Public History, Pop History, Academia, and Jobs.

Posted on 16 April, 2013 by

On the last day of the 2013 ASEH meeting in Toronto I had the opportunity to sit on a panel with two other public historians at a graduate luncheon and answer questions from graduate students about job opportunities outside academia.  The attendees asked some very good questions that ranged from “how do I get a job in consulting?” to “what skills do I have that could be useful outside academia and how do I market them?”  As panelists, we each drew on our personal experiences and, in the case of me and the other Canadian on the panel, spoke to the value of a Masters in Public History.

There was one question that has stuck with me because there was not enough time to adequately address it in the session and it speaks to a deeper disconnect between those with established careers in academia and the world outside the ivory tower.  The question asked us to address the tensions between university experts and public historians, which is a common enough inquiry, but the example given to illustrate the root of the question came from an American History Television program.  This showed a conflation of public and pop history that unfortunately plagues academic views on public history and is what I would like to belatedly address.

Public history can be defined in two ways.

1)      Public history is the presentation of historical knowledge to the public outside the confines of the traditional university setting.

2)      Public history refers to the historians employed outside the university in a position related to the field of history.

These two definitions are obviously connected and both allude to the places where public history takes place; museums, archives, websites, government ministries, tv documentaries, radio programs, etc.  Anyone trained as a historian and working in these fields is a public historian but that does not mean that all of them are trained in public history.  In Canada there are only a handful of universities that offer graduate programs devoted to the study and practice of public history – Carleton University and the University of Western Ontario are the most prominent.  This is important because the methodology, theory, and skills taught in public history programs is not the same as that taught in a traditional history masters and this disconnect is at the root of what many see as a tension between academic and public history.

museum

The question posed during the ASEH graduate luncheon about tensions between academic and public history accused public historians of not keeping abreast of new findings in academic history and as a result creating historical knowledge for the public that fails to adequately address the current state of literature in a field.  My response was as a-political as possible, drawing on the different modes of presentation used in public history and considerations for the audience as part of why certain information is left out of exhibitions and similar presentations.  In the response I tried to convey that public historians, especially curators, do keep up with the developments in academia; professional development is part of their job, they are constantly researching to develop their collections, and they actively publish in peer-reviewed journals.  However, that depth of knowledge is not always reflected in the knowledge that is transmitted to the public for two very important reasons; audience and space constraints.

The audience for academics is other academics.  There is a level of assumed knowledge that come with writing for your peers that allows monographs and articles to delve into the minutia of a topic that is not possible in other areas.  Public history does not have the luxury of assuming a base level of knowledge at the masters’ level.  Instead, public historians have to convey the same information that would make for a great article without the use of footnotes to explain or reference back to supporting information.  The audience for public history is anyone from an elementary school student to a university professor and everyone in-between.  There is no assumed knowledge when writing for an audience this diverse so often the newest information academics would like included must be cut for the sake of contextual information that gives the public a necessary base from which to continue exploring a topic.

Space is the second constraint and it often has a greater impact on what a public historian can convey than their audience.  In a museum, for instance, each text panel is restricted to about 200 words.  The first paragraph of this post is 109 words!  Often a curator has 200 words to convey what an academic could devote an article to.  It is a challenge to any academic thinking it is easy to do public history to distill the information of an entire article into 5 panels, 200 words each, in language that is suitable for a grade 8 reading level and still maintain the crux of the article.

The emergence of professional training through graduate programs in museums studies and public history created a pool of people working in museums, archives, government ministries, etc with an understanding of what public history should be and the skill set to make what they do seem simple.   However, not everyone producing history for public consumption is trained in the field or attune to the best practices in presenting knowledge to the public.  This is where pop history and public history collide and too often those working outside public history judge it with a harshness borne of too many disappointing or frustrating interactions with pop history.

