. What tries to sabotage this possibility for me is the Eurocentric training conditioning me to think that time and history is a linear thing; that to trace something back to the sun’s creation would take lifetimes. It would involve an impossible, abstract intellectual project spanning events and occurrences billions of years away from me. For my teacher, time is not linear. It is not separable from the circularity of life that is always unfolding right around him—the rise and fall of the sun; the cycling of seasons; the abiding return of the greening earth. In this way, humans are always in all of time in any given place. Our bodies and senses are just as important as our minds as guides. Any changes noticed are parts of larger cycles, but the organizing principle of “history” is spatial, not temporal. I have heard Indigenous commentators talk about this with an analogy: “time” and “history” in European worldviews is more like a river; in many Indigenous worldviews it is like a lake.

In the former, you step into the “river of time” at your birth, are carried forth by it for a time, and then leave it at death. The parts of the river behind you are “the past,” those ahead are “the future,” and the present is where you are. Your movement through life feels like a linear progression, getting ever further away from distant parts of the river that, as such, have increasingly less influence on your present and future as time goes on. In the latter, you are born from the lake, and all of its cycles, lives, deaths, currents, depths, and participants (past, present, and future), are with you, influencing you and your world more or less immediately all the time. Your presence also always has the chance to reciprocally influence them—those seen and unseen—in a continual, dynamic process of inter- participation. You might not see everything in the depths, but you feel its coldness on your toes. You

37 Sequoyah Trueblood, personal communication to Troy Patenaude.

14 might not see everything on the surface across the lake, but it sends ripples that envelope you too, as your actions do to it.

When the early settler-colonial explorers, missionaries, and the North West Mounted Police passed westerly by the tree-covered and sandy hills in the middle of the shortgrass plains, or crossed south over the rivers flowing from the north-central Rocky Mountains, they entered a “lake of time” like that above and did not know it. Those of us here today, in these places now more-often referred to as “Calgary,” “Cypress Hills,” “Red Deer,” “Great Falls,” or “Drumheller” are still in this same "lake of time,” and likely do not know it. We may think that history happens here like a river, but if this feels like the case, it may only be because we are not used to, or ready yet, to see how all rivers in this place either begin or end in “the lake.” The analogy here is to Blackfoot territory. This area of land, water, rock, sky, and all its entities, seen and unseen, ranges from the North Saskatchewan River (between the Rockies, passed Edmonton, to near Saskatoon), down the centre of Saskatchewan passed the Cypress Hills, to the Yellowstone River in Montana, and up through the Rocky Mountains again. It continues to dynamically unfold, cycle, repeat, and return through generations of Blackfoot land-human relationships, stories, songs, ceremonies, and ways of life, just as it has since the beginning.

Blackfoot scholars like Leroy Little Bear have broadened the linear quality of Eurocentric time and “history,” in attempts to restore the spatial orientation of Blackfoot time to this place.38 Blackfoot territory is so deeply interwoven with Blackfoot ways of knowing and identity that it is a topic Little Bear returns to throughout his career. He talks about it again with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples; again for a collected edition of international viewpoints on the importance of land to Indigenous beliefs, values, and identities; and again at a conference about Indigeneity in the twenty-first century.39 In a collected edition about restoring and reclaiming Indigenous thought and practices within mainstream colonial processes around the world, Little Bear again illustrates how Blackfoot understandings of time are bound up in Blackfoot identity and relationships with the land. He states:

If everything is constantly moving and changing, then one has to look at the whole to begin to see patterns. For instance, the cosmic cycles are in constant motion, but they have regular patterns that result in recurrences such as the seasons of the year, the migration of the animals, renewal ceremonies, songs, and stories…It results in a concept of time that is dynamic but without motion. Time is part of the constant flux but goes nowhere. Time just is….All of the above leads one to articulate Aboriginal philosophy as being holistic and cyclical or repetitive, generalist, process-oriented, and firmly grounded in a particular place.40

This “particular place,” for Little Bear and other Blackfoot people, is called Niitawahsi (the Blackfoot name for this territory). It is described in a detailed and accessible way by The Blackfoot Gallery Committee. They say: “in order to understand who we are, it is first necessary to understand the

38 Leroy Little Bear, “Concept of Native Title.” Canadian Legal Aid Bulletin 5: 99-105. 39 Leroy Little Bear, “Aboriginal Relationships to Land and Resources.” in Sacred Lands: Aboriginal World Views, Claims, and Conflicts, ed. Jill Oakes et al (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1998); Leroy Little Bear, “Land: The Blackfoot Source of Identity.” Paper presented at Beyond Race and Citizenship: Indigeneity in the 21st Century. University of California, Berkeley, October 28–30, 2004. 40 Leroy Little Bear, “Jagged Worldviews Colliding.” in Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, ed. Marie Battiste (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000), 78.

15 world around us.”41 The Committee’s book also introduces aspects of Blackfoot ways of life in this place, and how close relationships with all of creation here get reaffirmed in stories still told to this day: “these teachings show us how to live and explain our relationship with the other beings in Creation…Each of the stories happened at a specific place in our traditional territory.”42 These stories are traditionally passed on orally, and as Little Bear mentioned, the patterns of life in this place are also renewed in ceremonies and songs. It is most powerful to hear and experience these stories and teachings in these ways. Storytelling encounters and ceremonies bring this territory and all its “history” to life in a dynamic, participatory, life-giving way that is impossible to achieve through writing. Nevertheless, many stories grounded in the Blackfoot relationship to Niitawahsi have been gathered in writing as well.

One of the most comprehensive collections of stories like this, as told by a Blackfoot person, is Percy Bullchild’s The Sun Came Down: The History of the World as My Blackfeet Elders Told It.43 Stories demonstrating close connections between the Blackfoot and other beings here like the sun and moon, the bison, the beavers, the bull berries, the woodpeckers, and the places where many of these things happened are shared with great generosity and confidence. The lived experiences of many Blackfoot elders are also compiled in various places, complementing Bullchild’s stories with personal accounts of learning, transformation, and renewal. Some talk about their memories of listening to the old people when they were young.44 Some discuss their struggles with effects of colonization, and their ability to overcome overwhelming odds and return home to, or find strength and healing in, Blackfoot ways of life.45 Others talk about how they have devoted their lives to maintaining and ensuring wisdom like Bullchild’s—and the ceremonies, songs, and teachings animating it—stay alive.46

Blackfoot writers and visionaries have also shared teachings rooted in their relationship to this land, in order to help others live here better together too. Some demonstrate how reclaiming Blackfoot ways of life and knowing in this place are integral to the healing and rebuilding of Blackfoot communities.47 Beverly Hungry Wolf, Betty Bastien, and Ryan Crosschild discuss the importance of Blackfoot land-based teachings and ways of life in restoring gender balance for the wellbeing of Blackfoot women, queer people, and nations.48 Others have allowed stories rooted in relationships to this place to breathe in new ways—graphic novels, young adult fiction, children’s books, and language helpers. They draw inspiration from Niitawahsi and the stories passed to them, like their ancestors before, in order to continue showing Blackfoot people how to live here well as Blackfoot people today, and with other beings in creation here now too.49 However the Blackfoot relationship to this land has

41 Blackfoot Gallery Committee, The Story of the Blackfoot People: Niitsitapiisinni (Calgary: Glenbow Museum, 2013), 16. 42 Blackfoot Gallery Committee, The Story of the Blackfoot People, 18. 43 Percy Bullchild, The Sun Came Down: The History of the World as My Blackfeet Elders Told It (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985). 44 Diane Meili, Those Who Know: Profiles of Alberta’s Aboriginal Elders (Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1991), 50-58. 45 Meili, Those Who Know, 6-17; Arthur Bear Chief, My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell (Edmonton: AU Press, 2016). 46 Meili, Those Who Know, 378-91 47 Betty Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing: The Worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004). 48 Beverly Hungry Wolf, The Ways of My Grandmothers (New York: William Morow and Company, 1980); Beverly Hungry Wolf, “Life in Harmony with Nature,” in Christine Miller and Patricia Churchryk, eds., Women of the First Nations: Power, Wisdom, and Strength (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1996), 77-81; Betty Bastien, “Voices through Time,” in Miller and Churchryk, Women of the First Nations, 127-129; Ryan Crosschild, “Smudging the Cystem; Rejecting the Politics of Traditionalism and Settler-Homonationalism,” MA Thesis, University of Calgary, 2019. 49 Saa’kokoto and Mitchell Poundmaker, Ponookomita: A Blackfoot Graphic Novel (Calgary: Urban Society for Aboriginal Youth, 2016); Saa’kokoto and Mitchell Poundmaker, The Children Who Were Left Behind: A Blackfoot Graphic Novel (Calgary: Urban Society for Aboriginal Youth, 2017); Saa’kokoto and Mitchell Poundmaker, Aakapoap: We’re Going on a Trip: A Blackfoot

16 cycled, unfurled, and renewed, one thing is certain: this is still going on, enfolding all of creation here in the dynamic flux of this ever-unfolding place, just as it has always done since the beginning.

Allison Graham:

Empire and Fort Calgary

Although there does not seem to be literature specifically on Fort Calgary and empire, the Fort was a product and symbol of that imperial project; the NWMP, the CPR, and the other institutions that developed on the Fort’s site can all be connected to British imperialism, even though the historiography of Western Canada has only recently examined expansion and colonialism in this broader, imperial framework.

