West – serie

When we think about women settlers on the Prairies, our notions tend to veer between the nostalgic image of the ""cheerful helpmate"" and the grim deprivation of the ""reluctant immigrant"". In this book, Leigh Matthews shows how a critical approach to the life-writing of individual prairie women can broaden and deepen our understanding of the settlement era. Reopening for examination a substantial body of memoirs published after 1950 but now largely out of print, Matthews engages critical and feminist theory to close the gap between our polarized stereotypes and the actual lived experiences of rural prairie women.Addressing both the limitations and possibilities of life writing, Matthews presents a sound, well-developed and well-written case for memoir as reconciling female experience to the dominant historiography of the prairie west. Reading for ""failures and incoherences"", the memoirs considered here reveal women's voices that probe a community's most cherished values and beliefs, reveal its conflicts and contradictions, and call leaders to account.

Promoters, Planters, and Pioneers is a comprehensive study of Belgian settlement in western Canada, Cornelius Jaenen shows that Belgian immigration was unique in its character and brought with it significant benefits out of proportion to its comparatively small numbers.Canada's first Immigration Act (1869) included Belgium among the ""preferred countries"" from which immigrants should be sought, but unlike many other European countries, Belgium did not encourage its nationals to emigrate to relieve economic, demographic, and social crises, and Belgian officials took a strong interest in their emigrants, monitoring the conditions of settlement and, where fraud was discovered, intervening diplomatically and paying for repatriation. The result was a resourceful body of settlers adaptable to both anglophone and francophone communities and adept at promotion and raising of capital.The first wave of immigration, beginning in the 1880s, consisted mainly of farmers to southern Manitoba and miners to Vancouver Island. A second wave after 1896, facilitated by a direct steamship link to Antwerp, brought more miners, as well as orchard planters to the Okanagan, sugar beet farmers to Alberta, and dairymen to Manitoba. World War I was followed by a further wave of agriculturally oriented settlement, and World War II by a mainly urban and skill-oriented cohort. In all cases, Belgians differed from the larger immigrant groups in that they were not recruited by important immigration societies and did not settle in ethnic blocs.There is probably no one better equipped than Cornelius Jaenen to write the history of the Belgians in western Canada. An eminent historian and the son of Flemish and Walloon Belgian immigrants himself, Professor Jaenen has gleaned, from Belgian and Canadian archival sources and from local, community, and family histories, a story rich in detail and context that will be invaluable to Canadians of Belgian origin as well as scholars and students of western Canadian ethnic and immigration studies.

Hugh Dempsey has for decades been one of Alberta's most prolific and influential public historians. Author of more than twenty books, he has also been ""on the ground floor"" of the development of many key Alberta institutions, including the Indian Association of Alberta, the Historical Society of Alberta, and most importantly, the Glenbow Museum. Now, in his own words, he recounts his interesting and varied careers as journalist, government publicity writer, popular historian, archivist and museum administrator, speaker, and lecturer.Beginning with a compelling account of his childhood in Edmonton in the 1930s - when his family was for a time on relief during the Depression - and his 1940s teenage escapades hitchhiking across the continent, Dempsey's narrative moves into the frenetic world of post-war urban journalism. A fateful chance assignment as a reporter for the Edmonton Bulletin in February 1950 led to his involvement with the fledgling Indian Association of Alberta, its secretary John Laurie, president James Gladstone, and Gladstone's daughter Pauline, whom Dempsey would eventually marry. This in turn led to a strong interest in Indigenous culture and biography through which Dempsey was able to combine oral history with scholarly records to produce historical writing with a broad popular appeal.During the 1950s, Dempsey helped design early provincial historical recognition programs and began his lifelong involvement with the Historical Society of Alberta. In 1956 he joined the Glenbow Foundation (later Glenbow Museum), where for the next thirty-five years he would play a crucial part in its growth and reputation for excellence, designing and managing the Glenbow Archives and eventually serving as Acting Director of the Museum before retiring in 1991. Written with the trademark Hugh Dempsey eye for detail and lively anecdote, this memoir will be essential and enjoyable reading for anyone interested in Western and Indigenous history and the growth of key Alberta cultural institutions.

Dirty Thirties is the sobriquet commonly applied to the agricultural crisis in the drylands of southern Saskatchewan in Canada that coincided with the Great Depression, and it is generally assumed that prior to this period healthier, normal conditions prevailed. In Happyland, Curtis McManus contends that the ""Dirty Thirties"" actually began much earlier and were connected only peripherally to the Depression itself. McManus has mined the rarely consulted records of Rural Municipalities in Saskatchewan, as well as government documents, ministerial correspondence, local community histories, newspapers, and publications of relevant government departments, to tell a story of a quarter-century of stubborn persistence but also of absurdity, despair, social dislocation, moral corrosion, and inconsistent and often inept government policy. Thanks to McManus's rare and welcome blend of sound scholarship and living breathing prose, it is a gripping and evocative story as well.

