Writing Alberta

Hello, I'm Frits Pannekoek and I'll be your guide in this series of seven videos on Alberta's past. In this first episode, we're not simply revisiting what happened in this province. We're asking a different question. How is Alberta's past written and rewritten and who gets to do that writing? To answer it, we'll move along three paths: through historians and their debates, through archivists and what they preserve, and through communities whose lives and kinship networks are now reshaping the story. In the early days, the story of this province was told by a small circle of popular writers. People like Grant McEwen and Hugh Dempsey turned oral memories and newspaper clippings into vivid tales of ranchers, politicians and so-called pioneers. Earlier still, New Albertans such as Archibald Macrae and John Blue tried to pin Alberta down as a kind of frontier experiment, echoing ideas that go back to Frederick Jackson Turner's famous frontier thesis, which imagined the West as an empty land waiting to be claimed. In this episode, you'll hear from historian Max Foran, archivist Curtis Frederick and Métis scholar Heather Devine. Together, they show us how archives, families and everyday politics all shape the stories we tell about this province. I think that

Every historian is delineated by the general sense of new newness that this province involves. Everything is new. And because everything is new and we have no reference points, everything we do has got to be original. You start with nothing. And the early historians started with very few reference points. They used oral history and they used newspapers as best they could and they wove together their stories about individuals. They turned their back on a traditional chronological narrative to a more personal narrative because that's all I had. That's all I had. And people like Jimmy McGregor and Grant McEwan and Jimmy Gray, they were the sort of people who brought history alive using minimal sources and talking about individuals who were still living or not long dead because everything was new. And the historical of newness changed with the opening of archives to the public in the 60s, the Glenmo for example. And then the universities beginning to turn out graduates in Canadian and in regional history. And indeed, one of the best sets of local histories was the Centennial series that came out in 67. No historian ever read them all, but every historian looked at them. Like every historian has consulted Grant McEwan and Jimmy Gray and Jim McGregor. We've all looked at those in order to develop a new sort of narrative, a pretty traditional narrative. Pretty traditional.

Each generation of historians tried to distinguish the province by proposing both theses and then defending them against critics. It's a romantic frontier story. Then David Breen came along and challenged myths about Alberta's ranching. And it drew both fire and support from other scholars, Foran included. The earliest

One I can remember of the David Breen was David Breen and his refutation of a thesis about the socioeconomic basis of ranching in Alberta and how differentiated for the United States. And David Breen persuasively argued that the Canadian ranching experience was very different. And that was so new, everyone was on it. Everyone was talking about Dave Breen and other people came straight at Breen and said he was wrong. I myself, I extended Breen in talking about what happened to the cattle industry. But Breen was the first one to really define a new ranching historiography, which still exists today. And everyone builds on this ranching. Again, a stampede, all the stampede literature, Ritha Van Herc's book on Mavericks, all in some way rooted to the ranching industry. And we're still fascinated by it. And I say we owe that to David Breen. I think you then have historians jumping on the big issues that were passed over. David Jones's job at Empire of Dust and the collapse of the economy and the dust bowl in the 30s. That was revolutionary in my opinion. These sorts of people building a new layer on the new. When the Centennial book came out, did we do it the usual way like Bill Weiser did it in Saskatchewan? Nope. We took a year and gave it to every historian worth anything. And we all wrote a chapter. You're in it, Frits. And we're all in it. And that was so darn new. That was so darn new that who thought of that? Alberta's

Historiography grows layer by layer as historians argue with one another and with the records that underpin their work. That raises a basic methodological question. How do you keep control of such a sprawling literature and still do something

New? John Foster was very Influential. He taught me how to do research essentially and how to be critical. He had a lot of influence on me. One of the things that Dr. Foster said to me, he said, "You must control the literature. When you set out to read, you need to control the literature." And he had books about essential books, books you should be aware of, maybe do the grad school read, and then the ones that you should know about, but you don't, you know, they're probably not the best. And this is my major beef right now with a lot of people that do this. They ignore previous scholarship and they reinvent the wheel. And it's not necessary. I mean, there's some things that are already done. Go back to those people and do something new yourself. Do something different. Don't just tell us about something and then have people go home.