Victorian Imperialism and Western Canada

The historiography of Victorian Imperialism began as a celebratory late-19th C project aimed at defending the British Empire. More recent studies still focus largely on the thoughts and whims of white male imperialists (government officials, travel writers etc), but historians of the early-mid 2000’s seem at least somewhat more critical than their 19th C counterparts. In the introduction to his sweeping collection, The Victorian World, Martin Hewitt points to some of the defining characteristics of a Victorian age, and how those evolved from the start of the period in the 1830s to the Queen Victoria’s death in 1901. He argues that during the mid-Victorian period, the 1850s, “consciousness of empire steadily deepened,” suggesting that “versions of a common British culture were reformulated and reproduced in both settler and non-settler colonies.”50 The railway, he argues, was an essential defining factor of the Victorian age, one that also defined Victorian imperialism. He explains that “the strengthening of imperial and global perspectives was facilitated by the technological revolution in global communications achieved in the 1850s, as the age of railways spread to Britain’s colonies in North American and India, and opened out into the more general age of steam.”51 Only briefly mentioning Canada, Hewitt argues that Confederation in 1867 was perceived as “strengthening British global power and empire.”52

Hewitt certainly seems to echo imperialists themselves, depicting a story of progress as the British world expanded over the course of the 19th C. To counter this interpretation, a good deal of work has been done to explore racism in the context of the British empire, and how Late-Victorian imperialism has been “characterized by a deep sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority and the supposed inevitability of progress and civilization defined in terms of their imperial expansion.”53 The ‘civilizing

Graphic Novel (Calgary: Urban Society for Aboriginal Youth, 2018); Jason Eaglespeaker, NAPI—The Trixster: A Blackfoot Graphic Novel (Standoff, AB: Eaglespeaker Publishing, 2016); Jason Eaglespeaker, Napi – Level 3 Series (Standoff, AB: Eaglespeaker Publishing, 2017); Gitz Crazyboy, The Secret of the Stars (Standoff, AB: The Connection/ Eaglespeaker Publishing, 2017); Ikkináínihki Lena Heavy Shields Russell and Piitáákii Inge Genee, Ákaitsinikssiistsi: Blackfoot Stories of Old (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2014); Martin Whittles and Tim Patterson, “Nápi and the City: Siksikaitsitapi Narratives Revisted,” in Annis May Timpson ed., First Nations, First Thoughts: The Impact of Indigenous Thought in Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 97-122; Reg Crowshoe and Sybile Manneschmidt, Akak'stiman: A Blackfoot Framework for Decision-Making and Mediation Processes (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002). 50 Martin Hewitt (ed), The Victorian World, (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 20. 51 Hewitt, The Victorian World, 12. 52 Hewitt, The Victorian World, 29. 53 Graeme Thompson, “Upper Canada’s Empire: Liberalism, Race, and Western Expansion in British North America, 1860s- 1914,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, (2020, 48:1), 48.

17 mission’ used to justify Victorian imperialism, which constructed whiteness as superior and Anglo- Saxons as the leaders of ‘progress,’ revealed how empire was tied to racism and the construction of race-based difference.54

There are a few studies that have begun to situate Western Canada within the broader context of British Victorian Imperialism. Sarah Carter noted over 20 years ago, Western Canadian historians must “not only […] study the local, but to see how this fits into larger patterns of colonialism and empire.”55 She continued to explain that in the 1850s, as a Victorian empire was seemingly consolidated in the eyes of the British, there was a growing expansionist movement in Canada of those “who were convinced that acquisition of these territories [Northwest] was vital to the future prosperity of Canada and the British Empire.”56 Here, she conflates Canadian with British imperial interests, identifying a “moral imperative” among Canadians to acculturate Indigenous peoples of the West to a “superior way of life.”57

British Columbia has, by and large, received more historical attention when it comes to analyzing Western Canada and empire. In particular, Adele Perry echoed Carter’s call that 19th C white settlers were “using the language of imperialism: they were a civilized and white people surrounded by savage Indians in an empty and undeveloped place that could be transformed into an exemplary British colony.”58 However, she reminds her readers that British Columbia, like most British colonies, “is hardly an example of imperialism’s unmitigated success,” and points to the disconnect between the “high- minded ideals” of empire and how empire was “practically enforced.”59 This tension could be more thoroughly explored in the context of Fort Calgary, as placing Fort Calgary within the narrative of empire while still qualifying the extent to which empire could be “practically enforced” will be important for the site.

There have been more recent efforts to examine the history of western expansion in the prairies as part of a Victorian-British imperial project. Francis and Kitzan’s collection, The Prairie West as Promised Land, reveals some of these efforts, exploring how British and Canadian expansionists portrayed the prairies as a paradise, a tabula rasa, and the setting for the creation of a perfect society. Both Canadians in the East (present-day Ontario) and Britons articulated these imperial dreams and myths. In their introduction, Francis and Kitzan argue that this vision of imperial expansion also relied on ideas that Canada’s West would be “something different” from the United States: “it was to be a gentler, milder west” that would place “British culture and British law and order above American frontier culture and vigilante rule.”60 In Doug Owram’s contribution, he looks at the mid-19th C “rhetoric of expansionism,” contending that “the West was thus to be settled and civilized within the grand traditions of the British empire.”61 He shows that after early expeditions to the Northwest in 1857 (Hind and Palliser), there was an uptake in British imperialist language used to discuss the prairies, particularly

54 For a good overview (a bit tangential), Patrick Brantlinger, Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011). 55 Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 102. 56 Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, 104. 57 Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, 120 58 Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 194. 59 Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 195. 60 Douglas Francis and Chris Kitzan (eds), The Prairie West as Promised Land, (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007), xiii-xvi. 61 Doug Owram, “The Promise of the West as Settlement Frontier,” (in above, 3-28), 19, 4.

18 portraying the prairies as an idyllic agricultural frontier that was “suitable for settlement.”62 In his older monograph, Owram further argues that after 1870, “the sense of mission contained within Canadian expansionism focused on this idea of developing a society worthy of the British Empire.”63 He also argues that Canadians “inherited” their “approach to the Indian” from the British, following a British rather than American model, which included an “ideal” of Indigenous assimilation that was “paternalistic in approach.”64

British Imperialism vs. Canadian Imperialism vs. Canadian Nationalism

As seen above, scholars like Hewitt view Canada’s mid-19th C history (including Confederation) as part of the British/Victorian imperialist project. However, the distinctions between what is British and what is Canadian during this time become very confusing! Carl Berger is frequently referenced as the leading historian in Canadian imperialism, as his 1970 study, The Sense of Power, explained that there was an evolution from Victorian-British imperialism, to Canadian imperialism, and finally to Canadian Nationalism. He examines the creation of the North-West Emigration Aid Society in Ontario, founded by imperial supporters who “were convinced that the North-West had to be speedily settled in order to make it British in racial character and institutions.”65 However, Berger sees varying interpretations of what imperialism meant in the newly confederated Canada. Some, for example, believed that Canada would become ‘the future centre and dominating portion of the British empire.’”66 England was well past its expiration date for imperial glory, and the heart of the empire would need to shift, ideally to Canada. This sentiment leads Berger to conclude that “imperialism was one form of Canadian nationalism,” an argument that has been shared among other historians.67 Owram, for example, argues that “by the later 1860s, expansionism had become intertwined with nationalism,” despite the remaining connections to British imperialism.68

More recently, Graeme Thompson confirms that Anglo-settler societies such as Canada should be “rediscovered” in the context of British imperial history.69 He argues that “the colonization of the Canadian West should be properly understood as part of a global process whereby frontier territories were imagined as, and incorporated into, what historian James Belich has called the ‘British West’ – the British half of an Anglo-American settler world characterized by the appropriation of Indigenous land, Anglophone-led colonization, the reintergration of the colonies into the metropole’s economic sphere, and a claim to a shared imperial culture and identity, in this case Britishness.”70 He also explains the strand of Liberal political thought that sought to create an “Upper Canadian empire”: “In the province of Ontario, Liberal politicians and intellectuals both staunchly identified with an imperial ‘Britishness’ and

62 Owram, “The Promise of Eden,” 16. Owram provides a quotation from Hind to show imperial language: “the vast ocean of level prairie which lies to the West of Red River must be seen in its extraordinary aspects, before I can be rightly valued and understood in reference to its future occupation by an energetic and civilized race, able to improve on its vast capabilities and appreciate its marvelous beauties’ (18) 63 Doug Owram, Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 126. 64 Owram, Promise of Eden, 132. 65 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867-1914, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 66. 66 Berger, The Sense of Power, 260-61. 67 Berger, The Sense of Power, 259. 68 Owram, “The Promise,” 25. 69 Thompson, “Upper Canada’s Empire,” 40. 70Thompson, “Upper Canada’s Empire,” 46.

19 conceived Canadian nation-building in terms of western expansion of Upper Canada.”71 He further contends that “Ontario would lead the colonization of the great Canadian West” by “implanting Anglo- Saxon settlers and British institutions.” By colonizing the West, an “Anglo-Ontario settler empire” would become equal to that of Britain itself.72 The apparent blurring between British imperialism, Canadian imperialism, and Canadian nationalism makes these topics difficult to clearly separate.

Empire and the NWMP

The NWMP offers a clear example of how we can see colonization in Western Canada as part of the broader story of British imperialism. Most historians recognize the NWMP were less of a civilian police force, and more of a paramilitary group sent to displace Indigenous peoples and prepare the way for white settlement. The red serge is often enough to confirm this military connection, and it was not uncommon for British-colonial police forces in the 19th C to have military undertones. Sarah Carter was one of the first to emphasize their role as a “military, occupying force,” giving the example of their presence at treaty negotiations. She notes that “their function was to assist in expanding British- Canadian influence, without the costs incurred in costly wars of conquest,” but she stops short of actually analyzing the NWMP within any comparative exploration of the other colonial contexts in the British empire.73

Anderson and Killingray’s collection, Policing the Empire, was the “first attempt” to create a “new history of colonial policing” that took a more comparative approach in 1991. Overall, this collection seeks to demonstrate that the “colonial policeman […] stood at the cutting edge of colonial rule” in a variety of British colonial contexts from the 1830s-1940s. They argue that “policing played a vital role in the construction of the colonial social order,” and acted as the “primary ‘instruments of civilization’” in a number of different colonies.74 They also explain how perceptions of “dangerous classes” in Britain translated to the policing of both settlers and Indigenous peoples throughout the empire, creating a connection between policing and morality.75 They mention a few characteristics of British colonial police forces that were based on the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which also line up with the NWMP:76 living in barracks rather than within the community, organized along military lines and therefore distinct from civilians, and being centrally controlled by a national or federal government.77

Canada and the NWMP receive some attention in this collection. William Morrison examines the Mounted Police in the Yukon at the end of the 19th C, arguing that the “establishment of law and order […] shows the strength in Victorian Canada of the ‘British connection’ – that powerful combination of emotional attachment to Britain and her institutions one the one hand, and fear of American expansion

71 Thompson, “Upper Canada’s Empire,” 40. 72 Thompson, “Upper Canada’s Empire,” 41. 73 Carter, Aboriginal People, 128-29. 74 David Anderson and David Killingray (eds), Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830-1940, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 9. 75 Anderson and Killingray, Policing the Empire, 10. 76 In this collection, Richard Hawkins debates the RIC model in “The ‘Irish Model’ and the Empire: A Case for Reassessment” (18- 33) but it seems like he’s playing with semantics re: what “model” means more than anything. For more on police models and the British empire (some mention of NWMP but not a lot) see Clive Emsley’s “Policing the Empire/Policing the Metropole: Some Thoughts on Models and Types,” in Crime, History & Societies, 18:2 (2014). 77 Emsley, “Policing the Empire/Policing the Metropole,” 4.

