Western Canada has figured historically as a focus point for new directions in human thought and action, migrations of the mind and body, and personal journeys of both a substantial and transcendental nature. The essays in Finding Directions West interrogate the meaning of those journeys, their reality, their memory, and their constructed identities within Western Canada itself. The book situates landscapes and peopled places in the West within the larger study of Western Canada and its transborder relationships. It draws scholars from a vareity of disciplines within history, from gender studies, to museum studies, to environmental history, in order to examine afresh Western Canada as a place for finding new directions in the human experience. -- From back cover
Contents
Partial List of Contents: Colonizer or Compatriot?: A Reassessment of Reveren John McDougall / Will Pratt ; "The Country Was Looking Wonderful": Insights on 1930s Alberta from the Travel Diary of Mary Beatrice Rundle / Sterling Evans ; Mountain Capitalists, Space, and Modernity at the Banff School of Fine Arts / PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall
In 1933, the Banff School was established as a summer outreach program of the University of Alberta, offering a single course in drama. Since then, it has become a renowned cultural destination and educational institution, today known as the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. As PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall recount in this engaging history, over its first four decades the school produced and circulated ideals of culture and liberal democratic citizenship that were intrinsic to the development of modern Canada. Uplift traces the role of the school in shaping arts and cultural education, as reflected in its array of interests from the artistic to the political, economic, and ideological. Situated within Banff National Park, the school and its surroundings combined stunning natural scenery and cultural capital in a symbolic national landscape. In an era of unstable cultural policy and state support for the arts, Uplift offers a nuanced account of one particular engine of nation building and tourism development. It draws attention to the past and present place of fine arts, culture, and the humanities in public education and in Canada's history, exploring what they mean to democracy, citizenship, and a life well lived. -- Provided by publisher
Contents
Introduction: Artists, Tourists, and Citizens ; Uplifting the People: Extension Education and the Arts ; Branding Banff: Arts Education, Tourism, and Nation Building ; Building a “Campus in the Clouds”: Space, Design, Modernity ; “Wholesome, Understandable Pictures”: Practices of Landscape Painting and Production of Landscapes ; Presence and Portrait: Indigeneity in the Park ; “Leading Artists of the World”: Teachers as Tourist Attractions and Pedagogues ; “Some Paint, Some Tan”: Students Coming to the Mountains ; Conclusion: The Arts, Nature, and Democracy