Rejuvenating Wilderness: The Challenge of Reintegrating Aboriginal Peoples into the “Playground” of Jasper National Park
All 11,228 km2 of Jasper National Park (JNP) have always had what the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies as Category II designation. This category privileges its national park status and the preservation of ecological integrity. But constant use by humans and animals of the park’s congested Upper Athabasca River Valley (UARV) renders it much more characteristic of what the IUCN calls a Category V protected area, managed chiefly for conservation and recreation, “where the interaction of people and nature over time has produced an area of distinct character with significant aesthetic, ecological and/or cultural value, and often with high biological diversity. Safeguarding the integrity of this traditional interaction is vital to the protection, maintenance and evolution of such an area.”[647] Balancing human and non-human life in the UARV is an ongoing challenge in managing Canada’s fifth national park, by far the largest of the seven located in the mountains along the boundary of Alberta and British Columbia. Even more than the bedeviling binaries inherent in what earlier chapters have called the utilitarianism and preservation, use and conserve, and development and preservation duality of Parks Canada’s mandate, the ones inherent in this challenge pit not only humans against non-human life, but also non-Natives against Natives, and well-to-do urban tourists against labouring locals. The interstices of these binaries only stiffen the challenge, foregrounding perhaps even more than what James Morton Turner meant in coining the phrase (quoted in George Colpitts’s chapter) “paradoxes of popular wilderness.”
All seven mountain national parks – Banff (1885), Yoho (1886), Glacier (1886), Waterton Lakes (1895), Jasper (1907–09), Mount Revelstoke (1914), and Kootenay (1920) – are, as the editor’s introduction notes, children of Yellowstone, western North America’s and the world’s first national park. The Romantic notion of wilderness gave rise to its establishment by the U.S. Congress on 1 March 1872 “as a public park or pleasureing-ground [sic] for the benefit and enjoyment of the people,”[648] the beneficiaries of the park’s geysers and hot springs, should a profitable tourism industry develop. Regulations precluded permanent human presence – by local Bannocks, Crow, Blackfeet, Shoshone, or anyone else – in its 9,000 km2, so that visitors to comparatively remote realms could behold Nature in its sublime purity and experience supernatural spiritual enrichment unmediated – unperverted – by a human dimension. Axiomatic in the Yellowstone model,[649] then, is the protection of wilderness by the outlawing of permanent human residence. Following on the heels of Romanticism and, although prompted by additional motivations, early twentieth-century conservation continued to practise a policy of exclusion long enough that only about fifteen years, the 1950s and early 1960s, separated the effects of its policies from environmentalists’ call – identified as the second conservation movement – to position ecological integrity as the priority in the management of protected areas in western North America.[650] But although most of us “windshield visitors” to mountain national parks cherish the Yellowstone model, it is no longer tenable. Nowhere is this clearer than in the UARV. Moreover, in all such regions of Canada where non-Native populations outnumber Natives, the wilderness playground paradox favours majoritarian white culture and precludes Aboriginal presence.[651] We have reached a juncture where untenability and injustice coincide.
Jasper Forest Park (1907) became Jasper Park in 1909. Its first acting superintendent, John W. McLaggan, lost no time in ordering all hunters’ guns sealed and deputing Lewis Swift, the lone white homesteader, to ensure they were.[652] McLaggan offered and paid compensation for buildings and other improvements to six families of mixed blood (Métis [Cree and white, or Iroquois and white]) inhabiting homesteads in the UARV and told them all to leave. Only their departure, not their destination, concerned him. These homesteaders – four families named Moberly, one Joachim, and another Findlay/Finlay – were only the latest inhabitants of the UARV, for, as it does today, the valley had served many centuries of travellers and seasonal residents as an east/west thoroughfare through the Rocky Mountains. With the Athabasca and Miette rivers forming the relatively low Yellowhead Pass, the UARV played this role in superior fashion, as did the north-south route that the Snake Indian and Rocky rivers provide by meeting the Athabasca within a few kilometres of one another, and only a day’s ride by horse downstream from the tri-valley confluence of the Athabasca, Maligne, and Miette. While it is doubtful that over the past eleven centuries hunter-gatherers often practised the sedentary lifeway of erecting permanent habitations in the UARV, archaeological evidence makes plain that the valley had long witnessed an active human presence at different points of the annual cycle.[653] That two dozen groups have signed on as members of the Aboriginal Forum that JNP began establishing a decade ago clarifies how so many peoples, including Cree, Stoney, Shuswap, Ojibwe, several groups of Métis, Sekani, Carrier, Iroquois, and white consider the valley a part of their abiding heritage.