New work has to grow out of old work. Even when it disagrees. In other words, there is a chain that runs from a box of records to a footnote. To a sweeping claim about Alberta's past. If historians are to control the literature, they first need to know what exists and how it fits together.

Most of the archives is made up of primary sources, as in the original documentation. We have a variety of specialties and interests here at the university. In 2019, we took custody of the Glenbow Library and Archives. And so the Glenbow Library, over its period, collected a wide range on Western Canadian history, with a focus on Alberta and Southern Alberta, but collected everything from farming records, ranching records, economic records, records of local groups and interest groups, whether it be community organizations or political parties. So there's a great amount of that material. There's a bit of exploration. To me, that's part of the fun of archives is doing that exploration of that

Primary source document. The archive is not just a place to confirm what we already think we know. It is a place to be surprised. There's a lot of collections in our

Holdings that could be used to discover innovation. Whether it's political innovation, we hold the records of the Reform Party as they started up here in Alberta and turned into the Canadian Alliance and today's Conservative Party of Canada. In a lot of ways, we don't really know how researchers are going to use our records. It's fun to see how they use our records. It's not just reading a report or reading correspondence. It's understanding what those records meant in context with the other records that they're saved with. All those sort of contextual clues that can also be found in our records and in the archives are often important and you can find meaning in different things that may not be readily available just on first reading of those records.

If much of Alberta's public life leaves a paper trail, Indigenous politics often do not. The most important decisions happen far from boardrooms and Hansard and kitchens and community halls. That is where Heather Devine takes us next. The

Innovations of politics, Indigenous politics, is that you get people together and yes, you have your meetings. But I have come to the conclusion after many, many years of participating that where work really gets done is at lunch, where everybody gets together and they're eating lunch and then, you know, you start talking about things. You start talking about big fish stories and where they come from. And then you talk about television. And all of a sudden you're eating and everybody loves to eat. It's why people break bread. It's a group event. It's a social event. And that's how you get to know people is you talk to them and you find out that, oh, did you watch that? Oh, yeah. What did you think? You know, you behave like normal people. You're no longer a civil servant. You're no longer a band counselor. You're just normal people. And that's the thing. It's very difficult. The people that have had influential and long lasting relationships with Indigenous communities are the ones who have been at it the longest. They didn't go away. They didn't disappear after six months or two years. You have to have these relationships. It takes a long time. And this is what people don't understand. You don't have a relationship if you're there sporadically.

This echoes broader work on the Prairie West by scholars like James Daschuk, whose clearing the plains lays bare how policy, disease and starvation reshaped Indigenous lives. It also resonates with J.R. Miller's work on residential schools, which insists that we center survivors' testimony when we interpret official records. Foran, meanwhile, approaches Alberta's past from another interesting angle. He argues that Alberta's historiography has become new on new, each generation interpreting the

Province afresh. And new is falling on new now, and now we're expanding. Revisionism's coming in. Books are out challenging Alberta's conservative ethic. And you've got books on everything, craft beer to photography, all popular type books. But they're all building on a belief that Alberta is worth distinguishing. And that's what we're all trying to do in our books, is distinguish Alberta. And because we are historians, in my opinion, we are not social scientists. We are liberal arts. And everything we write is an interpretation. Everything is a compilation of selected facts that we have put together. That in itself, the collage of facts that we bring together, that's interpretive enough. But then we interpret the collage and put it together in a whole. That's pure interpretation. And so every historian who goes into an archives and bases an archival book is innovative. We've got a differentiator province, a very different province, a very different province, different immigration makeup, a swell from the south, a legacy from the north, immigration from everywhere. And we've got this differentiation right from the get-go with weird, strange provincial governments and strange ideas about how government should happen. And new on new, working on that, produced a different type of historiography that's rooted in the differentiation of province and rooted in the newness. New on new, building on new. And we're still building on new. And until new gets old, then we start doing the real, total stuff.