20 and revulsion against American institutions on the other.”78 He goes further, arguing that the mounted police “equated public order with British law and justice, and disorder with the American system.”79 Morrison seems to be unable to separate his analysis from the romantic narrative of the NWMP (and an apparent love for imperialism), reminiscing that “there was something intangible about these men,” especially men like Same Steele, “who cowed refractory natives or insolent Americans with a word, men who commanded obedience without seeming to try.” He claims the NWMP held such airs because “behind them stood the moral force of the entire empire.”80 Although this argument is super horrible for a historian to make, it reveals potentially more about how the NWMP and the British/Canadian expansionists who supported them viewed the mounted police as an imperialist organization.

Other historians have also connected the NWMP to British imperialism. In his examination of imperialism and the Northwest, Owram specifically brings up the NWMP, arguing that “from their very inception the North West Mounted Police have been depicted as deriving their authority from an ‘intangible connection with the British empire’ and, one might add, the civilization which it represented.”81 He further suggests that the “rapidity with which the Mounted Police took on mythical connotations” points to how they were at least perceived as having “transplanted some of the most important characteristics of civilization.”82 Although Owram does not qualify his use of the term ‘civilization,’ here he means that the NWMP garnered such high regard because they came to represent “the ideal of the settled community,” because “those who went west often sought to recreate as much as possible the habits and styles of living they had known in the East.”83 However, the NWMP are also part of a nation-building narrative, so again, there appears to have been a fine line between British imperialism and Canadian nationalism.

The ways that the NWMP acted as agents of empire ‘on-the-ground’ could be more fully fleshed across works that emphasis empire (as far as I can tell). The studies surveyed largely focus on how the NWMP were supposed to be symbols of a British-imperial ‘civility,’ but what the police actually did to achieve this (or not) receives far less attention in these works. Historians of empire tend to focus on visions or fantasies of empire (so, the NWMP’s mythic status), rather than the everyday realities of colonialism (what the NWMP were really doing re: policing Indigenous mobility, for example, as discussed in first policing essay). Both imperial projection and colonial reality (not always in opposition or completely separate, of course) are necessary for an accurate account of Fort Calgary. For example, historical actors like Captain Richard Deane reveal the direct connections between the NWMP and the British empire, in both a high-level and grounded way; born in India, part of the Royal Marines, he was appointed by John A Macdonald to the NWMP in 1883. Deane came from a family of imperial officials, was himself an imperialist, and therefore was considered well-matched in the NWMP.

78 William Morrison, “Imposing the British Way: The Canadian Mounted Police and the Klondike Gold Rush” (in above, 92-105), 92. 79 Morrison, “Imposing the British Way,” 99. 80 Morrison, “Imposing the British Way,” 100. 81 Owram, Promise of Eden, 141. 82 Owram, Promise of Eden, 141. 83 Owram, Promise of Eden, 142.

21

NATION BUILDING

Allison Graham

Canadian Nationalism and Fort Calgary

Overview: Nationalism and National Policy

As discussed in the previous essay about British imperialism, historians have explored how Canadian nationalism was tied both to Western expansion and to empire (debates about whether such views of empire were led by Britain or Ontario). The earlier historiography, although certainly less critical of both nationalism and imperialism, has shown how both ‘Britishness’ and ‘Canadianness’ held a complicated place in westward expansion. Donald Creighton’s biographies of John A. Macdonald (The Young Politician and The Old Chieftain), originally published in the 1950s, presented Macdonald as the main manufacturer of Canadian nationalism. These biographies made Creighton’s career, and have informed numerous historical interpretations of how Canadian nationalism was born. The creation of Macdonald’s Canadian nation-state in the mid-1870s, as portrayed by Creighton, involved 1.) a “British connection [which] was a precious cultural inheritance,” as Macdonald believed that “through the British alliance alone Canada could build up its own north-west and consolidate its transcontinental dominions” and 2.) “western settlement and the pacific railway” as his “first two national policies,” with the tariffs protecting Canadian industry becoming the third.84 From this, we get a sense of the National Policy historians describe: Macdonald’s effort to turn the Dominion of Canada into a “national unit,” as a distinct entity ‘saved’ from the United States through settlement, technology connecting coast to coast (CPR), and tariffs to stop cross-border industry (economist V.C Fowke is regularly mentioned for his role in investigating the National Policy).85 Especially as an outpost of western expansion and the CPR, Fort Calgary can be considered part of this Policy.

Historians continue to show how imperialism and nationalism were connected in Canada. Carl Berger, as mentioned in the previous essay, observed early on that Canadian imperialism and nationalism were almost two sides of the same coin. He acknowledges that there “have been many varieties of Canadian nationalism,” but he examines a predominant nationalist vision that was tied to loyalty to the British empire and ultimately created “unique features of the Canadian national character.”86

More recently, Leslie Erikson has explained this interesting duality, suggesting that by the 1950s (when Creighton was writing) there was a shift away from exploring Canada within the context of the British empire, and towards examining Canada as a separate nation-state.87 However, she notes that Canada’s “nation-building project” was dependent upon the settlement of the West, ideally with “Canadian or British citizens.”88 She argues that policies and institutions such as the NWMP, the railway etc. confirmed that the West was both a territory of the new Canadian federal government and a

84 Donald Creighton, John A Macdonald: The Young Politician, The Old Chief, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 206, 207-8. 85 Vernon C. Fowke, The National Policy and the Wheat Economy, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 4. 86 Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867-1914, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970), 9-10. 87 Lesley Erikson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law and the Making of a Settler Society, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 18. 88 Erikson, Westward Bound, 18.

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“colonial outpost of an empire.”89 Erikson writes “dreams of imperial expansion came to reside on settlement frontiers, but so too did dreams of nation.”90 For example, she argues (among others) that the “utopian vision” of the prairies was shared among Canadian expansionists (nationalists?) and British imperialists.91 It appears to be widely accepted that nationalism and imperialism were not mutually exclusive in Canada, and both narratives can be gleaned from the histories of Fort Calgary’s site.

In the context of Canadian nationalism, Daniel Francis made an important intervention with National Dreams in the 1990s, to explain how “particular events and institutions” have become legends in Canadian history. He defines these myths of Canada as “echoes of the past, resonating in the present,” allowing us to “organize the past into a coherent story, the story of Canada” without a critical eye for what/who is being emphasized, and what/who is being marginalized.92 Myths have become part of the “main cultural project” of creating a distinct Canadian nation. Two of the myths that Francis discusses, and have received a significant amount of historical attention, are also highly relevant to Fort Calgary: the CPR and the NWMP.

Nationalism and the CPR

Published in the early 1970s, Pierre Berton’s monographs, National Dream and The Last Spike, have become almost synonymous with the standard, nationalist interpretation of the CPR that celebrates the railway in the story of Canada. He suggests that the CPR was the first “great national endeavor,” the initial “glimpse” of nationalism that represented a “dream” of “filling up the empty spaces and the dawn of the new Canada.”93 He calls the CPR “that most nationalistic of all Canadian enterprises.”94 His history tells a white-washed ‘Great Man’ version of the railway (referring to the men behind the CPR as “dreamers,” and suggesting that there was nothing/no one in the land – empty spaces – prior to white settlement). John A. Macdonald comes across as the main hero of the narrative, and the “railway was the key” to his National Policy because it would facilitate white settlement.95 In the 1980s, Gerald Friesen parroted this interpretation, arguing that the “national dream” as represented by the CPR was not a myth or, in his words, was not a “fanciful revision of the past” but that by 1885 it was a true symbol of “national pride.”96

The historiography on the CPR has evolved somewhat in the last decade with more critical interpretations of the railway’s connection to both nationalism and colonialism. Daniel Francis, for his part, argues that the CPR over the years has become “a great ‘Canadian’ achievement” despite “being built chiefly on the backs of Chinese coolie labour, using land obtained for almost nothing from the Indians, and capital raised for the most part in Britain.”97 He, like many others, points to the Last Spike, but contends that this moment had less to do with Canadian nationhood, and more to do with “a group of capitalists [celebrating] the completion of a privately-owned railway.”98

89 Erikson, Westward Bound, 20. 90 Erikson, Westward Bound, 230. 91 Erikson, Westward Bound, 21. 92 Daniel Francis, National Dreams: Myth, Memory, and Canadian History (Vancouver: Aresanl Pulp Press, 1997), 11. 93 Pierre Berton, The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871-1881, (Anchor Canada, 2001), 11. 94 Pierre Berton, The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885, (Anchor Canada, 2001), 95. 95 Burton, The National Dream, 266. 96 Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 170, 172. 97 Francis, National Dreams, 15. 98 Francis, National Dreams, 20.