The IUCN’s Category V designation aims to retain cultural practices that are ongoing in a landscape, not, as would be the case with Aboriginal or Métis groups, rejuvenate a cultural practice curtailed by the park’s establishment. Any proposal to rejuvenate a cultural practice – whether annually practising ceremonial rites at locations identified by different groups as spiritually significant, or seasonally or permanently homesteading – challenges both the IUCN’s categorization and current practice by Parks Canada Agency (PCA), which (as Brad Martin’s chapter shows) has for some time worked closely with First Nations in the establishment and management of new parks and park reserves (especially the northern twelve, which cover 173,000 km2, nearly 65 per cent of the national total), but which has yet to invite evicted people or their descendants to return and take up residence in existing parks. In the case of the UARV, to act on any proposal for permanent re-settlement of any Aboriginal people would embroil Parks Canada in the thorny questions of prioritizing the rights of different Native groups and of prioritizing eras of past occupation. Dendroarchaeological evidence shows that the first of the evicted homesteaders’ cabins in the UARV was built no earlier than 1897, so accommodating homesteaders’ descendants would mean highlighting little more than two decades – 1897–1909 – of human history.[654] Why should such a brief and recent period receive precedence? Why should particular people receive special attention when, according to one source, more than a hundred people were in the valley in 1907, only two years before the eviction of the six families that had built permanent structures left a unique paper trail because they were paid compensation?[655] But is such thorniness grounds for denying occupation by any Native group? These questions face the staff of JNP at a time when Alan Latourelle, the agency’s chief executive officer, is on record as stating that
a Skins golf tournament on a heritage golf course that golfers have been competing on for more than a century, or a dragon boat race on a hydroelectric reservoir already being used for power boating and scuba [sic] are not likely to impair a national park nor the idea of national parks. The environmental assessments and public review of those and other events ensure they are responsibly planned and carefully delivered. And these events enable participants and spectators not just to enjoy exciting moments in spectacular settings, but to discover and connect to Canada’s protected heritage. There are many ways to discover a national park and these events are among them. We very much want Canadians to discover and connect to these places.[656]
Managing people – “all Canadians,” as Latourelle is fond of repeating – remains as much a part of the mandate of national parks as the protection of ecological integrity.
Co-management initiatives between a national park in southern Canada and its neighbours would have to deploy a policy that Parks Canada has championed and trumpeted only in seldom-visited, remote national parks and park reserves established in the past four decades.[657] There is common ground between the past and the future, but, at least in terms of the international parks movement’s understandings about the management of protected areas, Parks would need to re-designate land in order to mend the discontinuity that a century of Category II designation has imposed. Even a re-designation of what is called the frontcountry of JNP from Category II to Category V necessitates reconsideration of the Yellowstone model and the values that lie behind the concept of wilderness protection established by Canada’s first national parks act in 1887, which required that, insofar as “[n]o person shall … locate, settle upon, use or occupy any portion of the said public park,” management of Rocky Mountains (later, Banff National) Park would require “[t]he removal and exclusion of trespassers.”[658] This requirement was reiterated in the National Parks Act of 1930, which – in wording paraphrased from the United States’ Organic Act of 1926 and reiterated as recently as Canada’s National Parks Act of 2000 – maintains that “[t]he Parks are hereby dedicated to the people of Canada for their benefit, education and enjoyment, … and … shall be maintained and made use of so as to leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.”[659]
The interpretation of this ideal follows both its spirit and its letter: according to the principles that guided Parks Canada from 1994 to 2006, “[w]ilderness, is an enduring natural area of sufficient size to protect pristine ecosystems which may serve physical and spiritual well being. It is an area where little or no persistent evidence of human intrusion is permitted so that ecosystems may continue to evolve.”[660] Slightly paraphrased, this definition followed one articulated by the IUCN after its Fourth World Wilderness Congress, held in Colorado in 1987.[661] Intentionally or not, it emphasized enjoyment of the non-human by humans. As was noted a decade ago, and repeatedly in chapters of this volume,[662] a paradox inheres in this definition that effectively precludes its enforcement as a management policy in a park with Category II designation. The implicit understanding that some forms of recreation are permissible within a mandate to protect ecosystems acknowledges the ongoing presence of humans; that is, someone’s “physical and spiritual well being” prospers, but it does so because some human activity and activity by some humans are privileged, and others are outlawed. The privileging runs along economic lines: those who can afford to prosper do so: snowboarding trumps ranching, for example; hiking trumps hunting (in most parks, at least[663]). But the economic privileging has a habit of going unacknowledged. John Marsh’s paper from the 1968 conference, Canadian National Parks: Today and Tomorrow, called for parks to be maintained in order “to provide most wilderness users with a satisfying high-quality experience.”[664] So, the matter becomes a question of which individuals, which consumers of wilderness, can afford the “high-quality experience.”[665] That the economic lines often resemble ethnic lines that separate Natives from non-Natives is a commonplace of Canadian history, Latourelle’s emphasis on “all Canadians” notwithstanding.