New theses challenge old narratives. Revisionist histories question the stereotype of a uniformly conservative province. Scholars start writing about working-class life, culture, and even craft beer. But innovation on the page has to be matched by accountability to the people whose histories are being told.

Cheryl Troupe just published her new book about the Métis women of the Qu’Appelle Valley. And she wanted to communicate how they maintain their communities in a time of massive social change. And from that point of view, she interviewed women and she looked at old oral histories. And also the people writing a lot of these books are of Métis ancestry now. And they have family connections and they can sit down with people and talk to people frankly about things. Things that don't get into mainstream histories. Particularly in areas like the Qu’Appelle Valley where they actually had a removal of Métis road allowance people and moved them to northern Saskatchewan. And some people were so excited to get on the train to go north and other people were envious because they wanted to go with them. And then of course it was horrible because they burnt their houses. I mean it was a traumatic event and the people left were traumatized. Prosopography

In the hands of someone like Devine is not an abstract method. It is the slow, careful work of connecting names and parish records, census returns and family letters to living communities. And then checking those conclusions with the people themselves.

Prosopography has its roots in classics and it's about the business of interpreting artifacts from the past to identify names and figure out who people are. And in the ancient world, that's why you have to study Latin. I wasn't planning to do prosopography, but in my own work, one of the difficulties that genealogists have is dealing with people's nicknames, their surnames that change, and a lot of it's culturally driven. In doing this book, I had to familiarize myself with how French Canadians practice naming. You have your Christian naming conventions dictated by the Pope, where you are not allowed to give your child a frivolous name, you had to name them after saint. Their first name was a saint's name, the second name was whatever you wanted, and then of course you had nicknames. Once you start following dozens or hundreds of

Interconnected lives, nicknames and shifting surnames stop being minor details and become central evidence. From the archivist's perspective, that means building and protecting collections that can sustain this kind of work. One of the most requests that relates actually to the city of Calgary are what we call the Maussen plans. Maussen was a civil planner and designed some grand plans for the city of Calgary, sort of based on European inspiration. Sometimes they're called the Vienna on the Bow. And those plans, they're colourful, they're great, they show an interesting image of what Calgary could have been if they'd followed those plans. But World War I and other things got in the way. They're quite visually impactful, so they're very fun to show for

Classes. Those grand, unrealized plans for Vienna on the Bow hint at futures Calgary's elites once imagined but never built. They remind us that archives contain not only what happened, but what might have happened. The same is true in family stories. Reconstructing relationships is as central to writing Alberta's history as mapping an East City plan. The

Problem in written records is that people will read a name, say Joseph Desjardins or Desjardins, and they think that that Joseph is the one. And it's like there are more than one Joseph. And there are two Josephs on this reserve. I had a situation where one Joseph Cardinal was murdered. And in this book, I assumed he was one person. And I put it in the footnote. And then a little later, I got an email from the Cardinal family. And they said, "That man is still alive. We're his descendants." And they were really good about it. But this is a problem. If you don't understand genealogy, if you don't understand naming practices and how people express ideas in that context, you're going to misinterpret things. And as genealogists say, they all make mistakes. But when it comes to the Indigenous community, ideally you want to sit down with an older person, an elder, and hopefully it's informal. Because when they look at a list, a birth record for example, they'll look at it and say, "That's not the father. That baby is somebody else's." They know all that stuff. And technically, I guess, the actual identity of the father isn't important. The fact is, they're part of a family unit and that's all that matters. They're part of that unit. I think it's important that people understand that when Métis people are doing this kind of research and stuff, it's not necessarily about adding to the historiography. It's about dealing with their own family and community issues quite often. And I know this book was really for my mother. My mother got the information on her biological parents until she was well into her life. Her daughters were all grown up and everything. But she did track things down and then we figured out the surname of her father and then she was able to contact them. She wrote them. Wrote her surviving relatives and they wrote her back. I don't think you can understand a community without understanding how people are related. History

Can be a form of repair. Understanding who belongs to which family, who was moved where, and who was separated from whom is not just an academic exercise. It is part of healing. There is