Pop history is analogous to pop music – it is light and easy to access and digest but without much substance.  It can also be seen as the tabloids of history in the tendency toward sensationalizing over accuracy and use of outdated or disproven information.  Most pop history is encountered in television programming – the recent series “Viking” is an excellent example – and distorts fact for entertainment value without providing the viewer with a disclaimer.  As a result when the general public watches pop history programs they leave with misconceptions of what happened and unwittingly perpetuate false information and assumptions about the past.  When academics encounter pop history the story presented is often so distorted that their frustration and anger at the public receiving false information is understandable.  Public historians have the same reaction to the programs as academics because like in academia the core mission in public history is to engage people’s interest in the past while providing the public with the most accurate and up-to-date information available.

There is a disconnection between public history and academic history but in my experience it is not coming from the public history side.  As a MA student in a public history program I worked with academics who understood what public history was, brought in practicing experts, and fostered connections between the university and public institutions to ensure the best possible history was presented to the public.  As a PhD student I sat in on graduate level course about public history that completely over looked the long standing journals and scholarship in the field, and listened too many times to academics conflate pop history with public history.  Upon leaving a doctoral program to pursue my passion for public history it became clear that the hesitancy of some public historians to work closely with academics often comes from false assumptions about what they do informed by conflations of pop and public history.  Public historians understand academia because to work in the field a minimum of a Masters degree is required, but most academics have never worked in public history and do not have the understanding of the field that can only come from hands-on experience.  It is encouraging to see academic associations beginning to embrace public history and the opportunities it presents to the graduate students they are training and gives hope that eventually the tensions and misunderstandings between academia and public history will disappear.

Assumptions about public history perpetuated within the universities do the greatest disservice to graduate students planning their entry onto the job market.  Academic positions are few and far between but too many graduate students are woefully under prepared to be competitive in the public history sector.  The increase in public history and museum studies programs means the competition for jobs outside academia is stiff and simply having a doctorate is not enough to get an interview, let alone a job.  Experience is essential, knowledge of collections management is mandatory for museums positions, and practical knowledge of how to adapt history for a public audience is important.  For graduate students trying to plan for the day they go on to the job market, degree in hand, it means tough decisions.  To get the experience needed for a non-academic job means a graduate student must give up some summer researching time to work in the field, or adding volunteering at a public history institution to an already busy academic schedule.  It also means making a difficult decision while still in the doctoral program – do you want to work in academia or do you want to work in public history?  Speaking from the other side of that decision I would encourage any graduate student to take preparing for a possible job in public history as seriously as they do the academic route.

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Good-Bye STEP

Posted on 7 March, 2013 by

Today the Alberta Budget dropped and the news is not good for local heritage and history institutions or the students who keeps them going in the summer months.  The Student Temporary Employment Program, or STEP, was suspended.  This is not a surprise but it is disappointing and detrimental to heritage and history institutions, charities, and social service institutions as well as the post-secondary students the program ensured living wages for between academic years.

The STEP program cost $7.4 million a year and subsidized wages for students working for charities, museums, community institutions, and other groups with limited funds for full-time employees.  The program gave approximately 3000 students a year valuable work experience outside the typical serving and retail jobs available in the summer months.

STEP also helps charities and social service institutions pay students to help administer vital social programs in the summer months.  It gives students, particularly arts and social science students, a chance to put their courses to use and see what they can do with their degree before graduation.  To suspend the program does a disservice to students, making the competitive summer job market even more crowded and making it harder for students to come out of an undergrad degree with valuable work experience in their field.

The first STEP job I had was in 2002 at the NWMP Barracks Historical Site in Canmore.  This was the job that made me seriously consider a career in the field I later learned was called public history.  Since that first exposure to museums and STEP the program has helped pay part of my wage at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, the Canmore Public Library, the Three Sisters Scottish Festival Society, and the Canadian Circumpolar Institute.  Without the STEP program it is unlikely people like me would have the work experience necessary to be competitive in the field of museums and public history.

STEP gives back to communities because so many of the students it employs were in institutions that provide services and programs for their community.  For instance, at the Canmore Public Library I was one of two students who organized and ran all the summer reading programs for children aged 2-15.  Will small rural libraries have the funds to offer reading programs to children in the summer without the help of STEP?  Will museums and heritage institutions be able to develop their collections and exhibits without STEP?  Will the next generation of public historians and museums professionals be able to get the experience they need to get their foot in the door after graduation?

