This exhibition catalogue introduces historic photographs of Indigenous peoples of Western Canada from a collection housed at the University of Alberta's Bruce Peel Special Collections. The publication focuses on the ancestors represented in the collection and how their images continue to generate stories and meanings in the present. The selected photographs contribute to a richer, deeper understanding of the past. There is strength, character, persistence, determination, artwork, humour, dance, celebration, and so much more in the photographs. Some serve as records of cherished landscapes that may have been altered. Others provide links to ancestors: revered leaders, soldiers, healers, thinkers, and orators. The curators hope that the process of identifying the people in these photographs, only begun here, will continue. (Provided by Publisher)
Contents
Foreword / Chief Willie Littlechild ; The nature of the collection and its challenges ; Western Canada in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries ; The aims of the curators ; The Exhibition
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 1795 the Hudson's Bay Company established Edmonton House and the North West Company Fort Augustus a few kilometres downstream from the present day city of Edmonton. Although both posts were moved several times, they operated side by side as the major administrative, trade, and provisioning centres on the North Saskatchewan River from 1795 to 1821, when the companies merged.
The post journals and district reports from Edmonton House for the period from 1806 to 1821 are reproduced verbatim in this volume. Long available only to researchers with access to the collections of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives, these journals and district reports provide a detailed day-by-day account of the operations of Edmonton House during this crucial period. They provide direct insight into the Aboriginal, social, and economic history of the region, and new information on the foundation of the Red River settlement adn the struggle for control of the trade in the Athabasca region. -- From back cover
Contents
Edmonton House Post Journals, 1806-1921 ; District Reports, 1816-1821