Rendering all Canadians as identical when it came to enjoying a national park was merely the rhetorical manœuvre that the first piece of protectionist legislation made in 1887 and that subsequent acts of legislation have repeated. It persists because not to discriminate for and against users seems appropriate for the federal management of a protected area for national benefit. However, we know that we are patently not all equal in our use and enjoyment of JNP or any other national park. Marvin Henberg provoked his audience at the Fifth World Wilderness Congress in 1995 by arguing that to support the above-quoted 1987 IUCN definition of wilderness “tacitly supports the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans.”[666] Not just a federal agency, then, but all of us who tacitly support its mandate are complicit. Practically, the definition involves ethnicity and class, not just nationalism. If the Aldo Leopolds of the environmental movement that emerged in the middle of the last century managed, by “see[ing] the environment as a set of interactive relationships between humans and the rest of nature,” to “transcend dramatically the more limited national consciousness of the [early twentieth-century] conservationists,” then it behooves those in the early twenty-first century to attempt to transcend not just nation but also ethnicity and class in appreciating, evaluating, and managing the formal relationships that occur in protected areas between human and non-human life.[667] As was the case for Leopold and his colleagues, so for Canadians today, the challenge – or might we regard it as inspiration? – comes, as will be shown, from abroad.[668]
Human rights certainly have been upheld in negotiations for the establishment of national parks since 1969, when 1,500 people, 85 per cent of them Acadians, were summarily evicted at the time that Kouchibouguac National Park was established in eastern New Brunswick.[669] Human rights certainly would figure prominently in negotiations for a new park today. So, one must ask: how is Parks Canada’s policy of wilderness protection in the mountain parks still tenable except from the point of view of pure science? Apart from managing a park as though it were a laboratory field station, protected from all human intrusion, what could be meant by wilderness? Perhaps some sort of reserve could succeed in isolation from humans, but, if looked at dispassionately, a national park that accommodates highways, fibre-optics cables, train tracks, and a recently twinned pipeline could never hope to do so. Increasingly, it appears as if the concepts of wilderness and wilderness protection that were born and bred in western North America are doing JNP a disservice.[670] While Parks Canada has adopted a classification of five zones that recognize degrees of human presence and use,[671] Canadian parks are responding slowly to progressive thinking about the management of protected areas. Fifteen years ago, William Cronon’s anthology Uncommon Ground articulated criticism of this traditional practice in American parks.[672] Its subtitle, Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, sounded a reasonable – if to wilderness devotees a diabolical and heretical – note of insistence on the human role in non-human nature and prompted a new wave of conceptions of protected landscapes that had “aim[ed] to conserve tangible and intangible landscape values that are the outcome of the interaction of people and nature.”[673] North Americans loyal to early twentieth-century conservationism (the Yellowstone model) thought such an aim belonged properly only in western Europe, where proponents of protected areas simply had no choice but to manage long-inhabited and long-worked landscapes.[674] That it was a “Eurocentric concept” meant, then, that the IUCN’s Category V had no place in western North America[675]; it was precisely the openness, the vacancy of large areas of the West that early preservationists and conservationists had been determined to see protected. As Joseph Sax argued three decades ago, one of the problems for North Americans in our attitude to the West is our inability to cope with landscapes that fail to dissociate people from natural areas; to combine them, we think, is to taint if not pervert non-human nature.[676] According to this thinking, if “protected landscapes often have goals of preserving the traditional local culture and encouraging a lively sustainable economy,” the Yellowstone model wants nothing to do with them.[677] Just ask visitors to mountain parks.
One hundred and more years ago, officials with the Department of the Interior could not see Aboriginal people, any more than the general populace could; their view of a vacant wilderness depended upon this myopia and a subscription to the doctrine of the vanishing Indian, undergirded by a deterministic and what was regarded as a “progressive” view of history. Moreover, the emerging authority of science could not offer an antidote to the myopia since wilderness is not a scientific concept but a human construct, a non-Native human construct.[678] Generally speaking, the century-old North American understanding of wilderness erected an apartheid between the human and non-human realms, such that people essentially constitute a problem for managers of protected areas. Cronon’s edition of essays relentlessly showed its readers facets of that apartheid and reasons why proponents of wilderness insisted on it. As well, it showed how such apartheid perpetuated a ban on all permanent settlement. But that ban had established other instances of apartheid, ones between tourists and permanent occupants (whites and Natives, thereafter visitors to and inhabitants of towns like Banff and Jasper) and between well-heeled tourists and labourers – merciless binaries. Protected landscapes are heralded for the species they protect but are seldom examined for the ideologies or cultural values that they protect and project.
Propounding wilderness is escapist; malaise with the world inhabited by humans (well, urbanites) prompts us to suppose and desire a better place, one untrammelled by what disturbs and disgusts us about our created world. This anti-modernist spirit held sway when Jasper Forest Park was established in the midst of the great early twentieth-century shift of Canada’s population from overwhelmingly rural to – and for the first time – urban and rural evenly split.[679] Wilderness parks in the Rocky Mountains, playgrounds as they were then called, became the realm for Canadians who could afford to perceive protected areas as an escape from urban blight. “Safe and inviolate” from “the power of man,” these refuges/sanctuaries appear, in the words of the guidebook to Jasper written by Mabel Williams (see Alan MacEachern’s chapter, above), “new” because newly “made accessible to beauty lovers of the world.”[680] Beauty did not inhere in human life; exclusive to the non-human, it precluded signs of ‘sordid’ toil by humans of other class or ethnicity than the beholder’s.