 

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A Little Bit of Everything

Posted on 18 January, 2013 by

The key to working in public history is to be adaptable and willing to try anything.  You will learn quickly in this field that no matter what the job description said you will be asked to do things you never imagined were in your skill set.  If this scares you, don’t become a public historian and definitely don’t work in an institution that presents history, for instance a museum.  If you like to be creative and like the challenge of coming up with new approaches and constantly learning new skills, public history is the place to be.

For seven years I’ve worked in public history and done everything from research to interpretive programming to managing an exhibit to creating databases and pretty much everything in between.  Each contract is different but the one similarity is a willingness to try new things and push new ways of conveying information to the public is essential.  In these contracts I have been a website contributor (Active History), event planner, POS expert, interviewer, designer, video editor, researcher, guide, and general assistant to whom even needs assisting.  Often I am many of these things at once.

Not convinced?  Here are the various hats I’ve worn this week:

Video Editor

App Designer

Researcher

Event Planner

Photo Shoot Assistant

Text Editor

Design Assistant

Content Assistant

Only four of these jobs fall under the umbrella of what you would learn in a history program.  The rest are skills I’ve picked up and developed over years of public history work.  I am a decent video editor because of the year I spent co-producing EHTV: Live from the Field for NiCHE.  I am an event planner because in grad school I organized far too many conferences, social events, and workshops.  My academic work in visual history allows me to assist the designers and act as a bridge between the content expert curator and the creative minds who will make an exhibit look amazing.  However, my programming expertise is limited to one class in html back in 1998 and I only got to play at app designing this week because the IT guys found a seemingly idiot proof program I could populate for them.  (Unfortunately, the program’s linear design means it is useless for what we need it to do so it is useless.)

Next week will likely be more of the same because public history is one of the most interdisciplinary fields around.  There is no hard edge to delineate what the job entails.  To convey history to the public in a meaningful way you must go beyond the written word and a token picture.  Everything must fit together to create something that conveys the richness of a topic that does not rely heavily on text in order to engage multiple learning styles and all ages and education levels.  This means incorporating new technology with the tried and tested standards of exhibiting — a text panel and archival image that functions alongside a tablet for exploring old newspaper articles or videos.  Layering how information is presented in this way allows makes an exhibit accessible and exciting.  It is this challenging process of making history resonate with the public and trying new ways of presenting it — ways that don’t even seem like learning about history — that keeps me interested and working in this field.  There is nothing more rewarding than wandering around an exhibit you’ve helped create and seeing visitors interacting with it exactly how you hoped they would.

Public history is the most creative branch of history.  Innovations in how to tell history is reflections the creativity and daring of the people working in the field.  Telling the story in a new way shows people who write off the past as a dry series of names and dates that it is exciting and interesting and fun.  It shows how pertinent something that happened a century ago is to what we do today.  If making history fun means I have to learn how set-up a basic program on an iPad then I welcome the opportunity (and will happily leave the really technical stuff to the pros).

 

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Making History Look Delicious at the Royal Alberta Museum

Posted on 18 December, 2012 by

*This post was written for Active History.

I recently took a trip to a Calgary restaurant where the most iconic of Chinese-Canadian dishes originated.  The restaurant is on Centre Street at 27th Avenue North and you would likely miss it unless you looked for the sign reading “Silver Inn.”  Two colleagues from the Royal Alberta Museum (RAM)also  made the trip from Edmonton to Calgary to record the interviews.  When the interviewee is the owner of the first restaurant to serve “Ginger Beef,” the footage has to look better than good.  It must look delicious.

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Author interviewing the owner of the Silver Inn.

Making history look good is a big part of designing a museum exhibit.  As sites of public history, museums suffer from the stereotype of stale rooms filled with artefacts hidden behind glass and a sleepy security guard ensuring nothing happens to the precious items on display.  This idea of museums persists in spite of decades of interesting and innovative exhibits and new methods designed to engage the public with museums.  Food is still prohibited in exhibits, but high-quality video of a dish or a detailed description of its ingredients can create the same Pavlovian reaction as the smells of a busy kitchen or a table set for a feast.  With this in mind, we went to Calgary in search of footage to add this dimension to the RAM’s Chop Suey on the Prairies exhibit.