23

Newer work has continued to examine the symbol vs. reality of the railway, emphasizing gender and race in the discourses that surrounded the CPR. Margot Francis for example, depicts the railway as both a technological tool and symbol of “an implicitly masculinist national trajectory.”99 She examines the CPR settlement campaigns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to explore how nation building was expressed through their “homesteading rhetoric,” arguing they sought out “ideal men” (white men) “who would come either from eastern Canada, the United States, or Britain.”100 As she notes, CPR settlement literature rarely included discussions of the Indigenous peoples whose land was used for the railway, except to “reassure settlers of their [Indigenous people] supposedly compliant status.”101 Francis also notes how the nation building rhetoric of the CPR erased the presence of thousands of Chinese rail workers. She concludes that CPR literature emphasized white, masculine “appropriation and control,” thereby highlighting the “gendered and racialized tropes implicit in the technological nationalism that fuelled the building of the nation.”102

In a similar vein, Leslie Erikson contends the West was “a place that would foster happy homes because colonialism and nation building were also about making families.”103 To demonstrate this argument, she examines CPR advertisements that highlighted the ‘proper’ (white/British, patriarch leading wife/ “helpmate” and children) family they sought out for settlers.104 She uses these images as a starting point to analyze how distinct gendered spheres were a part of national and imperial discourse and legislation, including what Erikson calls the construction of the “domestic domain” with a “strict division between public and private” that ensured women, Indigenous peoples, and the working class would be subordinated.105 Like Margot Francis, Erikson adds that white settlement of the prairies created a “renaissance of manliness” tied to nation building (again as seen in CPR posters), one that emphasized a supposed “British Canadian preference for law, order, and authority” – this idea directly relates to the NWMP as representing a ‘national’ normative masculinity.106 She therefore moves beyond the railway and other typical features of the National Policy, arguing that gender roles and family formation were equally as significant (“the incorporation of the West in Canada and the United States was deliberate exercise in nation building, and the monogamous, patriarchal family was viewed as the building block of the nation that was as important as the transnational railway, the national policy, and the arrival of the NWMP”).107

Nationalism and the NWMP

R.C Macleod has presented the main argument for how the NWMP fit into Canada’s nation building, specifically that the NWMP were involved in “building and sustaining the informal National Policy in the West.”108 He argues that the “police were more influential” than churches, schools, or any other institutions that were supposed to create a distinctly ‘Canadian’ national culture.109 He suggests

99 Margot Francis, Creative Subversions: Whiteness, Indigeneity and the National Imaginary, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 62. 100 Francis, Creative Subversions, 62. 101 Francis, Creative Subversions, 67. 102 Francis, Creative Subversions, 69. 103 Erikson, Westward, 22. 104 Erikson, Westward, 23. 105 Erikson, Westward, 25. 106 Erikson, Westward, 28-29. 107 Erikson, Westward, 230. 108 R.C Macleod, “Canadianizing the West: The North-West Mounted Police as Agents of the National Policy, 1873-1905,” in The Prairie West: Historical Readings, edited by R. Douglas Francis et. al, (Pica Pica Press, 1992), 229. 109 Macleod, “Canadianizing the West,” 229.

24 that the NWMP understood “Canadianism” better than anyone in the West, specifically that Canadian society would be “more orderly and law-abiding than others.”110 And, according to Macleod, they held a unique position “to influence the development of Western attitudes” because they became “leading figures in their community.”111 Regular interaction with settlers, coupled with ‘correcting’ what Macleod calls “non-Canadian immigrants” signified that officers were aware of their role in reinforcing “correct Canadian values.”112 Macleod does not really define what these Canadian values are beyond an apparent love of law and order (an “Upper Canadian Tory tradition in its purest form”).113 And, he gives few specific examples (other than general mingling with settlers) of how the NWMP created a ‘Canadian culture.’ Still, he concludes that the police were not simply interested in “anglicizing” settlers by referring to British law, but instead that there was something “specifically Canadian” about the values the NWMP imparted.114

Gerald Friesen’s The Canadian Prairies seems to follow Macleod’s narrative. Like others, he suggests that “Canada’s empire” was built through the National Policy, and that settlement, the railway, and tariff were “central elements in the national design imposed on the western interior.”115 However, Friesen emphasizes the role of the NWMP in facilitating every part of nation building, to “express Canadian sovereignty and act as a vehicle for maintaining good relations with the Indians.”116 And, he further argues that the NWMP was “an outstanding success,” and that they ensured “peace would prevail in an area that could have been extremely violent.”117 Like Macleod, Friesen suggests that the NWMP “came to the North-west determined to mould it according to their image of what Canadian society should be,” which was a middle class society that “possessed the crucial civic virtue [and] respectability.” He goes further to contend that this middle class “set the standard by which all others were judged,” living in a “stable environment, often in a family setting, they were sober in public, and they never engaged in violent activities.”118 Friesen seems to truly believe the middle class never behaved badly, unlike the poorer ‘rabble’ (also: was there a middle class in Canada by the end of the 19th C?). The NWMP, for their part, would ensure that stability (a middle class ideal) could be maintained. Most of Friesen’s work is extremely vague (same with Macleod), and this narrative builds off of an assumption that the NWMP were respectable and respected men. There is little empirical evidence to show exactly how they were able to enforce what would become supposed ‘Canadian values,’ and how policing translated to cultural transformation as a part of colonization.

In more recent work, historians seem to agree that the NWMP played a role in Canada’s National Policy and emerging Canadian nationalism, but the overwhelmingly positive image that surrounds the police should be up for debate. Daniel Francis’s counter to this nation-loving Mountie narrative largely focuses on the turmoil they faced as an organization leading up to the 1970s, when the myth of the RCMP was re-emphasized as essential to Canadian nationalism (as discussed in earlier essay). He appears skeptical that the police were widely recognized symbols of national pride during the

110 Macleod, “Canadianizing the West,” 230. 111 Macleod, “Canadianizing the West,” 231. 112 Macleod, “Canadianizing the West,” 231. 113 Macleod, “Canadianizing the West,” 235. 114 Macleod, “Canadianizing the West,” 233. 115 Friesen, The Canadian, 162. 116 Friesen, The Canadian, 166. 117 Friesen, The Canadian, 165. 118 Friesen, The Canadian, 170.

25 late 19th C, but were crafted as these symbols over time thanks to popular culture representations of the Mounties. Moreover, Francis is critical of the studies that depict the NWMP, “a mere handful of officers,” as respected authorities who were uniquely able to “befriend and pacify the Native tribes,” thereby acting as agents of cultural change.119 In her history of Louis Riel, Jennifer Reid is similarly unconvinced that the NWMP were able to unify Canada by transforming the west with the full respect and acquiescence of Indigenous peoples and settlers.120 She critiques J.G Colmer’s 1915 introduction to Sam Steele’s account of the North-West rebellion “praised the Hudson’s Bay Company, territorial governments, and the Mounted Police for the way in which they contributed to the ‘peaceful and wonderful development’ of the region.”121

At Fort Calgary, it would make sense to explore both the actual role of the NWMP in Macdonald’s National Policy, while also investigating the mythic status they achieved over the 20th C. The problem with the earlier work in this historiography is not that they connect the NWMP to nation building, but that they rely heavily on the myth of the mounted police and make significant value judgments (nationalism and the role of NWMP in the emerging Canadian nation was inherently ‘good’). We will need to tackle how to separate the image of the NWMP that was used to create nationalist sentiment later on from their on-the-ground role of policing Indigenous peoples and settlers and contributing to the colonization of Mohkinstiss.

Troy Patenaude

The Arrival of the CPR

Residents of Calgary—often well aware of the city’s ceaseless growth, and economic importance to the province and nation as a whole—can easily take for granted how incredibly young this city is. Officially incorporated in 1884, Calgary is not even as old as two average human life spans. Despite this, the vast majority of our historical attention is directed to this very short amount of time, almost as though anything of importance here only began 136 years ago. In actual fact, this 136 years is just the tail end of the current chapter of important occurrences that fill chapters upon chapters of tomes upon tomes upon tomes of occurrences here prior to 1884. The skewed sense of history and value judgements now connected to this place largely began arriving by train in 1883.

In August of 1883, the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), reached Calgary. There were residents already living in the area at the time, but not much more than around a hundred. Based on the 1881 census as well, roughly 66% of this population living in the current city limits of Calgary were Métis. With the arrival of the train, the population soared to between five hundred and a thousand people by the end of 1884, and it became increasingly white and non-Indigenous. This rapid influx of white settler- colonial people also brought with it imported ways to think about governance, economic relations, civilization as a whole, history, and the land-human relationship. In this section, I will explore some of these imported ideas and practices relative to Fort Calgary and the growth of the city around it. I will first discuss the kind of land-human relationship that began arriving with the train. There are particular

119 Francis, National Dreams, 32. On a side note, I find the rhetoric of having just a few men ‘stabilize’ the entire west super interesting because it’s similar to what older generations of historians used to say about the Mexican Conquest (a handful of men took down an entire empire – totally inaccurate). 120 Jennifer Reid, Louis Riel and the Creation of Modern Canada: Mythic Discourse and the Postcolonial State, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 61-2. 121 Reid, Louis Riel, 61.

26 ways that the above-mentioned European understandings of land-human relationships manifested around Calgary. On one hand, they made possible the process of thinking about land like a commodity, a passive backdrop to human action that could be owned, surveyed into arbitrary sections, historicized in a linear way, objectively explained, and exploited for resources. On the other hand, they also made possible the need for environmentalism, a way to curb or prevent the mounting problems being noticed as a result of the latter Eurocentric approaches to the land.

Within a couple months of the arrival of the CPR, its subsidiary—the Canada Northwest Land Company—appointed an agent in Calgary to supervise the surveying of townsite lots. Surveying is the process of measuring features on the earth’s surface, in order to determine legal boundaries between parcels of property, or the topography of land so it can be transcribed into lines on a map, plan, or chart. While elements of surveying were used by the ancient Egyptians, it became a profession under the Romans, and a science during the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. It was imported to Canada through various European people and events, such as Samuel de Champlain, the Royal Engineers, the Hudson’s Bay Company, and the creation of the Geological Survey of Canada in 1842.122 By January of 1884, the surveying of the Calgary townsite was already well underway, and land here was opened up for settlement.123 In imported European fashion, the land was deemed useable insofar as it could be cultivated for ranching and farming, or exploited for mining, timber, irrigation, or tourism.