The cowboy, as perhaps no other figure, has captured the imagination of North Americans for over a century. Before Owen Wister's publication of The Virginian in 1902, the image of the cowboy was essentially that of the dime novel - a rough, violent, one-dimensional drifter, or the stage cowboy variety found in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show. Wister's novel was to transform, almost overnight, this image of the cowboy. Soon after its publication, Wister sent a copy, inscribed ""To the hero from the author"", to Everett Johnson, a cowboy from Virginia who had been a friend of Wister's in Wyoming in the 1880s. Johnson had migrated to Alberta by the 1890s, eventually settling in the Calgary area. Before his death in 1946, his daughter-in-law, Jean Johnson, transcribed Everett's stories of the old west and collected them into a manuscript, now on deposit in the Glenbow Archives.In The Cowboy Legend, John Jennings, building on Jean Johnson's work, details the evidence that Everett Johnson was the initial and prime inspiration for Wister's cowboy, and in the process shows that Johnson led a fascinating life in his own right. His memories of both the Wyoming and Alberta cattle frontiers provide insight into ranch life on both sides of the border, and the compelling parallel biographies of Johnson and Wister feature vignettes of legendary period figures such as Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp, and Butch Cassidy, not to mention the best man at Johnson's wedding, Henry Longabaugh, a.k.a. the Sundance Kid. With an impressive range of scholarship and archival research, Jennings melds this realistic study of the cowboy frontier with an intriguing account of Wister's subsequent creation of the cowboy mystique, aided by two close friends and perhaps somewhat unexpected collaborators, Frederic Remington and Theodore Roosevelt. As compulsively readable as it is informative, this unique contribution to western history and literature will be welcomed by fans and scholars alike.

As playwright, actor, director, teacher, mentor, theatre administrator, and critic, Sharon Pollock has played an integral role in the shaping of Canada's national theatre tradition, and she continues to produce new works and to contribute to Canadian theatre as passionately as she has done over the past fifty years. Pollock is nationally and internationally respected for her work and support of the theatre community. She has also played a major role in informing Canadians about the ""dark side"" of their history and current events.This collection, comprised entirely of new and original assessments of her work and contribution to theatre, is both timely and long overdue. It includes a new play titled Sharon's Tongue by the Playing with Pollock Collective.

In the past, Western Canada was a place of new directions in human thought and action, migrations of the mind and body, and personal journeys. This book anthology brings together studies exploring the way the west served as a place of constant movement between places of spiritual, subsistence and aesthetic importance. The region, it would seem, gained its very life in the movement of its people. Finding Directions West: Readings that Locate and Dislocate Western Canada's Past, showcases new Western Canadian research on the places found and inhabited by indigenous people and newcomers, as well as their strategies to situate themselves, move on to new homes or change their environments to recreate the West in profoundly different ways. These studies range from the way indigenous people found representation in museum displays, to the archival home newcomers found for themselves: how, for instance, the LGBT community found a place, or not, in the historical record itself. Other studies examine the means by which Metis communities, finding the west transforming around them, turned to grassroots narratives and historical preservation in order to produce what is now appreciated as vernacular histories of inestimable value. In another study, the issues confronted by the Stoney Nakoda who found their home territory rapidly changing in the treaty and reserve era is examined: how Stoney connections to Indian agents and missionaries allowed them to pursue long-distance subsistence strategies into the pioneer era. The anthology includes an analysis of a lengthy travel diary of an English visitor to Depression-era Alberta, revealing how she perceived the region in a short government-sponsored inquiry. Other studies examine the ways women, themselves newcomers in pioneering society, evaluated new immigrants to the region and sought to extend, or not, the vote to them; and the ways early suffrage activists in Alberta and England by World War I developed key ideas when they cooperated in publicity work in Western Canada. Finding Directions West also includes a study on ranchers and how they initially sought to circumscribe their practices around large landholdings in periods of drought, to the architectural designs imported to places such as the Banff Centre that defied the natural geography of the Rocky Mountains. Too often, Western Canadian history is understood as a fixed, precisely mapped and authoritatively documented place. This anthology prompts readers to think differently about a region where ideas, people and communities were in a constant but energetic flux, and how newcomers converged into sometimes impermanent homes or moved on to new experiences to leave a significant legacy for the present-day.