The Silver Inn was the first restaurant in Calgary to offer Peking-style dishes.  It opened in 1975 in a small space on 4th Street Southwest.  For the first few years, the establishment served mostly the burgers, fries, soda, and milkshakes typical of Chinese-owned restaurants across the prairies.  The menu listed Peking dishes, but customers were not interested in trying them.  But after a few years, the Cheung family took the risk and dropped the western side of the menu and focused exclusively on Peking cuisine.  Calgarians were hesitant to try the dishes, but they slowly came around to these new flavours.

The dish known as ginger beef is based on a traditional Peking dish of beef cooked so that it is chewy like a jerky, deep fried, and seasoned with orange peel and chili sauce.  The chef thought the dish would go over well with Calgarians because it was similar to popular pub food.  Customers liked the flavour, but not the chewy beef so he began experimenting ways to make the beef a similar texture to French fries.  The resulting dish – deep fried shredded beef in chili sauce – became an instant hit with customers.  The perfectly crunchy exterior hid beef that was cooked but still tender.  The sauce tasted so different from standard fare that people started asking for the dish as “that ginger beef dish” – even though there was no ginger in it!

The dish nicknamed ginger beef by customers became so popular that other Chinese restaurants tried to replicate it.  The flavour combination spread across the province.  The success of the Silver Inn helped to inspire other Chinese restaurant owners to introduce more authentic Chinese dishes onto their menus.   Ginger beef is now synonymous with Chinese food in Alberta.  And since it originated in Alberta, there was no question it would be featured in an RAM exhibit about Chinese restaurants.

Yet capturing the essence of an iconic dish for a museum exhibit poses a challenge.  Museums have strict rules surrounding food and drink in exhibit space for both practical and conservation reasons.  Maintaining a fresh bowl of ginger beef within an exhibit would be a logistical nightmare, not to mention the temptation to visitors that a bowl of food would offer.  Furthermore, food is a no-go in exhibit spaces because it attracts bugs, and these critters eat the organic material that constitutes most artefacts.  Knowingly exposing material in a museum’s collection or on loan from generous donors to conditions that would lead to its disintegration is a sin in the museum and archive community.

The question is: when planning and designing an exhibit, how best to use audio and video to conveying the look, smell, and taste of food to visitors?  A museum could interview someone connected with the invention of a dish, like the RAM did with ginger beef.  A sound bite that explains how a dish came to be gives people an extra treat and something to share with others; a piece of trivia to hold onto for the future and a reference point for remembering the exhibit experience.  But information is not enough to make visitors’ mouths water.

To successfully convey the essence of food without tasting or smelling it, the visual must be hyper-realistic and the sounds must be crisp and clear.  When these elements are brought together, the visitor enters a mental place where they can almost smell what is being cooked.  This all must be done without resorting to the “money-shot” of food programs everywhere: a host eating the food, making sounds of a delighted palate, and gushing over the dish.  To do so would distract visitors from the content of an exhibit and make a spectacle of what is a supporting component of a larger narrative.   Play it too safe and visitors would remember neither the visual nor the story behind the dish.  Overdo it and the dish becomes a distraction from the rest of the content, not to mention the possibility of criticism about lewd content in a public museum. But get it just right and people leave the exhibit craving the dish.

Such considerations influenced the upcoming Royal Alberta Museum exhibit Chop Suey on the Prairies.  Conveying the essence of Chinese-Canadian food is of core importance to successfully telling the story of Chinese restaurants.  However, the food is only one piece of the Chinese experience in Canada and cannot overwhelm the rest of the story.  The food — whether ginger beef or chicken balls or chop suey — is a reflection of the unique situation of Chinese immigrants to Canada before the federal government repealed the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 in 1947.  The dishes that introduced Canadians to Chinese cuisine are a mixture of Chinese cooking techniques, ingredients available in Canada, a willingness of people with non-Chinese backgrounds to try new flavours, and the emergence of a strong Chinese community in the West.  The melding of traditional Chinese flavours with a texture common to English pub food created Ginger Beef, and this is one story the RAM tells at its new exhibit.