In order for these approaches to the land to be imported, Indigenous ones had to be controlled, micro-managed, and eradicated. The process by which this occurred—making it possible for the train and white settler-colonial people to arrive and now benefit from here in the first place—is three-fold: (1) the numbered treaty process (Treaty 7 around Calgary); (2) the creation of the Indian Act; and (3) the implementation of the residential school system (all buttressed by an imported system of laws keeping the main tenets of each intact). This trifecta process was largely set in motion by Confederation and the acquisition of former Hudson’s Bay Company lands by the new Canadian nation state. Although amendments to each element of the process have happened throughout the years (and the final residential school closed in 1996), the main tenets of each—dispossession, control, protection, and civilization (assimilation)—are still in effect today.124 By 1885, Calgary had already become a regional commercial centre dependent on the dispossession and subjugation of Indigenous peoples, lands, and tomes upon tomes upon tomes of wisdom from here.

The two, main, overlapping expressions of the colonial approach to the land— ownership/exploitation and environmentalism—can be exemplified in the Calgary area through the work of a man who arrived by train in 1884. William Pearce was a surveyor, civil engineer, and

122 Don Tomson, Men and Meridians: The History of Surveying and Mapping in Canada (Ottawa: Roger Duhamel, Queen's printer, 3 volumes, 1966, 1967, 1969). 123 Henry C. Klassen, Eye on the Future: Business People in Calgary and the Bow Valley, 1870-1900 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), 74. 124 Treaty 7 Elders and Tribal Council with Walter Hildebrandt, Dorothy First Rider, and Sarah Carter, The True Spirit and Original Intent of Treaty 7 (Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 1996); Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples Committee, Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Ottawa, 1996); Arthur Manuel and Ronald M. Derrickson, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015); Russell Diabo, “The Indian Act: The Foundation of Colonialism in Canada,” in Peter McFarlane and Nicole Schabus, eds., Whose Land is it Anyway?: A Manual for Decolonization (Vancouver: Federation of Post-Secondary Educators of BC, 2017), 22-26; Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action, (Winnipeg, 2012).

27 statistician who worked for the Dominion Lands Survey in the mid-1870s, and was appointed Inspector of Dominion Lands Agencies in 1882, as well as Superintendent of Mines for the North-West Territories in 1884. His responsibilities were to help ensure compliance with the law by locals in the prairies, adjudicate land disputes, advise government on land and resource development, and help administer and develop the Calgary region’s timber and mineral resources.125 Although not an environmentalist in the modern sense of the word, some of Pearce’s actions within these roles also influenced environmentalist expressions in the region.

When he arrived in Calgary in 1884, the CPR’s railway construction was advancing from Calgary through the Rocky Mountains. This sparked an increase in settler-colonial mineral rights applications for nearby properties along the rail line. One of Pearce’s first tasks arose when settler-colonial railway workers found and claimed a mineral hot springs near Banff. Pearce evaluated the situation and concluded that the crown should administer the springs, not the individuals. He borrowed sentiments from the Yellowstone National Park Act of 1872 and drafted the statute creating Canada’s first national park in 1886-87. Pearce went on to help create Yoho and Glacier National Parks as well, and set aside St George’s and St Patrick’s Islands as parkland in Calgary, just north of Fort Calgary in the Bow River. These actions precipitated settler-colonial approaches to the land that were now also based on other kinds of exploitation—national parks and national historic sites—that were also bound up in environmentalism.

125 David H. Breen, The Canadian Prairie West and the Ranching Frontier, 1874-1924 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983).

28

POLICING AND THE HISTORY OF FORT CALGARY

Overview and Major Debates

Historical work on the North-west Mounted Police has understandably highlighted their role in policing, and how policing relates to the expansion of a Western frontier in the Northwest Territories, what would become Alberta and Saskatchewan. Most scholars agree that the NWMP was a unique police force with duties spanning those typical not only of police officers, but also of prosecutors, justices of the peace, and jail wardens.126 However, the NWMP’s role in policing Indigenous peoples has received the lion’s share of historical attention, and has also informed the main historiographical debate over the nature of policing in the frontier. In the literature on policing and the NWMP, two main ‘sides’ have emerged. The first emphasizes a well-meaning, effective, and compassionate force, while the other revises this interpretation to reveal a colonizing paramilitary presence.

The debate over the history of policing and the NWMP appears to have begun in earnest in the 1970s. Over the 1960s and 1970s, the RCMP were dealing with a series of controversies related to their national surveillance role, and began receiving more pushback from social activists over their anti- Indigenous and anti-worker policing. Lorne and Caroline Brown’s An Unauthorized History of the RCMP, published in 1973 (a timely release during the centennial year of the Mounted Police), voiced those criticisms against what they argued was a “secretive” institution that has relied heavily on successful public relations to keep up appearances.127 This “leftist” perspective was met with significant resistance, and it is out of this moment of heightened anxiety over the reputation of the Mounted Police that we see a more concerted historiographical debate over policing and the NWMP.

Scholars reinvigorated a more “traditional” narrative, which highlights the efficient and tempered policing efforts of the Mounted Police, toward the end of the 1970s. This perspective is typically attributed to historian R.C Macleod. His interpretation sought to recover the Mounted Police as a distinct and worthwhile Canadian symbol, and as an essential piece in the story of Canadian nation- building. Another commonly referenced voice is John Jennings, a “traditional” narrative proponent of the 1970s, who has argued that the “white settlement of southern Alberta, and the Canadian West in general, was peaceful and comparatively enlightened” thanks to the presence of the NWMP.128 As a result, Macleod and those who agreed with his work emphasized:

1. The NWMP made significant “improvements” to the lives of the Indigenous groups they encountered, especially in regulating the whiskey trade, and established a sense of trust and good relations with Indigenous people. These achievements should be recognized even if those

126 Shelley Gavigan, Hunger, Horses, and Government Men: Criminal Law on the Aboriginal Plains, 1870-1905, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012), 35. 127 Lorne and Caroline Brown, An Unauthorized History of the RCMP, (Toronto: James Lews and Sameul, 1973), 127. Lorne Brown even took part in a CBC radio show against former RCMP deputy commissioner William H. Kelly, you can listen here (it’s pretty awkward): https://www.cbc.ca/archives/entry/rcmps-reputation-debated 128 John N. Jennings, “Policeman and Poachers: Indian Relations on the Ranching Frontier,” in The Mounted Police and Prairie Society, 1873-1919, edited by William Baker, (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1998), 41-71. This article is based off of his dissertation, “The Northwest Mounted Police and Indian Policy, 1874-1896,” (Ph.D Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1979).

29 improvements ended up being short lived, as Macleod, Jennings, and others argue that there was a shift in Indigenous relations, which started to break down after 1885.129

2. The NWMP relied on “moral authority,” diplomacy, and the respect they garnered from Indigenous and settler communities, rather than violence in their policing efforts.130 Peacekeeping and mediation were their priorities, and through that, they (almost single-handedly) created a law-abiding society in the West.

Overall, this interpretation portrayed the Mounted Police as contributing to the broader narrative of a ‘gentle,’ orderly expansion of the Canadian West, depicted in stark contrast to a violent and disorderly settlement of the American West. What made Canada different from the United States can almost be reduced down to the calm efficacy of the NWMP.

Although this “traditional” narrative of the history of policing and the NWMP remains strong today, the “revisionist” approach has grown over the 1980s-90s, providing a counter narrative to the iconic police force.131 In one of the more historically and theoretically grounded studies, Walter Hildebrandt’s Views from Fort Battleford sees the policing of the NWMP as part of a system of social control and colonial acculturation, arguing that “the NWMP thus were an arm of the law which was to restrain and guide Native people (as well as the incoming white settlers) into conformity with the dominant culture and society the Mounties represented and were to disseminate.”132 In other words, regulating, policing, and punishing had a cultural purpose, to create a ‘proper’ society in the western frontier. He seems to be one of the first to explore the colonial context of the police, explaining that NWMP officers were agents of the government’s colonial and imperial “motives” and that they “were equivalent to colonial police forces in the old British Empire.”133

Hildebrandt’s work is especially relevant to Fort Calgary, not only for being situated around a Mounted Police fort in the late nineteenth century, but also for being based on a fort that is a museum today. His discussion of the Fort buildings themselves, and how that architecture was meant to signify a new order that would be upheld by the “agents of Anglo-Canadian culture” within, is illuminating (and the development/layout of the grounds is strikingly similar to Fort Calgary).134 The transition of Fort Battleford into a historic site (Chapter 7) could prove particularly interesting as a comparative case study to Fort Calgary.

Still, like Macleod and Jennings before him, Hildebrandt’s work tends to lack nuance, albeit moving us toward the other end of the NWMP spectrum. More historians have begun to include the history of policing and the NWMP to build on the broader histories of colonialism in Western Canada.

129 R.C Macleod, “The North West Mounted Police, 1873-1919,” Canadian Historical Association, (Ottawa: Love Printing Services Ltd, 1978), 7. This booklet is a condensed version of his monograph, which I was not able to access digitally: The North West Mounted Police and Law Enforcement, 1873-1919 (Toronto, 1976); Jennings, “Policeman and Poachers,” 47-8. 130 Macleod, “The North West,” 8. 131 Also included in this bunch would be Keith Walden, Visions of Order: The Canadian Mounties in Symbol and Myth, (1982, unable to access online); Michael Dawson’s more recent work also focus on Mounted Police more as a national symbol and their representation in popular culture, see The Mountie: From Dime Store to Disney, (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1998).

132 Walter Hildebrandt, Views from Fort Battleford: Constructed Visions of an Anglo-Canadian West, (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Centre, 1994), 2. 133 Hildebrandt, Views from Fort Battleford, 35. 134 Hildebrandt, Views from Fort Battleford, 19-20.

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Shelley Gavigan, for example, investigates the relationship between emerging criminal law in Canada and the Plains First Nations (largely in present-day Saskatchewan). Rather than a NWMP-centric view, she examines how Indigenous people understood Canadian law, their knowledge of rights as outlined in the Numbered Treaties, and how they navigated the criminal system. Policing is certainly a factor in her analysis, mostly when it comes to “low law” or the everyday accounts of criminal accusations, imprisonment, and prosecution (this type of law specifically relevant to the Fort/NWMP policing). Her focus, however, is the many ways Indigenous people were actively engaged in the law, both using and resisting laws and the legal system.135 Moreover, Gavigan is also exceptional in her analysis of criminalization, a topic that appears to be either assumed or an afterthought in the historiography.136 Gavigan’s work is therefore one of the few (only?!) examples of tackling a more complicated picture of policing in the West, one that looks at policing but also effectively decenters the police themselves to tell a story that is instead centered on Indigenous experience.

