Canadian Parks for Tomorrow 2008 - Presentations

The creation of Stanley Park as Vancouver’s landmark urban park at the end of the nineteenth century was an active process that required a massive human effort to reshape the landscape to conform to popular expectations of idealized wilderness. Park advocates did not simply aim to preserve nature unimpaired by human disturbance, but instead sought increasingly elaborate means to improve nature through active management and intervention. In order to produce an authentic nature experience within the city that would satisfy Vancouverites’ expectations of wilderness, Stanley Park required improvement. Park improvements to Stanley Park in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included a refashioning of the animal landscape with subsequent ecological changes and feedback effects. The Vancouver Park Board set out to eliminate certain animal species and enhance the presence of others for the pleasure of park-goers. They hunted and killed pest and predator species, and simultaneously propagated and protected recreational animals. The construction of this city park as a natural retreat nestled within the urban environment involved significant manipulation of animal-life to achieve an “authentic” nature experience. But there were clear limits to this kind of human control. These modifications opened new niches for opportunist species to exert their autonomy and occupy the park. Animals found new ways to elude park policy and operate beyond the purview of human control.

The removal of homesteaders from the upper Athabasca River valley in 1910 prior to the re-designation of Jasper Forest Reserve as Jasper National Park is a well-known but insufficiently analyzed event in the annals of Rocky Mountains national parks history. This presentation will use newly uncovered archival sources to trace the course of the removal from Jasper and the subsequent harassment of families who moved to Grande Cache and thus, unwittingly, into the as yet unsurveyed federal Athabasca Forest Reserve. Surviving federal records help to paint the picture of the relations between the Department of the Interior's forestry and parks branches as they developed on the eastern slopes of the Rockies in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In turn, these help to explain why difficult tasks, like the removal of homesteaders, which tend to be associated with policing, fell to the only representatives of government in the region: forest and park superintendents and their staff. Second, the paper will further our understanding of the social upheaval that this removal caused Metis, the legacy of which seems to be that, at the expense of Aboriginal families, two dimensions of national identity were advanced: the creation of what were frequently and positively called playgrounds for well-heeled tourists in the early part of the twentieth century; and, more persistently, the creation of the impression that wilderness lands could be enjoyed all the more by future generations of Canadians because they had not been anything else than wilderness; that is, they had never been inhabited in any permanent sense. Third, the case of Jasper suggests a modification of the idea of wilderness in order to accommodate permanent habitation within the evolving understanding of the essential humanity of a wilderness ethic. If, as I have argued elsewhere, wilderness is us, then the possibility arises by which a working homestead (if not one supplemented by hunting and gathering) could feature as prominently in a protected area as horses, golf courses, gondolas, alpine huts, and downhill skiing facilities. First Nations people are not being asked to vacate proposed parks in the North, so is the time not now ripe for Parks Canada to initiate a policy of negotiating a reintroduction from or otherwise discouraged from remaining in areas that came under national park designation in the early twentieth century? At least one of the mountain national parks could, by including this dimension, exemplify how people lived, not just recreated, in wilderness settings.