Ready to eat the ginger beef.

Ready to eat the ginger beef.

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Mountain Names

Posted on 9 October, 2012 by

As a public historian working outside of academia I often get contracts that are vaguely in my area general area of expertise — western Canada — but not the odd corners of history that are where I like to spend my time — mountains, visuality, and environmentalism.  This is great because I am constantly learning about things I previously had nothing more than a cursory knowledge of and occasionally I pick up interesting tidbits about topics I though I knew very, very well.

Last week I came across a piece of information while reading up on the history of the Chinese in Alberta that went counter to the everything I knew about a peak in Canmore.   The peak is called “Ha Ling Peak”, it is located to the southeast of Whiteman’s Pass on the edge of the Grassi Massive, and until 1997 it was called “Chinaman’s Peak”.

The racist original name of this mountain comes from a story about a Chinese resident of Canmore winning a bet with some of the miners that he could climb the peak in under 6 hours.  There are variations on the story but the basics are as follows: the man was a cook at the Oskaloosa Hotel and made a $25 bet with a group of miners that he could make it to the top of the peak on Whiteman’s Pass and back to the hotel in 6 hours.  He returned to the hotel within the allotted time but the miners did not believe he reached the summit so after doubling the bet he made the trek again with a big white flag so the miners could look up at the peak with binoculars and see it at the summit.  Once again he was back to the hotel in 6 hours and after the peak was viewed through binoculars he received the $50 on the table.  This great feat led the community to christen the mountain “Chinaman’s Peak” in commemoration of the accomplishment.  The urban legend when I was growing up was that the flag was still at the summit of the mountain but no one whose made it to the top, including myself, has reported any proof of this.

In the mid-1990s the Calgary Chinese community began a petition to rid the peak of its offensive name.  The reason for the push was two-fold; “Chinaman” carried too many negative racists connotations, and the name of the Chinese man was not a mystery so the peak should bear the proper name of the man it was called after.  People of Canmore are not always welcoming of change so there was some backlash from long-term locals about changing the name but most accepted the group had a point:  Why were we using an offensive name for a mountain when we could use something else?  So “Chinaman’s Peak” became  ”Ha Ling Peak”.  Certain locals and wannabe locals take pride is using the old name as proof of their deep knowledge of the town and its surroundings — honestly, the locals only use the old name around other locals and when habit causes the old name to come out instead of the new one.

Since the renaming of the mountain it was not questioned that the man’s name was Ha Ling.  The guide books recount his story along with the directions for getting to the jump-off parking lot and how many switch backs to expect.  Never had I heard another name associated with this peak until last week while reading the only comprehensive history of Chinese in Alberta.  In Mooncakes over Gold Mountain, the name of the Chinese man is given as Lee Poon not Ha Ling.  I was confused and surprised.  The story of Ha Ling Peak is well known in Canmore so how could someone get the man’s name wrong in a book based on a master’s thesis!

The most obvious explanation is in the endnotes of Mooncakes over Gold Mountain.  The story is taken from a local history of the Crowsnest Pass not the local history of Canmore.  Both are coal mining areas and miners often moved between them as work demanded so it is likely names in stories were changed as the story travelled south along the Rockies.

Why the name of the Chinese man who climbed the mountain is different in two parts of Alberta is, however, unimportant.  The important part of the story of the name change is that it returns a name to its rightful place and erases a racial slur from the landscape of the Bow Valley.  It shows a willingness to change and correct past insensitivities, to embrace the multicultural past of a town that is still overwhelmingly white.