This historiographical debate is significant not only to provide context of Fort Calgary as an institution of policing, but also to the creation of Fort Calgary as a museum. If thinking about our museum as an historical object or artifact itself, it was born out of an increasingly tense historical debate over the nature of the Mounted Police. Although this place has layered histories that extend beyond policing, the reignited desire to present the RCMP as an essential and positive part of our national narrative surely informed the decision to create a museum that focused on the NWMP Fort.

Important Themes

Policing Indigenous Peoples: The literature of policing and the NWMP has historically, and continues to focus on the policing of Indigenous peoples. As can be gleaned from the discussion above, two opposing perspectives come to the fore, emphasizing how the NWMP held either good or bad motivations, and fostered either good or bad relationships with Indigenous peoples. It is also in this context that a number of historians contend that the NWMP were more of a military than a police force, meaning that the term “policing” itself with regard to Indigenous people might be a misnomer.137

• Illicit Whiskey Trade - The contention that the John A. MacDonald sent the NWMP to secure a Canadian border and (more significantly) protect Indigenous peoples from illegal American whiskey traders is pervasive in the historiography, and still one of the main interpretations expressed in the exhibits at Fort Calgary. Most historians, including more recent studies like those by Sarah Carter, agree that the NWMP were essential in curbing the whiskey trade, and that Blackfoot leaders such as Crowfoot were concerned enough about that issue to cooperate with the police.138 This one example, however, has been used to support a more far-reaching argument for the “benevolent” NWMP, where the first priority for policing was to protect Indigenous people (historians following in R.C Macleod’s

135 Gavigan, Hunger, 18. 136 Gavigan explains that criminalization “occurs when people are criminally prosecuted and convicted for forms of conduct that have become defined by the state as crimes. It may encompass the extension of criminal law over formerly non-criminal behaviour, or it may involve the systemic targeting, overpolicing, and criminal prosecution of particular groups and communities for particular kinds of offences.” 20. 137 Sarah Carter suggests “occupying” instead of “policing” – “They were more a military occupying force than a police force.” “They served in a military rather than a police capacity at occasions such as treaty negotiations. At Treaty Seven, they brought and fired canons.” See Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 129. 138 Carter, Aboriginal People, 129.

31 footsteps include Barbara Joan Mayfield, whose late 1970s work suggests that by policing the whiskey trade, the NWMP created a period of peaceful “coexistence” between the NWMP and the Blackfoot, and it was the trust and mutually beneficial relationship built around the whiskey trade that allowed for the “successful” implementation of Treaty 7).139 And although Carter agrees that the elimination of the illicit whiskey trade did create some good relations between the Blackfoot and the NWMP, she still balances this contention by demonstrating that “their actions were not always appreciated,” including the “indignant reactions to police posts being placed in the path of the buffalo, without the government first conferring with them about these establishments. A post such as Fort Calgary was placed at a popular camping and fording site without permission or consultation.”140

• Horse and Cattle stealing/killing – Policing crimes relating to stealing horses and cattle tended to be only relevant to Indigenous peoples. Jennings suggests that the NWMP acted as a peacekeeping buffer between Indigenous people and white ranchers in Southern Alberta, and through their policing efforts, officers were responsible for the relative lack of violence between the two groups. However, Jennings also confirms that these crimes were some of the more difficult ones to police, especially cattle-killing, which often went undetected.141 The inability for officers to regulate cattle- killing is one of the reasons for the creation of the pass system.142 More recently, Vic Satzewich challenges the idea that cattle-killing was something cultural among Indigenous peoples (which apparently the NWMP at the time suggested) – instead, he argues it was both a solution to the starvation Indigenous peoples faced across Treaty 7 (which was continually denied by the Canadian government), as well as a form of resistance to the rations policy and ration reduction in the late 1880s- 90s.143

• The Pass System – Jennings best articulates one of the more common arguments made regarding how the NWMP policed the mobility of Indigenous peoples. Because the pass system was not expressed in law or Treaty, Jennings argues it put police officers in an “awkward position,” they were “equivocal” about the new regulations, but regardless of their supposed ambivalence the pass system caused them to lose credibility with Indigenous peoples.144 Shelley Gavigan and Sarah Carter also find evidence of tensions between the Canadian ‘state’ and the police when the pass system was first implemented, that many officers were opposed to enforcing the system because it lacked any legal backing.145 Hildebrandt offers a different view, arguing that the NWMP represented “interests of the colonizer,” and were not only “enforcers” of the law but were also “makers” of it. In that regard, he does not let NWMP officers off the hook when it comes to the pass system, but rather sees them as agents of a colonizing force that not only disregarded Treaty promises, but also relied on separation and surveillance for social control.146

139 Barbara Joan Mayfield, “The Interlude: The North-West Mounted Police and the Blackfoot Peoples, 1874-1877” in The Mounted Police and Prairie Society, 1873-1919, edited by William Baker, (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1998), 17- 40. 140 Carter, Aboriginal People, 128-9. 141 Jennings, “Policeman and Poachers,” 47. 142 Jennings, “Policeman and Poachers,” 48. 143 Vic Satzewich, “Where’s the Beef?: Cattle Killing, Rations Policy and First Nations ‘Criminality’ in Southern Alberta, 1892- 1895,” in Journal of Historical Sociology, 9:2, (1996, 188-212), 200. 144 Jennings, “Policeman and Poachers,” 48-9. 145 Gavigan, Horses, 37. 146 Hildebrandt, Views, 35.

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Policing Settlers

Historians appear to have paid less attention to the policing of settlers in comparison to the policing of Indigenous peoples. This gap is significant because it demonstrates that the NWMP was overwhelmingly concerned with preparing for colonization, including the regulation of Indigenous people. Interestingly, the policing of Indigenous peoples appears to be analyzed totally separately from the criminal activities of settlers – why is there a historiographical dissonance between “crime and punishment” for settlers and policing of Indigenous people? As Gavigan argues, First Nations were “Indianized” and “were prosecuted [and policed] as ‘Indians’ – not as criminals – for violating the Indian Act.”147 Has the historiography followed this distinction? In studies on how settlers were policed, the crime and criminality [I know this is rambling, I’m trying to make a point but my brain is not here for it].

Most historians seem to agree that the policing of settlers was prioritized based on the nature of the crime, but that there was a great deal of individual officer discretion of when an illicit activity was going to be treated as a crime. Once again R.C Macleod appears to be an authority on this topic. In his essay “Crime and Criminals in the North-West Territories, 1873-1905,” he looks at some of the most common crimes in Southern Alberta, with specific mention of Calgary. This essay includes violent crimes (assault, murder), theft (especially among ranchers – again, no mention of Indigenous cattle-stealing), vagrancy, and crimes that were largely ignored by the NWMP (gambling and prostitution). This article provides a solid overview, if lacking in any interesting analysis about crime and criminality. He concludes that the NWMP were “generally successful in enforcing the law,” which supports his overall interpretation of the effectiveness of policing (although this conclusion is surely more difficult to prove if you are using exclusively criminal records and cannot account for criminal behaviour that went unseen). More interesting is his suggestion that the “police view of what was important usually coincided with that of the public; an important element in maintaining their reputation.”148 He argues that there was a perception among settlers of crime being curtailed, and the ‘right’ kinds of crime were being regulated.

As can be seen above, the historiography on policing and the NWMP seems quite divided when regarding Indigenous peoples, and fairly sparse when it comes to settler crimes. The challenge (and opportunity) for Fort Calgary is to create a balanced, truthful narrative that considers multiple perspectives to create a more complex interpretation of policing. Can we highlight the middle ground between these two largely opposing interpretations? Sarah Carter and Shelley Gavigan seem to be the most successful at creating a more nuanced history of policing. Taking Gavigan’s cues, issues of policing, criminalization, colonial legal systems are extremely complicated and there are different degrees of acquiescence, resistance, ambivalence, both for those who were policed and those doing the policing. The more ambivalent, at times fickle, realities of policing and the regulation of crime reveals the complexity of the NWMP story more broadly, which Fort Calgary could certainly use. Exploring this on- the-ground messiness will also allow us to avoid making heroes or villains of historical actors, which is the lazy essentialism into which the historiography of the NWMP tends to fall.

Areas for Further Exploration

• Policing and Masculinity

147 Gavigan, Horses, 22. 148 R.C Macleod, “Crime and Criminals in the North-West Territories, 1873-1905,” in The Mounted Police and Prairie Society, 1873-1919, edited by William Baker, (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1998, 85-101), 99.

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o Many historians imply a connection between NWMP and masculinity, but the historiography lacks a clear, gendered analysis. Sarah Carter, for example, argues that the “traditional” narrative of the NWMP as describing the officers “as sterling examples of manly attributes such as integrity, sobriety, and courage.” The reality, of course, was that “many of the predominantly young men who made up the force were a far cry from the exemplary models of behaviour that most of the police literature would have use believe.”149 Studies that discuss how officers themselves were involved in certain criminalized behaviour (such as soliciting sex workers, drinking, gambling etc.) are more difficult to come by. Still, thinking about ideals and realities of masculinity might add some interesting dimensions to policing – especially with the discourse around the benevolent NWMP, the image of police as benevolent patriarchs fathers policing/taking care of Indigenous people, fallen women, poor people/vagrants etc. are so many already

• NWMP and Nation-Building

o Fort Calgary was established alongside Fort Macleod and Fort Walsh as a string of southern bastions to protect and enforce a Canadian-US border. The mere placement of the first NWMP forts in the mid-1870s, and the offshoot outposts that were established later, has been used as evidence supporting the argument that policing illegal American activity with the intention of solidifying a national border. To be sure, the desire to police the border was intimately connected to policing Indigenous groups, but also to enforcing a sociocultural shift with the National Policy. The role of the NWMP in implementing the National Policy is a debate that seems pervasive in the historiography.

• Judicial Process and Punishment

o Although scholars do acknowledge the surprising judicial and punitive powers many NWMP officers had beyond policing, the specifics of their jurisdiction does not seem to be as clearly studied. It might be interesting to dig further into this topic as crime and criminality is explored.