The implicit European criticism of this perspective ultimately prompted the IUCN’s categorization of protected areas.[681] With its seven categories of designation, the graduated European view is influencing North American thinking about biosphere protection (though still more in the east than in the west) just as it is gradually gaining favour around the world, in part because as a species we are coming to the recognition that “strict protection measures alone are … inadequate to secure the biodiversity values of protected areas.”[682] If we take people out of the landscape, we also take out people’s interest in and commitment to protecting it, cherishing it, and maintaining it (as well, admittedly, as some people’s interest in putting it to uses that appear ecologically hostile or imperiling). We evict its most obvious stewards. Assigning it to humans employed to manage it might have made sense at one time in the West, but those managers do not enjoy robust support from the country’s citizenry. The national identity of JNP and its fellow parks is muted: as Lyle Dick notes in his epilogue, Canadians do not exhibit a widespread, vital engagement with the challenge of managing national parks; most of us assume their perpetual existence rather as we do an infinite supply of potable water.[683] And yet, the idea of reinstating an ongoing Aboriginal or Métis presence – that is, residence – in the UARV still sounds untenable. It does so, not because the perception remains unchanged that First Nations and Métis associations lack a cultural history worthy of showcasing in the nation’s southern parks,[684] but because a reintegration of a hunting-gathering lifeway poses a potential safety risk to other park users. As well, although it encourages Parks Canada staff to consult with Native people, the federal Department of Justice admonishes against establishing a precedent of accommodating them in any way that involves their ongoing occupation of national parks. Co-management occurs as an idea bandied around in meetings, not a practice out on the land.[685]
Fig. 1. Parc national des Pyrénées, Lac de Gaube. June 2007. [Photo: I.S. MacLaren.]
Fig. 2. Parc national des Pyrénées, Lac de Gaube (detail). June 2007. [Photo: I.S. MacLaren.]
What remains wrong with the scene depicted in figure 1, such that its viewer would be shocked to learn that it was photographed in JNP? Cattle lowing in an alpine meadow along the edge of which runs a road that permits access to Lac de Gaube by tourists and school children might not strike most people as appropriate for JNP.[686] What would the cost be to the prevailing sense of Jasper, were a portion of it occupied by someone other than tourists/outdoor sports enthusiasts and something other than “wild” animals? What would be the cost to the prevailing sense of Jasper if the school children were on a week-long course at a culture camp operated by a First Nation (a different one each year) teaching the history of its human occupation of the UARV and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK)? If the concept of wilderness acknowledged the longstanding cultural presence of First Nations and Métis cultures, JNP would, at least in the montane and perhaps in selected locations in the backcountry, have to be re-zoned if not re-designated as a park protecting both ecological and cultural values, but it might also pique the interest of a new generation of visitors at a time when park visitation and use of the backcountry are decreasing lower than ever.
The scene in figures 1 and 2 was photographed in June 2007 in the Parc National des Pyrénées, a park of 457 km2 established in 1967, which proclaims itself as “protected nature in balance with man.” Official wording mentions that “[t]he imposing landscapes were colonized little by little by vegetation and animals. Man also, over the course of centuries, has shaped these spaces by grazing his flocks there, by harvesting the forests, and by practicing prescribed burning … [ellipsis in original]. Today, with the creation of the National Park of the Pyrénées, new rules of balance have been established between man and wild life.”[687] This is a typical description for Category V protected areas and one that accords well with a photograph showing a steep-sloped boulder-bedecked alpine meadow, tourists, a narrow cinder road, school children, and cows. Backing into the Spanish border, Lac de Gaube provides its visitor with hikes as “wild” as, if rather busier than, those available in JNP, but also, at the lakeshore, a human presence such as one finds in many parts of the UARV as part of Jasper’s mix of the human and non-human. In Canadian practice, if not in policy, only an inconsiderable stretch separates the current situation from one that included an Aboriginal/Métis presence. Both park staff and visitors are already comfortable with many permanent human constructs lying well outside the townsite of Jasper: the Palisades Centre, Columbia Icefields interpretive centre, Marmot Basin ski resort, Tekarra Lodge, Beckers Bungalows, Pocahontas Cabins, accommodation at Pyramid and Patricia lakes, cottages on Lake Edith, and, most prodigious of all, Jasper Park Lodge, the largest leasehold ever granted in a Canadian national park, which, at 365 hectares (900 acres), is half as big again as the townsite of Jasper (243 hectares [600 acres]).[688]
Situated on the land (see no. 2 in Fig. 3) once worked by Evan Moberly (Fig. 4) and his family, for example, a living homestead would not have to be regarded as obtruding on the experience of Jasper to the same extent that many other sites selling and exhibiting human values already are.[689] Similarly, a seasonal cultural camp erected, say, at the confluence of the Miette and Athabasca rivers would only complement the human/non-human balance that is pervasive in the frontcountry montane areas.
Fig. 3. Map showing the location of Métis homesteads in Jasper Park, 1910. Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park, 124. Fitzhugh was the name of the village until 1914, when the name changed to Jasper. [Courtesy of Foothills Research Institute and Peter Murphy.]
