Canadian Historical Association 2008 Presentations

This paper address the creation of La Mauricie National park in the province of Quebec, in the 1970's. It presents how the federal institution Parks Canada used scientific ecology to justify the implementation of a new wilderness park on the otherwise humanized landscapes of la Mauricie region. By extracting cultural dimensions of the Maurician territoriality through scientific abstractions, Parks Canada was thus able to recreate it's institutional ideal of wild nature on this hybrid territory.

This paper examines the regulation of urban animals in Vancouver in the nineteenth century. As one of Canada's youngest western cities, Vancouver rapidly grew into one of the leading Pacific metropolises of North America. In part, that sudden growth was fueled by the bodies and labour of animals. Cows, pigs, chickens, and horses were a crucial component of the city's population. The early regulation of animals in Vancouver shows that animals played a vital role in city-building and that urbanization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a process of constructing a built habitat that facilitated symbiosis between humans and domestic animals.

As Toronto developed through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Don River Valley on its eastern periphery was straightened, diverted, and polluted. Particularly in its lower reaches, the river valley has been relegated to a “waste space”: a dumping ground for coal tailings, salt waste, and other “undesirables”—including people living on the fringes of society. This paper explores the interconnections between a marginal space and the marginalized populations who sought refuge there. The experiences of two groups in particular are explored: Depression-era "hoboes" who established an extensive camp in the Lower Valley in 1930 and 1931, and a series of Roma family groups who sought refuge in the valley in the early twentieth century.