149 Carter, Aboriginal People, 128-29.

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GENDER AND THE HISTORY OF FORT CALGARY

Allison Graham

Overview and Major Debates: Gender and Nineteenth-Century Imperialism

Gender, or how femininity and masculinity is performed, interpreted, and projected, is culturally and historically constructed. By the 1990s, historians began to explore how gender and sexuality were key to imperial ideologies and processes of colonization. The attention feminist scholars paid to ‘New Imperialism’ is especially pertinent to Fort Calgary’s history, as historians examined the distinct ways that European powers activated gender in an effort to impose their own cultural values, norms, and mores on a new colony, and buttress their imperial projects of the late 19th Century. In the British Empire, studies like Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather have become representative of how Victorian understandings of gender were translated, transformed, and challenged in colonial contexts around the world. McClintock has been credited for arguing that the cult of domesticity, which ideally solidified the gendered division between public/male and private/female space, was intimately tied to British imperialism.150 Her work, moreover, revealed how gender and race were inseparable.

In the Anglo/British-Canadian context, historians have suggested that Western expansion can be seen in the context of this broader, global process of Victorian/Edwardian ‘New Imperialism.’ And, since the end of 1990s and early 2000s, there have been a few historians to place gender at the heart of their studies. Adele Perry’s On the Edge of Empire (and her earlier article) is one of the few concerted studies of how gender and colonialism intersected in Western Canada.151 She depicts a complicated picture of colonial British Columbia, where gender factored in establishing a ‘proper’ Victorian society in a colonized place, but also where a gendered system that emphasized separate spheres of active masculinity and domesticated femininity, not to mention heterosexual family formation, was simply impossible in reality.152 Still, Perry perhaps phrased it best, contending that “notions and practices of manhood and womanhood were central to the twinned business of marginalizing Aboriginal people and designing and building a white society.”153

Although the historiography of ‘New Imperialism’ and gender is broad, and finding a work that mentions Fort Calgary seems to be an elusive task, this literature highlights themes that are extremely significant to Fort Calgary’s history. We can see through Fort Calgary the early creation of what Perry identifies as a “white homosocial culture and mixed-race heterosexual relationships,” neither of which represented a Victorian ideal.154 How gendered expectations evolved over time specifically in and around Fort Calgary, and the role of the NWMP in policing gendered behaviour in what was being defined as an Anglo-Canadian society (not to mention how gender informed the actions and reputations of the NWMP, or how the NWMP failed to conform to these ideals) has received scant if any attention. But as a starting point for what Perry calls that “twinned business” of displacing Indigenous peoples and

150 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, And Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, (Routledge, 1995), 36 – how “colonial space became domesticated.” 151 Earlier article is Adele Perry, “Fair Ones of a Purer Cast: White Women and Colonialism in Late Nineteenth-Century British Columbia,” in Feminist Studies 23, (1997). 152 Adele Perry, On the Edge of Empire: Gender, Race, and the Making of British Columbia, 1849-1871, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 17-18 153 Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 19. 154 Perry, On the Edge of Empire, 18.

35 their ways of life, along with contributing to the creation of a “white society,” to create order in a supposedly disordered frontier, Fort Calgary was a nucleus for how gender and colonialism intersected. And, the NWMP was supposed to guide and enforce a cultural transformation, of which (late-Victorian) understandings of femininity and masculinity were paramount.

Important Themes

NWMP as Manly Men

Although seemingly an obvious topic of exploration, historians have not thoroughly discussed the ways in which the NWMP intersected with masculinity. The historiography of the Mounted Police, especially the more ‘traditional’ narratives of the 1970s-80s, simply embraces the mythic Mountie status as burly, but restrained, manly men. Sarah Carter (as discussed in Policing Historiography Essay) has argued that the “traditional” narrative of the NWMP as describing the officers “as sterling examples of manly attributes such as integrity, sobriety, and courage.” The reality, of course, was that “many of the predominantly young men who made up the force were a far cry from the exemplary models of behaviour that most of the police literature would have us believe.”155 In Michael Dawson’s investigation of “Mountie novels” from the 1890s-present day, he also suggests that mounted police have historically been depicted as “splendid specimens of manhood,” possessing all the traits of a refined, physically fit, Anglo-Saxon man.” 156

But if gender is socially, culturally, and historically constructed, where did this version of masculinity come from, and why? A body of literature, starting in the late 1980s, sought to identify a particular late-Victorian (imperial) model of masculinity, a set of ideas about how men should behave that emerged in the late-19th C and within the content of ‘New Imperialism.’ J.A Mangan, a sports historian of the 1980s, made one of the first calls to study how Victorian/late 19th C masculinity was transplanted in various parts of the Anglo world. Drawing on the emerging theoretical works on masculinity (R.W Connell’s 1982 essay on hegemonic masculinity), Mangan argued “by the final quarter of the nineteenth century, at least in the rhetoric of idealists, manliness had evolved into the somewhat controversial and sometimes confusing phenomenon of ‘muscular Christianity.’”157 This term, ‘muscular Christianity,’ has pervaded the historiography, denoting an ideal of a strong, physical man who still followed a sense of Christian morality and decency.

Identified as a militaristic and adventurous masculinity, historians have more recently demonstrated how this version of masculinity developed out of, and was solidified by, imperial expansion. Interestingly, there was a flurry of publications between 2012-2015 that took to exploring masculinity in Canadian frontier contexts, and highlighted the prevalence of this muscular Christian ideal. Robert Hogg compared the 19th C frontier contexts of Queensland and British Columbia, arguing “the ‘muscular’ virtues came to the fore as the frontier provided a stage on which British men could ‘perform’ manliness, in particular by exercising courage, stoicism, and perseverance, and developing ‘a wild self-dependence of character.’ The frontier was imagined as a place which could be tamed and

155 Carter, Aboriginal People, 128-29 (from last essay) 156 Michael Dawson, “ ‘That nice red coat goes to my head like champagne’: Gender, antimodernism, and the Mountie image, 1880-1960” in Journal of Canadian Studies, 32:3, (Fall 1997), 124. Can also be found in his monograph The Mountie from Dime Novel to Disney, (1998). 157 Introduction to J.A Mangan and James Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 3.

36 civilized by British men who possessed the manly virtues.”158 Bradley Deane looks to British popular literature, but similarly contends that “an emphasis on the competitive dimensions of manliness – as derived, for instance, from discourses of honor, gamesmanship, or military codes – provided conceptual templates through which the aggressive ideologies of the New Imperialism could be understood and valued.”159

A clear connection between British empire and masculinity, where militarized discipline and action were essential, provides a fascinating backdrop for Fort Calgary. This shift in thought about how men were supposed to behave coincided with the creation of the NWMP and their march west; their role as colonizers was not just a legitimate model for men to embrace and emulate, but an idolized one (a “masculinist imperialism”).160 The romanticization of the NWMP, and especially their reputation for being exceptional men, has a much broader story connected to their role in expansion and colonization in the Anglo world. Still, the Mounted Police are not mentioned in these studies, despite being almost perfect products and, eventually, symbols of this construction of masculinity. For example, in Amy Shaw’s essay examining masculinity and Canadian participation in the Boer War, she suggests that these Canadian soldiers “served as representatives of prescriptive manliness,” an articulation of “colonial masculinity,” including the “late-Victorian” characteristics of a “devotion to duty, British civilization, and a muscular Christianity.”161 However, Shaw does not make any connections to the Mounted Police, despite their noted role participating in for the Boer War (did I make this up?). The gap in examining how the NWMP were part in parcel of this version of hegemonic masculinity is glaring, especially considered they were modeled after a British imperial paramilitary force.

Historians also have rightly countered the idyllic image of muscular Christian men taming the frontier by demonstrating the “deep paradox in the Victorian ideal of manliness,” that it was relatively impossible to achieve given the particularities of frontier life. In particular, Hogg and others (Adele Perry) point to the absence of white women and the resulting homosociality that certainly differed from the ideal.162 The issue of a homosocial environment is also directly related to the NWMP living in a frontier that was, at least in the early days, not conducive to Victorian ideals of domesticity and family formation. Along with the dearth of white women who were considered ‘appropriate’ wives (as opposed to Indigenous women), marriage was also typically discouraged among younger officers prior to the 20th Century, thus reinforcing an overwhelmingly single, male population. The institution of the NWMP itself was homosocial, making a militaristic model of masculinity (military also a homosocial institution) at least somewhat more conducive than a ‘family man’ image (this also reveals the contradictions and multiplicities of gender constructions, as scholars refer to “masculinities” and “femininities”).

In some cases, the NWMP committing crimes themselves or engaging in less than ideal behaviour suggests that not all officers could, or tried to, conform to the masculine image their organization represented. Drunkenness, gambling, drug use (opium), and soliciting sex workers were just a few favorite pastimes that were typically attributed to men, but did not jive with the restrained,

158 Robert Hogg, Men and Manliness on the Frontier: Queensland and British Columbia in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 3. 159 Bradley Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 15. 160 Deane, Masculinity and the New Imperialism, 40. 161 Amy Shaw, “The Boer War, Masculinity, and Citizenship in Canada, 1899-1902,” in Contested Bodies and Nation in Canadian History, edited by Patrizia Gentile et. al, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 100. 162 Hogg, Men and Manliness, 87.

37 moderate masculinity discussed above. In fact, these crimes were in part categorized as deviant because of how they clashed with gendered norms, theoretically causing men to lose or waste their money and be therefore unable to support their household (the household being a miniature patriarchy reflective of patriarchal structures in wider British society).163 Sarah Carter has found that the NWMP were engaging in unsanctioned sexual relationships with Indigenous women, leading to a report that suggested 45% of the NWMP were being treated for venereal disease in the late 1880s.164 Lyle Dick, in his aptly named article “The Queer Frontier,” has found evidence of NWMP officers engaging in same-sex relationships, arguing that “the heavily male homosocial character of the frontier generated various opportunities for men to produce space for homoerotic expression.165” Cases of gross immoral conduct (before the 1892 criminal code law against sodomy) at Fort Macleod and at the NWMP barracks outside of Regina reveal same-sex desire among the Mounted Police that was certainly punished, but only when made public enough that it could not be covered up.