Alberta writing has a long tradition. Beginning with the pictographs of Writing-on-Stone, followed by Euro-Canadian exploration texts, the post-treaty writing of the agrarian colonization period, and into the present era, Alberta writing has come to be seen as a distinct literature. In this volume Melnyk and Coates continue the project of scholarly analysis of Alberta literature that they began with Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature (2009). They argue that the essays in their new book confirm that Alberta's literary identity is historically contingent with a diverse, changing content, that makes its definition a work-in-progress.The essays in this volume provide contemporary perspectives on major figures in poetry and fiction, such as Robert Kroetsch, Sheila Watson, Alice Major, and Fred Stenson. Other essays bring to light relatively unknown figures such as the Serbian Canadian writer David Albahari and the pioneer clergyman Nestor Dmytrow.Writing Alberta offers a detailed discussion of contemporary Indigenous writers, an overview of Alberta historiography of the past century, and the fascinating autobiographical reflections of the novelist Katherine Govier on her literary career and its Alberta influences. This Collection demonstrates that Alberta writers, especially in the contemporary period, are not afraid to uncover, re-think, and re-imagine parts of Alberta history, thereby exposing what had been lain to rest as an unfinished business needing serious re-consideration.

Settler ranching in southern Alberta conjures the image of a lone cowboy riding through the foothills or a stoic ranch hand roping errant cattle. But women have always played an integral part in the cattle industry, often working without recognition or support to meet the challenge of the frontier.Ranching Women in Southern Alberta examines the rhythms, routines, and realities of women's lives on family ranches. As these ranches replaced the large-scale cattle operations that once covered thousands of acres, women were called upon to ensure not only the ongoing economic viability of their ranches, but also the social harmony of their families and communities. At the same time, ranching women enjoyed personal freedoms and opportunities unknown to their urban and European contemporaries.The great-granddaughter of pioneer ranchers, Rachel Herbert brings a unique insight to the stories of these brave and talented women who carved a role for themselves and their daughters during the dawn of the family ranch.

The Rocking P Ranch was one of the most ambitious family ranches in Southern Alberta. Founded in 1900 by Roderick Riddle Macleary, the Rocking P flourished during the Second Cattle Frontier as open-range the Texas System ranches failed. Beginning in 1923, Maxine and Dorothy Macleay edited, reported, and published The Rocking P Gazette, a monthly newspaper grounded in the daily life of the Rocking P. Ranch. With an audience of their parents and relatives, cowpunchers, teachers, and cooks, the 12- and 14-year-old sisters set out to create a family newspaper that reflected as closely as possible the commercial publications of the time. With sections for local news, advertisements, riddles, poetry, and contributions from Macleay ranch hands, The Rocking P Gazette brings the family ranch to life. Clay Chattaway and Warren Elofson draw upon this remarkable resource to explore the Second Cattle Frontier and to tell the story of the Rocking P Ranch. Through the lens of The Rocking P Gazette, Chattaway and Elofson detail not only a system of agricultural production, but a way of life that continues to this day.

Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges is a collection of public lectures delivered by historian Dr. Elizabeth Jameson during her tenure as Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair in American Studies at the University of Calgary from 1999 to 2017.Together, these lectures represent the intellectual evolution of an important and influential scholar told through engaging original research. Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges presents insightful and challenging discussions of historical questions informed by contemporary debates. Ranging from the gold camps of California to northwest Alaska, from North Dakota homesteads of the late 19th century to New Jersey cities of the 1960s, they address the boundaries that divide people and the ways that private acts in everyday lives can make meaningful change.Dr. Jameson explores the histories of borderlands, labour, women, workers, people of colour, and the connected pasts of Canada and the United States. Rejecting approaches that write most people out of history, she makes humanity visible again and again. Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges is a record of a remarkable career.

Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges is a collection of public lectures delivered by historian Dr. Elizabeth Jameson during her tenure as Imperial Oil-Lincoln McKay Chair in American Studies at the University of Calgary from 1999 to 2017.Together, these lectures represent the intellectual evolution of an important and influential scholar told through engaging original research. Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges presents insightful and challenging discussions of historical questions informed by contemporary debates. Ranging from the gold camps of California to northwest Alaska, from North Dakota homesteads of the late 9th century to New Jersey cities of the 1960s, they address the boundaries that divide people and the ways that private acts in everyday lives can make meaningful change.Dr. Jameson explores the histories of borderlands, labour, women, workers, people of colour, and the connected pasts of Canada and the United States. Rejecting approaches that write most people out of history, she makes humanity visible again and again. Thresholds, Walls, and Bridges is a record of a remarkable career.