I have written about Ha Ling Peak before in the context of when it is appropriate to rename a landmark or place for the purpose of being politically correct.  Today, I want to highlight that renaming it is not always about political correctness or even getting the name right.  It is about honouring the ordinary people whose stories we tell decades later.  Ha Ling, or Lee Poon, probably did not stay in Canmore very long but in the time he was there he made a mark on the local memory.  He climbed a steep mountain that is essentially a scramble once you are above the tree line.  His name needed to be returned to the peak to remedy the racism of the early 20th century that lingered on the Bow Valley in the name of a mountain.

Near the summit.

Posted in Environment, Public History | Leave a comment

YEG…I think I heart you…

Posted on 1 October, 2012 by

Edmonton there is something I have to say, I don’t want to love you but I kind of, sort of think that I do.  I feel no pride when the Oilers or the Eskimos win a game.  If something notable happens in the city I have no urge to brag to my out-of-town friend and family; but I will brag when you are the coldest place in Canada, occasionally the coldest place on earth.

The best words to describe you are ‘meh’ and ‘grey’.  Sure the River Valley is nice in the summer and a veritable symphony of colour in the autumn and festival season has something to do every week for 3 straight months.  But from mid-October to mid-April the sky and the city are the same shade as the flannel suits loved and loathed by depressed businessmen the world over.  Your roads are weird, your potholes could swallow a Smart Car, traffic circles seem to appear out of nowhere, road work seems to never end and when it finally does you seem to have some sort of mental block when it come to clearing the snow.  Your international claim to fame is an enormous shopping mall; a mecca of conspicuous consumption and late-twentieth century suburban sprawl.  The sum of these parts inspires one to take advantage of every opportunity to leave, even if the destination is somewhere as small as the hamlet of Radway.

But here is the thing Edmonton, the thing that is so tough to admit that even after 4 years residing within your municipal limits I can only say it after recounting a sampling of your shortcomings.  Edmonton, I think I love you.

            Somehow, and against my better judgment and staunch attempts to prevent it, you got under my skin Edmonton.  You softened my defenses with perfect Indian Summers that made me sad to leave for the frost and flurries of my hometown in the mountains at Thanksgiving.  Slowly, you showed me that when the sky and the city are the desolate grey of the long, cold, winter there is still colour hiding in the corners and under the covers.  The creativity of your inhabitants in the face of your shortcomings seduced me.  Their music made your bleak streets sing.  Their art made your grey a rainbow and your dingiest bits shine.  They embraced all the culture you had to offer and their curiosity and love of discovering something new could not be quashed by weeks of -30C or record snowfall.  They created new communities through food one would be hard pressed to find done as well in this countries other major cities – where else do you get traditional Mexican with a touch of Alberta duck, burgers inspired by the theatre, poutine influenced by the humble perogie, cinnamon buns that know no equal, a latte topped with maple bacon, and great steak tartar (made better when it is 1/2 price).

There are still things about you, Edmonton, I cannot say I love.  When it snows for 30 days straight and blue sky becomes a distant memory, I long for the Chinooks of my childhood – would even welcome the migraines they bring.  Your municipal politics are often farcical with a billionaire bully regularly trying to push dorky council in the mud to take its lunch money.  Your leading university has a building that looks like a giant stick of butter!  Yet, when I walk down Jasper Ave and see the “I (hear) YEG” stencils on the sidewalk it makes me smile.  The strangely apocalyptic orange-pink glow cast by the fluorescent accents on the Whyte Ave streetlights in the winter is unique to your never-ending winter.

You see Edmonton, you are kind of like the annoying little brother of everyone’s best friend.  At first you are such a pain in the rear end that one cannot get away from you fast enough, then after a while you stop throwing rocks at your sibling and their friends and show that you are actually kind of cool.

Edmonton, I love you.  There I said it without any qualifications or hesitations or attempts to avoid the inevitable.  Are you happy now?

(PS. Still can’t bring myself to cheer for your sports teams to win but have been known to wear their colours – borrowed from someone else.)

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Reviving a Canadian Hero

Posted on 28 August, 2012 by

*This was written for Active History and can also be found on the Sam Steele Collection site.

Portrait, Samuel Benfield Steele, 1891. Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta (2008.1.2.1.6.1.8).