Very little research has come out examining the extent to which Indigenous men related to this Anglo-masculinity model, especially in the context of their interactions with the NWMP. From a ‘traditional’ Mounted Police narrative, historians have tended to repeat, uncritically, a colonial and what is often described as ‘feminized’ view of Indigenous men; stereotypes of drunkenness, inability to govern their household, needing the care and protection of the police (the ‘real men’). In his article on Gabriel Dumont and the 1885 Rebellion, Matthew Barrett examines how “imperialists often turned to an imagined masculine ideal of the colonized Native” by creating a narrow understanding of Indigenous manhood focused on military prowess.166 Still, this work explores the view of the colonizer, and information on how different Indigenous groups perceived their own ideals around masculinity (same for femininity) seems to be lacking – were the NWMP involved in policing “moral” crimes for Indigenous people that might be expressions of Indigenous gender systems (polygamous marriages, two- spiritedness or what might have been deemed sodomy, cross-dressing for examples), or was this left up to missionaries and religious folks (Erikson mentions briefly that Indian agents and NWMP would be involved pgs. 67-70 but I’d be interested in more info)?

Policing Women’s Bodies and Femininity

Masculinity, of course, did not exist in a vacuum. As Victorian-imperial gender constructions operated in a binary, femininity was also an important part of the British-colonial project. And, as the

163 The idea of the household being a replica of the kingdom, the commonwealth, or the republic has shifted overtime in Britain, but the idea of masculinity being tied to domestic authority and being a functioning patriarch of the family (reproduction of patriarchy) has more or less remained similar over the early modern period and into the modern. For overview see introduction to Karen Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth Century Britain, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 164 Sarah Carter, “Categories and Terrains of Exclusion: Constructing the ‘Indian Woman’ in the Early Settlement Era in Western Canada,’’ Great Plains Quarterly, 13:3, (Summer, 1993), 150. 165 Lyle Dick, “The Queer Frontier: Male Same-sex Experience in Western Canada’s Settlement Era,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 48:1, (Winter 2014), 43. Just FYI: NWMP Sergeant C.P. Thomson, Fort Macleod charged with immoral conduct following reports of sexual activities with another Mountie and dismissed from force in 1882 – “His case illustrates moral regulation within the ranks of the NWMP in the late nineteenth-century, but also the interplay between male same-sex desire and frontier space in a quasi-military environment in the West.” (24) – accused of trying to seduce riding companions while on patrol away from police posts of Fort Macleod and Fort Walsh, an 18-yr old constable James Fintz accused Thomson of “beastly practice” both outdoors and in his sergeant’s room at Fort Macleod – NWMP took action only against Thomson, dismissed for “grossly immoral conduct” 166 Matthew Barrett, “Hero of the Half-Breed Rebellion: Gabriel Dumont and Late Victorian Military Masculinity,” Journal of Canadian Studies, 48:4 (2014), 84.

38 patriarchal representatives of the emerging Anglo-Canadian society, the NWMP were tasked with not only portraying the qualities of an ideal man, but of simultaneously enforcing the qualities of the ideal woman. The cult of domesticity, whereby women were supposed to be the angels of the home informed British colonial contexts, as white women became the barometers of Christian morality and British ‘civility’ in their new settlements. Women’s bodies were perceived to represent order in British society; a woman safely enclosed in her home signified social order, whereas a woman out and about on the street (ie. sex worker) represented social disorder. In a colonial frontier (like everywhere!), this Victorian ideal was rarely achievable and not always a desirable option for women. However, as Perry demonstrates, the supposedly innate chaos of the frontier meant that white women were considered essential to the colonial project, largely “to encourage white men to adopt normative standards of masculinity and respectability.”167 In Southern Alberta, Indigenous women greatly outnumbered white women until well after the CPR station was built in 1883. As a result, the historiography of the NWMP really lacks any mention of women (the essay on ‘traditional’ narratives of the Mounted Police reflects this). Still, Fort Calgary’s history can reveal how women were not simply Victorian angels of the home. With a women’s prison and hospital on Fort Calgary’s site, we should be able to get a glimpse at how women navigated the realities of living in an emerging frontier town, the opportunities and limitations they experienced, and the extent to which women’s bodies were monitored and criminalized (I haven’t found any reference to these buildings).

Most of the studies that examine the policing of women (perhaps surprisingly) suggest that they were rarely policed in any real way at all. Perhaps because women were so outnumbered, they were simply less represented in criminal activity. It seems that the NWMP were particularly lenient when it came to the one female-dominated crime, sex work. The history of sex work and its connection to colonial settlement in Western Canada has been explored since R.C Macleod, who suggested that policing “laws designed to protect the moral wellbeing of the inhabitants” was met with “the least enthusiasm.”168 He presents some anecdotal examples to demonstrate that this lack of interest included prostitution, as Macleod argues the NWMP simply wanted to “keep an eye on it.”169 He provides little else for context or analysis.

Paying specific attention to Indigenous women, Sarah Carter’s early work on the development of racialized stereotypes of Indigenous women in Western Canada touches briefly on sex work. She demonstrates that government officials suggested men would be easily overwhelmed by Indigenous women’s sexuality (idea that all Indigenous women were essentially prostitutes –it goes back to Shelley Gavigan’s idea that Indigenous women were not necessarily ‘criminalized’ but they were ‘Indianized’), and that the NWMP could not possibly regulate, let alone resist, their behaviour. By creating this hypersexual image of all Indigenous women, the NWMP could “deflect criticism” for engaging in sexual relationships with them. Moving beyond stereotypes, Carter does suggest that some Indigenous women engaged in sex work and that the 1892 Criminal Code had separate legislation that made it “easier to convict Aboriginal women that other women” for prostitution. The potential for over-policing, or at least over-convicting, Indigenous women in comparison to their white counterparts would be interesting for

167 Perry, “Fair Ones,” 508. 168 R.C Macleod, “Crime and Criminals in the North-West Territories, 1873-1905,” in The Mounted Police and Prairie Society, 1873-1919, edited by William Baker, (Regina: Canadian Plains Research Center, 1998, 85-101), 94. 169 Macleod, “Crime and Criminals in the North-West Territories, 1873-1905,” 96.

39 further discussion.170 As victims of crime, Carter also points to the long history of murdered Indigenous women, discussing the 1889 Calgary trial of “Rosalie,” an Indigenous sex worker murdered by a veteran of the 1885 Rebellion, William Fisk.171

More recently, Lesley Erickson’s thorough study provides insight into “prairie women’s engagements with the criminal justice system.”172 Examining legal records and correspondence of NWMP investigations (1899-1910) she finds that the “explicit […] narratives of sex and violence” challenge the “mythic images of Canada’s prairie West.”173 Regarding policing of sex work, Erikson sees a shift over the 20thC. In the late 19th C, sex work was more likely to be policed intermittently, as Macleod suggests. The uptake of moral reform and fears of settler-women being sold into ‘white slavery’ (white women getting sold into sex trafficking) in the early 20thC meant that police were under more scrutiny from social purity activists to regulate prostitution.174 However, she also explains that by 1907, there were two laws under which a woman could be convicted of prostitution, either under the vagrancy laws (being a ‘night walker’) or for keeping a bawdy house.175 And, of course, the harsher punishments were given to women accused of prostitution, not the men soliciting – this “masculine bias” was, as Erikson suggests grounded in the vestiges of “the West’s homosocial culture [that] underlay the discrepancy between the rhetoric of protection and the realities of punishment.”176 These laws were supposed to encourage more rigorous policing of sex work, but Erikson confirms that most police forces, NWMP included, made use of “pragmatic policies of toleration and segregation,” continuing to see prostitution as a necessary evil (going back to the homosocial frontier? Single men need them!). This apparent concern the NWMP had to ‘protect’ white women engaging in sex work (I use the term ‘protect’ loosely, in the sense of monitoring them in red light districts) does not seem to have translated to Indigenous women (although a closer reading of Erikson might shed light on more information here).

White women did take on roles in NWMP barracks, even though they were not necessarily involved in policing. Bonnie Schmidt, more concerned with female policing in the 1970s, explains that in the late 19th C women’s involvement in the NWMP was rarely mentioned. She notes that “when women were mentioned, they were the wives of commanding officers who were most often portrayed as civilizing influences and exemplars of white British womanhood.”177 In David Bright’s article about prison life in Alberta, he argues that “prison duties” were not seen as part of the “proper function” of policing, and that women were indeed more suited for that labour.178 While he notes that they are rarely documented, the labour of women in Mounted Police jails reveals an interesting division between active, ‘manly’ police work, and the more private, ‘domestic’ work within the NWMP buildings. Bright identifies Mrs. S.L Stuttaford as the matron of the women’s jail in the early 20th C, which he specifies

170 Carter, “Categories,” 155. 171 Carter, “Categories,” 156-7; also explored in Lesley Erikson, Westward Bound: Sex, Violence, the Law and the Making of a Settler Society, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 16. 172 Erikson, Westward Bound, 4. 173 Erikson, Westward Bound, 12. 174 Erikson, Westward Bound, 88-89. Erikson also mentions there was tension between the NWMP and City police in Alberta over who would police liquor laws and sex trafficking, more info on this might be interesting. 175 Erikson, Westward Bound, 95. 176 Erikson, Westward Bound, 96. 177 Bonnie Schmidt, “Contesting a Canadian Icon: Female Police Bodies and the Challenge to the Masculine Foundations of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in the 1970s,” in Contested Bodies and Nation in Canadian History, edited by Patrizia Gentile et. al, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 370. 178 David Bright, “Life in Alberta’s Mounted Police Jails, 1905-1914,” Alberta History, 48:4, (2000)

40 also housed the “hospital and lunatic wards.” Bright does not take his gendered analysis much beyond presenting some interesting snapshots into the work of Mrs. Stuttaford, but a wider investigation into police matrons and the other roles women took on adjacent to NWMP policing would reveal to what extent gender informed the daily activities of the police (especially when it comes to ideas of reform and containment, but Bright does not go there). Moreover, women like Mrs. Stuttaford provide important examples of how white women were not only complicit in, but actively supported what the NWMP represented, a new ‘orderly’ British-Canadian colonial society.

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