Fig. 4. Ewan (a.k.a. Evan) Moberly (ca.1860–1919). Anon., no date. [Courtesy of Glenbow Archives, na-3187-16.]
In terms of preserving the cultural values of Euro-Canadian Jasperites, the park has done well enough, but what about the now relict cultural values of Métis and fur-trade era First Nations people, let alone cultural practices from millennia prior to the arrival of a fur-trade presence in the 1790s? Apart from some plaques and signage, the fur-trade history of the park is not well commemorated on the land. Few visitors realize that this historical dimension is one that distinguishes Jasper from the other Rocky Mountain national parks, any more than they realize that the Athabasca has Heritage River designation because its still-undammed upper 300 kilometres served as part of the transcontinental route during the acme of the continental fur trade (1810–55).
It was as part of the effort to turn the valley into a “playground” for recreationists that its most recent occupants were removed. Identifying this shift is intended less to cast aspersions on majoritarian white society[690] – it operated on the prevailing values of its times – than to insist that, from its inception, JNP has been predicated on human cultural values. In other words – words that echo from a French park with Category V designation – humanity has, over the course of a century, shaped Jasper, by outlawing the grazing of flocks, the harvesting of forests, and the practising of prescribed burning; then by grooming trails, operating tour boats, horse camps, and a golf course, and developing downhill skiing facilities, not to mention managing a town of 4,700. Is it any wonder that the Panel on Ecological Integrity noted in 1999 that some acknowledgment of cultural values had to be made even in plans that aim at safeguarding biodiversity?
As Parks Canada recognizes that many aspects of national parks’ ecosystems – wildlife migration routes, for example – extend beyond park boundaries, it now acknowledges that “the ecological integrity of national parks can be maintained only by working within a greater ecosystem context.” Such work requires partnerships with people formed into associations and organizations who are willing to act on behalf of the environment.[691] The same should hold for people striving to conserve cultural heritage. Olivier Craig-Dupont’s and Ronald Rudin’s chapters in this volume offer examples of the much more recent eradication, in the name of ecology, of vestiges of cultural heritage in other national parks, La Mauricie and Kouchibouguac, both in Eastern Canada. Has the time not come to reverse such history in at least one of the mountain parks?
One of the agency’s proposed linkages with humans is accelerated and sustained collaboration with First Nations:
This, too, is part of Parks Canada’s long-term strategy. With new funds, the first priority would be to build effective ecological integrity partnerships through a process of healing, education and cultural awareness. Workshops and gatherings would be held to develop a shared vision for managing national parks and embracing nearby Aboriginal communities as a part of greater ecosystems. Cooperation on educational projects would involve public education about the role of Aboriginal peoples in ecosystems, Parks Canada staff awareness about Aboriginal culture and its role in ecological integrity and Aboriginal communities’ awareness about ecosystem issues. With these building blocks in place, opportunities for Aboriginal communities to be engaged in ecosystem issues would be pursued.[692]
It appears that, on paper, it aims to restore an Aboriginal presence, if not permanent residence, in national parks. The “Healing Broken Connections” program in Kluane National Park is a good example. Although people of the Aishihik Champagne First Nations are not entitled to inhabit the park, they have re-established annual camps on the land and teach TEK to younger generations.[693] All such initiatives help decrease antagonisms between First Nations and Parks Canada (even if non-Native residents of Haines Junction expelled from Kluane when it was established in 1972 continue to resent it). The will is not lacking, but the statement confirms that the necessary funding is, and that, unless and until it is forthcoming, work with First Nations communities will not reach beyond consultation to accommodation. And yet, one of the recommendations issuing from the Panel on Ecological Integrity suggests a responsibility by Parks Canada to “ensure protection of the current cultural sites, sacred areas and artifacts” under its jurisdiction.[694] The operative word in the recommendation is probably “current,” because Parks Canada has interpreted it to mean the repatriation of “moveable” sacred objects and the like, not the restitution of portions of parks to the descendants of those who inhabited them and were expelled from them. Three other of the Panel’s recommendations pertain to fostering relationships and developing educational projects, but not to putting First Nations people on land from which they or their ancestors were removed. The staff of JNP are exploring this possibility through the Aboriginal Forum, but the effort involved requires participants to collaborate, not to contend with, one another.[695] As is not the case with Kluane and most of the parks in the North, with JNP the paramount challenge is contending with multiple groups’ varied interests, including groups with no interest at all.
