Perspectives on Parks 2010 Presentations

When Captain George Vancouver visited the area just north of present-day Powell River, British Columbia in 1792, he named it Desolation Sound. He noted the multitude of Native settlements, almost all “abandoned,” amongst a wilderness that “afforded not a single prospect that was pleasing to the eye….” Move forward 170 years, however, and non-Native tourists to Desolation Sound wrote much the same about the absence of a human presence on the landscape and its pristine condition, though they appraised its worth quite differently. In fact, the main scene desolate to local eyes was the increasing number of yachts ruining the area’s “natural” and “wild” beauty. After years of public recommendations and departmental economic studies, British Columbia’s government created Desolation Sound Marine Park as well as smaller “satellite” parks nearby in 1973 to preserve the area, prevent the further privatization of its shores, and to capitalize on a growing tourist market. Integral to both these narratives was the cultural construction of a landscape that was seen much differently from its original Coast Salish – in this instance Sliammon (Tla’amin) – inhabitants.

Against this backdrop, my presentation explores the contested histories of the construction of human and environmental place in this ongoing, academically ignored, “contact zone.” Viewscapes of Desolation Sound represent a microcosm of power relations in flux between competing colonial and subaltern cultural structures. These competitions turned on controlling a master discourse of what constituted a “desirable desolation.” For BC Parks and other conservationists, “desolation narratives” were a means by which to perpetuate and justify a dominant and paternal relationship to the area’s First Nations. BC Parks and conservationists argued that the presence of Aboriginal people “using” the environment for resource extraction or settlement despoiled it, and, more importantly, ruined visitors’ experiences and expectations of an untouched, unclaimed wilderness; such use threatened to deconstruct Desolation Sound and satellite parks as a “desirable desolation.” For the Sliammon, their own narratives of desolation-making provided a means for critiquing unequal power relations. According to local First Nations, park boundaries, infrastructure and historical narratives participated in a colonial project that turned their homeland into a different sort of desolation, one infrequently visited by the place’s indigenous inhabitants yet overcrowded by – and thus despoiled by – outsiders. For the Sliammon, parks and conservationists made Desolation Sound an “undesirable desolation.” Both the above groups thus shared the perception that the presence of the “Other” ruined the environment, while both also were secure in their belief that their own presence in Desolation Sound was fitting rather than ruinous.

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During the twentieth century, Canadians were most likely to encounter wild animals in cities. Canadian historians often look to the study of rural wildlife in national parks to better understand our relationship with nature because, in many ways, wildlife has become emblematic of the country. From the portrait of a beaver on the five-cent coin to the inflatable moose that whimsically hovered over the audience in BC Place during the closing ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, rural wildlife has come to represent a significant aspect of Canada’s national identity. Yet most Canadians in the past century have experienced wild animals in cities rather than distant rural places.
This presentation examines the role of prominent landscape urban parks and zoos in the construction and presentation of wildlife in Western Canada. What Vancouverites encountered in Stanley Park for most of its history was a demonstration of national nature through the composition and display of human-modified animal landscapes. The Vancouver Park Board sought to improve the landscape of Stanley Park not only by altering the flora but also the fauna of the peninsula. Through the introduction and propagation of new species and the construction of an elaborate park zoo, the board strove to enhance the nature experience for urban park-goers by offering samples of authentic wildlife encounters. Over the course of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries Stanley Park emerged as a platform for the presentation of regional, national, and international nature as squirrels, swans, beaver, bison, and even polar bears inhabited the park to entertain millions of human spectators.
The creation of this animal landscape, of course, was not solely dictated by the guiding hand of the Park Board. Instead, the animal landscape of Stanley Park was built and re-built over time through a negotiation of competing and complementary human and non-human factors. Each anthropogenic modification of the environment of Stanley Park produced new niches or opportunities for animals to inhabit and exploit that environment in ways that often contradicted the will of the elected Park Board and its staff. The behaviour of these animals influenced Park Board decisions and placed material limits on humanity’s ability to transform the environment of Stanley Park.

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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries profoundly new ways of thinking about and acting within the natural world emerged throughout North America. Previous environmental value systems that viewed the natural world as an inexhaustible storehouse of resources waiting to be exploited increasingly gave way to anxieties about the loss of natural landscapes whose potential benefits to society were only beginning to be understood and appreciated. New relationships, many came to believe, would have to be forged between nature and humankind.

If anything, such cultural change was especially rapid on the British Columbia coast. Rapid urbanization beginning around the turn of the twentieth century completely altered the region’s human geography. Over the next four decades associated socio-cultural change led many local residents to view their natural surroundings, the mountain wilderness in particular, in a new light. No longer a regrettable impediment to progress, the Coast Mountains came to be seen as a still-wild, but now benign and “pure” landscape. The “discovery” of the territory that soon became Garibaldi Provincial Park was a major catalyst and venue for the popularization of these new perspectives.

An emerging mountaineering community successfully campaigned for the preservation of the Garibaldi landscape in its pristine state. Newspapers and politicians soon joined their chorus, proclaiming that mountain landscapes such as Garibaldi could foster the development of mass recreational cultures that would be a key contributor to British Columbia’s future physical, economic, and spiritual well-being. These new conceptions of the Coast Mountain landscape remain a dominant paradigm to this day.

Despite this quasi-utopian tone, however, public funding and policy for the park fell short of the expectations of Garibaldi’s many advocates. By examining this discrepancy one can gain a knowledge of the relationship between popular perceptions of landscape with parks policy in interwar Canada.