Sam Steele was the Forrest Gump of Canadian History. He was involved in some way with the Fenian Raids, the Long March West, the 1870 Riel Uprising, the establishment of the North-West Mounted Police, the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the 1885 Northwest Uprising, the Klondike Gold Rush, the Second Boer War, the First World War, the Spanish Flu epidemic, and the Winnipeg General Strike. None of the first five Prime Ministers could make claims to have experienced that many of the key events of the country’s first fifty years! Today Steele is a relatively unknown figure of Canadian history. Aficionados of RCMP history know of him and there are corners of the country where his life is celebrated – like Fort Steele, BC, Fort Macleod, Alberta, and Dawson City, Yukon. If you walked up to the average person on the street and asked “Who was Sam Steele?” they would probably give you a blank look and respond “Sam who?”

For those who remember the Heritage Minutes of the mid-1990s, Sam Steele is the stern-faced Mountie who responds to an American prospector, pointing a pair of pistols at him, with “In that case I’ll be lenient, we’ll keep this gambling gear and you’ll be back in the United States by sundown.” At the end of the Heritage Minute, the prospector, with two Mounties escorting him back to the US, states “I coulda shot that guy right there. Who was he anyway?” The response: “Superintendent Sam Steele, North-West Mounted Police.”

Steele was a quintessential hero and the embodiment of Victorian masculinity at a time when Canada was striving to create a country from sea-to-sea and trying to emerge from the shadow of Great Britain. His life parallels the major events of opening and settlement of the West, and his distinguished career with the NWMP and the military ensure his reputation was well known. It is this reputation that led men from all corners of the country, and the US, to apply to serve in South Africa under Steele as the first contingent of the Lord Strathcona’s Horse. Of the 2,000 men who applied in 1900, only 500 were accepted for service. Nineteen years later when Steele’s funeral procession wove through the streets of Winnipeg, it brought the Winnipeg General Strike to a halt as workers paused in silent respect of his life and legacy. There are few people whose passing could produce the a similar effect today.

Lord and Lady Strathcona group portrait with Steele (centre) and Officers of Lord Strathcona’s Horse

What is striking about the story of Sam Steele is that he went from national hero to relative obscurity in less than a century. This decline presents an interesting opportunity to revive Steele’s legacy, not as a hero but as a means of conveying the first fifty years of Canadian history to the public. The potential of the repatriated Steele collection to teach Canadian history through an individual is clear in how the University of Alberta Libraries have designed their digital and physical exhibitions of the collection.

Small sample of the Sir Sam Steele Collection

The website for the Sam Steele collection breaks Steele’s life and the collection into six sections: the Red River Expedition (1867), the Northwest Mounted Police and the March West (1873), Sam and Marie (1890), the Yukon and the Klondike Gold Rush (1898), the Boer War and the South Africa Constabulary (1899), and World War I (1914). Each section corresponds with a notable period in Steele’s professional and private life and, as the titles indicate, each is a significant event in Canadian history. The correlations are reiterated in the 100-foot long timeline that is a central feature of the Sam Steele: Journey of a Canadian Hero exhibit currently on display at the Enterprise Square Gallery in downtown Edmonton, Alberta. The top of the timeline gives the key events of Steele’s life and the bottom give major events in Canadian history to clearly show when, and how often, these two lines intersect. The rich collection of documents and photographs that is the Sam Steele Collection provides the evidence necessary to connect these two timelines and create a narrative of the past.

Through these parallel timelines, Steele becomes a tool for telling the story of Canada’s first fifty years in a way that gives it a human face. Because Steele is no longer a well-known figure, means when people encounter his life as a means of conveying Canada’s history it is without many of the preconceptions that come with historical figures like Louis Riel or Sir John A Macdonald. This does not remove all political bias from the events – Steele’s advancement in the NWMP was often blocked by virtue of his Conservative political affiliations at times when the Liberals were in power – but it avoids the overt politicization of Canadian history that comes with many of the better-known individuals. I would also challenge Canadian historians to find another person who was involved in as many significant events and has a rich archival collection comparative to Sam Steele.

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