Not part of Jasper’s Aboriginal Forum because it has enjoyed preferential status with two successive superintendents of JNP is a group called the Elders of the Descendants of Jasper National Park (EDJNP). Its interests exemplify those of many of the twenty-seven groups that have participated to date at meetings of the Forum. (As EDJNP has no – certainly, it deserves to have no – greater claim to accommodation than do the other members of the Forum, placing it on view on this occasion does not imply precedence or priority.) One of the contributions that a selection of historical essays titled Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park (2007) aimed to make to the collective human history of JNP and the UARV is the publication of the interview that Ed Moberly (1901–1992) gave in 1980 to Peter Murphy, then professor of forest history at the University of Alberta.[696] Ed spent the first decade of his life on his Métis parents’ homestead (no. 5 in Fig. 3) prior to eviction and resettlement outside the park (no. 9 in Fig. 3). Some members of the EDJNP are Ed’s kith and kin. From the interview, one gains a strong familial perspective on the workings of a homestead in the UARV during the first years of the twentieth century and what could serve as somewhat of a blueprint for the restored operation of one or more homesteads.[697] According to the experience of the National Park Service in the United States, “[t]ell[ing] the stories of people and place, providing accurate, well-focussed information,” numbers among eleven “principles for forging long-term, sustainable partnerships” between parks and engaged citizens.[698] So, an initiative to rejuvenate a working homestead in JNP would meet such a principle, as does the park’s completed restoration of the exterior of the farmhouse of Ewan Moberly, Ed’s uncle (Fig. 5), and the series of meetings that past-superintendent Ron Hooper and current superintendent Greg Fenton have held with the EDJNP. Similarly helpful are the photographs of the homesteads in 1915, five years after their abandonment (e.g., Fig. 6, left). The photos were inadvertently captured in the systematic phototopographical survey photos shot by crews under the direction of Dominion Land Surveyor Morrison Parsons Bridgland (1878–1948).[699] Thanks to the work of the Rocky Mountains Repeat Photography Project, which has also re-taken the entire Jasper survey (e.g. Fig. 6, right and inset), these photos are now available in digitized form, so that they may be enlarged sufficiently to provide a valuable visual record of the presence on the land of several homesteads.[700]
Fig. 5. Restored, unoccupied house of Ewan Moberly, Jasper National Park. May 2002. [Photo: I.S. MacLaren.]
Fig. 6. Left: Morrison Parsons Bridgland (1878–1948), DLS. Station 62 (Mt. Esplanade), no. 504, southeast, 1915. Clearly visible are the tracks of each of the Canadian Northern Railway (nearer) and Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (farther; visible is its bridge across the Athabasca River, which is where the Yellowhead Highway presently crosses it, beneath Mt. Morro, at the northern end of the Colin Range). In this photograph, the Ewan Moberly homestead’s fields stand between the braided river and ponds above and to the left of them, and the rock of the peak of Mt. Esplanade below them, in the immediate foreground. [Courtesy of Mountain Legacy Project. Digital image copyright 2000, University of Alberta.]
Right and inset: Jeanine Rhemtulla and Eric Higgs. Station no. 62 (Mt. Esplanade), no. 504, southeast, 1999. [Courtesy of Mountain Legacy Project. Copyright, J.M. Rhemtulla and E.S. Higgs, University of Alberta.]
As far as the written historical record is concerned, little is known beyond the well-rehearsed version of events concerning Chief Forest Ranger and Acting Superintendent John W. McLaggan’s role in evicting the homesteaders. The UARV had not been fully surveyed and title to land had not been made available before the fall of 1907, so homesteaders could not have had title to their land before it was turned into a playground, “a perpetual possession of the people …, a region, too, of green loveliness, of grassy valleys and thick pine forests, of emerald alplands bright with flowers, of lakes, pure and brilliant in colour as precious gems[, and] an animal paradise, too, with guarded frontiers, from which the vandal and the destroyer are shut out, where many thousands of wild creatures roam, unmolested and unmolesting, learning a new relationship with man.”[701] By 1913, a planned townsite had been furnished (Fig. 7),[702] and within fifteen years a championship golf course and other amenities deemed more appropriate to wilderness were imposed on the valley.[703] The point is that, from the start, people trained to deal with trees found themselves dealing with people, who often posed for them far knottier challenges. For people with science degrees, degrees in disciplines which in the twentieth century exalted the positivity of existence and the accountability for all variance, having to deal with people has been as foundational a challenge for the maintenance of protected areas as has been the thorny problem of providing “all Canadians” with access to wilderness while controlling the impact of human nature on non-human nature.
Nothing further is known about McLaggan; he arrived on the scene, played a brief role in confirming the homesteaders’ identity as “trespassers” (according to the terminology of the Rocky Mountains Park Act of 1887, or “half-breed squatters,” according to the account published in the Toronto Globe in January 1910[704]), and then seems to have vanished from the historical record.[705] But the identity stuck to the “Moberly breeds,” as the Métis families were called by one official, and, when some of the homesteaders were found to have moved to the area of Victor Lake, southeast today of the site of the town of Grande Cache, they were dogged by McLaggan’s colleagues working out of the Alberta office of the Dominion Forestry Branch.[706]
Fig. 7. H[ugh]. Matheson (1879–1959), DLS. Plan of the town of Jasper, Province of Alberta, 27 June 1913. Canada Lands Survey Records, 21221 CLSR AB. [Reproduced by permission of Natural Resources Canada 2010; courtesy of Surveyor General Branch, Government of Canada.]