A belief that the parties get together. They talk about it. They smoke the pipe. The spiritual aspects are there that you have made this bond. But if things go wonky as they do, well, it's not in force anymore. When the Europeans arrived, it was essentially a glorified real estate deal. They didn't understand that it was part of a larger kin relation, family relation. And, you know, certain groups, Treaty 7, they said we were sharing, but we weren't giving it away. And I believe that modern Indigenous settler negotiations are actually rooted in previous practices during the fur and robe trade and the opening of European travel into the continent. No single

Archive can hold Alberta's history. Instead, records are scattered across provincial, municipal, university and community repositories. In the province, definitely the three or four most important would be the provincial archives of Alberta and Edmonton. It holds a lot of the government records, but it does have a lot of records from private individuals and Alberta innovators as well. There's ourselves here at the University of Calgary, our archives and special collections. We have 12 and a half kilometres of material on a wide variety of things and more than 200,000 books in our rare books and special collections. The University of Alberta archives and the Bruce Peel library and their special collections up there is also another big resource. And then there's a Few if you're looking outside of the major centres, so the Esplanade archives in Medicine Hat for that corner of southeastern Alberta, the Galt Museum and Archives in Lethbridge in the southwest, and the Peace Archives up in Grand Prairie is also a good source. They have a lot of material and it's a growing archives as well. Taken together, these archives make it easier than ever to write nuanced, regionally grounded histories of Alberta. Yet, the stories we tell with that evidence often circle back to the same problem: Alberta's

Persistent belief in its own uniqueness. Alberta's

Historiography will always come back to its roots because that's who it's been from day one. New on, new on, new on, new. We've been the outlaw province, we've been the differentiator province. New on, new on, new. Us, us, us, us, us. We're unique. We're different. And once you think you're unique and different, then you are.

When a province tells itself over and over that it is exceptional, the real question becomes: who is included in that "we"? For most of the 20th century, the loudest voices in Alberta's history were settler politicians, businessmen, and the historians who wrote about them. But the most important innovations today may not be new labels for the province. They are coming from Indigenous and Métis scholars who are recentering kinship, land, and community in their work. A growing cohort of Indigenous and Métis scholars, archivists, and community researchers have begun to rewrite the very

Notion of Alberta. The Indigenous academics are so strong right now. They're good ones. They are good ones. They have the skills. Their work is excellent. And that makes me happy. I think we're experiencing a Renaissance.

This sense of a Renaissance in Indigenous scholarship brings this episode full circle. We began with a small group of non-Indigenous chroniclers writing about a new province on supposedly Empty land. We arrive at a moment where communities whose histories were pushed to the margins are now producing their own research. That shift changes what we expect from future historians. They will need to be at ease moving between oral testimony and textual records, between community priorities and institutional constraints, and between provincial narratives and family stories. And there is no better way to bring all of this together than to have Foran reflect on his own life as an educator And what he would do differently if he were to teach knowing what he knows now. I

Think I'd go to more issues that the kids could understand, the issues they lived with. I would be more interactive, more discussion, every essay I gave them, open-ended, completely open-ended. Because I think if I've learnt one thing in my whole life, it's the danger of prescriptiveness. And I don't like the black and white, I like the grey. And that's where I go every time. I go to the non-prescriptive and I go to the grey. Yeah, what I know now. Oh, I can make a big difference in the classroom if I could. Yep.

In this episode, we've followed three paths into Alberta's history. Through Max Foran, we've seen how historians build and rebuild big stories about ranching, politics, and the province's sense of self as new. Through Curtis Frederick, we've stepped inside the archives that make those stories possible. And through Heather Devine, we've watched how kinship, land, and community can reshape what writing Alberta even means. If there is a lesson here, it isn't that one school or one archive or one community has a final word. It's that Alberta's past is still being written and there is room for new questions, new records, and new voices. As we continue this series, I hope you'll carry their example with you. Be curious about where a story comes from, who is included in it, and what sources lie behind Alberta's history.