Evicted homesteader Evan Moberly decided to move his heavy farming equipment 200 kilometres up the eastern slopes to Victor Lake. It is not certain that the eastern boundary of the Athabasca Forest Reserve was altered purposely to take in Victor Lake, but it is known that the lake did not form part of the reserve when McLaggan told Moberly to leave the UARV.[707] Peter Murphy’s study of the shifting boundaries of the Rocky Mountain national parks and the five-forest Rocky Mountains Forest Reserve indicates that in 1910 the unsurveyed boundary ran south and west of Victor Lake.[708] By 1913, however, new legislation, based on a by-then-completed survey, took in Victor Lake.[709]
So, although Moberly and his contingent would see no survey stakes in 1910 or the first half of 1911, they would later learn that they were again in violation of federal legislation, since, like parks, forest reserves precluded permanent settlement.[710] It must have hardly mattered to Moberly whether McLaggan and his colleagues represented the Department of the Interior’s Dominion Forestry Branch (est. 1906) or the later Dominion Parks Branch (est. 1911). According to one source, James Shand-Harvey, a sometime forest ranger, packer, surveyor, resident of Entrance, Muskeg River, and Moberly Creek, and not altogether reliable (because sympathetic) witness, “J.J. McCluggen [sic], Government Commissioner, sent to Jasper to make arrangements with the squatters, … Mr. McCluggen stated that he had bought out their rights and made a cash settlement with each one…. He [McLaggan] stated in my hearing that he had told them they could move anywhere they wanted to, outside of the Jasper Park Boundaries. Nothing was said about any Forest Reserve.”[711]
By choosing to go north into the watershed of the Smoky River instead of that of the Athabasca outside the park, Moberly was certainly not breaking new ground, for the area was already home to a number of mixed-blood families: Gladieux, McDonalds, Gauchiers, Wynyandies, Plantes, among them. Perhaps they were joined in their move by others from the UARV, people who were not named in documents because, having made no “improvements,” they received no compensation.[712] The surviving written record leaves unclear when exactly Moberly and the others who took up residence on the south and southwest side of Victor Lake learned of their violation, since few if any agents of government visited the area in the 1911–15 period. Forestry Branch staff might have, but their numbers were low during the war, as was their priority for the Athabasca Forest Reserve. G.H. Edgecombe had nominal charge when it was first formed, but assigning a crew to survey the boundary in 1911 was the extent of his work. Both Ernest Finlayson, on the eastern boundary in the summer of 1911, and Charles H. Morse, in the mountains and along the headwaters of the reserve’s various rivers in the summer of 1913, submitted reports, but these reports did not bring a problem of homesteaders to the attention of their superiors.[713] Indeed, before 1915, nothing much seems to have come to the attention of officials in decision-making roles. In that year, a campaign of harassment began, one that issued in no decision and no further removal, but also in the acceptance of no claims of title.[714] To this day, the descendants of Ewan Moberly, whom one wealthy white eastern seaboard alpinist and hunter had called “very pleasant and … one of the nicest and most willing Indians I ever saw” when he met him at Grande Cache in late July 1914, and who died in December 1917 when the Spanish Flu epidemic ravaged the area, enjoy no title to land.[715]
Fig. 8. 1902–1910–Rocky Mountains Park, Jasper Forest Park, and the Rocky Mountains Forest Reserve, Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park, 79 (detail). Victor Lake is the small body of water located on the map to the right of the black dot indicating the location of the Town of Grande Cache, established in 1966. [Courtesy of Sustainable Resource Development (Government of Alberta) and Peter Murphy.]
Fig. 9. 1911–1913–Diminished Parks, Expanded Forest Reserve, Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park, 81 (detail). (A small portion of Jasper Park, as it then was drawn, is represented on this map by the triangle that includes the community of Brûle.) [Courtesy of Sustainable Resource Development, (Government of Alberta) and Peter Murphy.]
So, in reverting to the matter of managing wilderness as a matter of human rights: what role could Parks Canada play in the lives of subsequent generations left bereft by previous federal policies towards their forebears? Although the prospect of rejuvenating UARV homesteads possesses an undeniable romantic, nostalgic dimension, would it be improper to invite descendants of the six expelled Métis homesteading families to consider re-situating to the UARV, if the restoration and rejuvenation of their homesteads were offered as part of a redesignation to Category V of a portion of the valley within JNP? Even if it were appropriate, logic demands that this interest-based initiative be balanced by the accommodation of the interests of groups whose presence in the UARV long preceded the short-lived eras of Métis homesteaders, of the fur trade before them, and of Métis people altogether. The challenge of balancing various people’s interests, however, is not grounds for inaction. Guy Swinnerton, together with Parks historian Susan Buggey, has analyzed and consulted on Category V initiatives in Canada. A useful western example on which advances have been made is the 97 km2 Cooking Lake–Blackfoot Grazing, Wildlife and Provincial Recreation Area, east of Edmonton. It marks a good demonstration that advocates of Category V are not poaching on Category II parks. The area is “managed in an integrated fashion to accommodate cattle grazing, wildlife management, trapping, natural gas extraction, and a wide range of year-round recreation pursuits.”[716]
If it has become de rigueur for Parks Canada to negotiate with local First Nations peoples when establishing a new national park or even reserve,[717] restoring and helping to reinvigorate an Aboriginal presence in a park from which it had been excluded does not lie beyond the realm of possibility in administrative, conceptual, ethical, or political terms that espouse the protection of cultural heritage. That said, although an impressive series of recently erected, detailed, and historically accurate panels recounts the history at the former homestead of Ewan Moberly, such an undertaking has yet to take shape, and one can imagine a host of objections to any attempt. However, the objections focus, like the devil, on the details. Were one to keep an eye on the larger picture, then rejuvenating the valley with various forms of Aboriginal and Métis presence remains worthy of consideration and adoption: biodiversity includes a human presence – and not just the presence of privileged recreationists and other tourists – as well as the commemoration of cultural values and practices that the historical oral and written records justify. Does Parks Canada have the mindset to manage Category II parks and Category V historic sites/landscapes/zones within them as a demonstration that the maintenance and enhancement of biodiversity and the healthy maintenance of cultural values can co-exist? It has usually kept these two mandates separate (although the Abbott Pass Refuge Cabin, Cave and Basin, Skoki Ski Lodge, Sulphur Mountain Cosmic Ray Station, and Banff Park Museum – all in Banff National Park – mark examples of historic sites maintained within a Category II park, commemorating some cultural values, if not the ones that, say, internment camps and abandoned mines would commemorate).[718] In the midst of an always-evolving concept of conservation, a shift in bureaucracy would enable Parks Canada Agency to see this as an opportunity. Bringing to an end the illusionary apartheid that has been steadfastly maintained between human and non-human nature, as between protected areas and their neighbours, is the key. Willmore Wilderness Park, contiguous to JNP and established by the Alberta government in 1959, successfully permits trapping and hunting and yet has not lost its integrity as a protected area.[719] The traditional activity of grazing cattle within the boundaries of Dinosaur Provincial Park has not marred or compromised its UNESCO World Heritage Site designation.[720] If Canadian policy could leave behind the long-held dichotomous idea that parks and cultural activity are antithetical, portions of some national parks could, on an interest-based, not a rights-based, understanding, be re-designated with less difficulty than the current process of consultation invariably experiences. We have graduated beyond early twentieth-century concepts of conservation, so why might we not evolve beyond the concept of parks that the National Parks Act of 1930 bestowed with the best of intentions on us, only to end up leaving Canada in the wake of today’s progressive thinking about the management of protected areas?
Buggey wrote a decade ago that “the concept of cultural landscapes is a relatively new one in the heritage conservation movement.”[721] In the interim, has the concept advanced far enough that Parks Canada could countenance such an initiative? The UARV, unlike most stretches of the transcontinental fur trade route, remains intact on a river that remains undammed and enjoys Heritage River designation. Because of fire suppression and prevention policies, the vegetation is much changed, but ecological restoration could be effected to alter that surmountable hurdle. As the fate of cormorants in Point Pelee National Park shows well, ecological restoration can achieve almost anything.[722] Since 2002, the Beaver Hills Ecosystem east of Edmonton, which includes Elk Island National Park, has partially accommodated integrated management between Parks, local communities, and other stakeholders.[723] Even if, as the Beaver Hills Partnership shows, negotiations for such management are anything but straightforward, does not it suggest that the rejuvenation of the heritage of Aboriginal activities lies within reach? Or would Parks Canada be chary about the prospect of eventually losing, through judicial proceedings, entire control of the land to the Aseniwuche Winewak Nation of Grande Cache, the EDJNP, or another of the more than two dozen groups that have represented themselves at the park’s Aboriginal Forum?
Meanwhile, what concept of wilderness must be entertained to make sense of a river valley in a national park that excludes an Aboriginal presence but is managed by policies that include prescribed burning of vegetation, and which includes a townsite, outlying motels, inns and cabins, recreational development, a horse paddock, highway and other paved roads, railway, airstrip, training centre, power station, sewage treatment plant, fibre-optics cable, and twinned pipeline with attendant pumping stations? Given that government agencies cannot garner widespread support as silos, should PCA play the role of an agent-provocateur? If it played that role, would it not challenge Canadians to undertake “a fundamental shift in thought and practice” about conservation and stewardship?[724] Expecting PCA to take a leading role in influencing humans seems a tall order, but, if the matter is seen from a global perspective, there appears to be little choice. For the view of ‘all Canadians’ to avoid looking increasingly unenlightened a century after the view of the nascent Dominion Parks Branch at least appeared progressive, the agency will have to marshal resources to put more than words into initiatives that Jasper espouses in its just-approved management plan for the next decade and beyond. Three of that plan’s seven commitments, as summarized in its “Highlights” document, are to connect more Canadians “to inspiring experiences that are grounded in Jasper National Park’s distinctive natural and cultural characteristics,” to “raise the profile of Jasper’s rich human history, national historic sites, Canadian Heritage River and World Heritage Site status,” and to “strengthen relationships with Aboriginal communities with historic associations with the park and facilitate their increased participation in Parks Canada’s activities.”[725]