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This paper discusses the coverage given to Ukrainian Canadian topics in two Alberta newspapers, the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Bulletin, during the World War II years. Examples of the subjects included in the essay are Ukrainian Canadian participation in the war effort through enlistments in the Canadian armed forces and other ways, the banning of the Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association, the formation of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, the raising of the matter of Ukrainian independence, and the Canadian conscription plebiscite of 27 April 1942. The two newspapers published in the provincial capital accorded significant attention to Ukrainian Canadian issues, a coverage that was paralleled by the many stories that related to Ukraine, a major battleground in the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the beginnings of archaeological research in Banff National Park and the prominent role played by a housepit site at the Banff Springs golf course. As the Rocky Mountains were first explored, Banff was a focus for early scientific activity, including archaeology. Foremost among the amateur collectors in the late 19th and early 20th century were Bill Peyto, guide and warden, and Norman Bethune Sanson, curator of the Banff Park Museum. Professional archaeologist Harlan I. Smith came to Banff in 1913 from the Victoria Memorial Museum in Ottawa to bring order to the Banff Park Museum collections. All three were involved in recording the house-pit site, the first professional archaeological work in Alberta, resulting in the first formally protected archaeological site in Canada. While archaeologists have since discovered housepit sites in other parts of Banff NP, they are unknown elsewhere in the province or in the Rocky Mountains. Without the historic record, modern archaeologists would be unaware of a significant site that was ultimately destroyed, even though it was in a protected area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigations on the Canadian Plains have been unsuccessful in differentiating between pre-contact projectile points recovered from One Gun phase sites--an intrusive group to the region--and points from the locally defined Cayley series, which are frequently used as diagnostic markers of the Old Women's phase. This paper uses a variety of statistical methods to investigate similarities between points from the One Gun phase Cluny site, and points from the uppermost levels (Old Women's phase) of the Head Smashed-In Buffalo Jump site. Metrics were collected on digital images from direct 2-D point scans to promote consistency, accuracy, and replicability. While population level differences were found, individual specimens could not be identified to their respective phase. In this case, projectile points are not reliable variables for linking components with phases in the proto-historic period, which suggests that the point type may be best described as a horizon style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the sociology of vital statistics by examining the understandings of infant mortality which circulated in Alberta in the early 20th century. In those years, infant mortality came to be represented as an unnatural and unacceptable diminishment of Alberta's population and an appropriate object of political concern. This paper deals with the ways in which infant mortality became saturated with symbolism, even before the full emergence of policies and programs for reducing it. Using a database of 73 digitized Alberta newspapers, I identify the dominant metaphors for infant mortality as economic inefficiency and military defeat. I also set this concern for lost infant life within the context of other population anxieties, including xenophobic fears about "unnatural increase" through immigration and fears about "population quality" which culminated in calls for eugenic sterilization. I argue that infant mortality is a unique form of population process in that it temporally fuses birth and death, creating, in the collective imagination, a spectral collection of those who might have lived, had they not been deprived of life unnaturally soon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Landing Trail was a Hudson's Bay Company supply route used between metropolitan Edmonton and frontier Athabasca during the late nineteenth century. This article begins with the rediscovery of the trail in 1950s Alberta and analyzes its diverse archival life in the two communities. In three sections, it moves through a fifty-year period of attempts to commemorate, represent, and archive the history of the trail as it existed in the 1890s. As groups in Edmonton and Athabasca sought to reinvest the trail with meaning, they also represented dynamics of power between the two places, each articulating a different version of Alberta's historical geography. I show that the commemorative and archival practices that unfolded between the 1950s and the present used history to reflect and interpret contemporary geographical relationships between Edmonton and Athabasca. I conclude that these stories of the trail and the archives they produced constitute spatial histories, because their meanings were informed by representational spaces in the present. A theory for using spatial history is elaborated throughout the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Hutterites are a religious sect, an ethnic group, and a communal brotherhood. Since their arrival in North America in 1874, they have resisted assimilation and held onto their language, their schools and socialization processes, their clothing and their lifestyle. Two clan groups of Hutterites relocated to Alberta in 1918. During and after World War Two, the freedom of these Hutterites to buy land on which to establish new colonies was curtailed by legislation. It was not until 1973 that the incoming Lougheed government repealed the Communal Property Act. This paper describes Hutterite expansion during the past thirty-five years and examines the changing context in which their locational decisions have been made. First, the attitudes of the main "actors" - the government, the Hutterites and the people of Alberta - are evaluated, and then some of the issues that have remained contentious are examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1936 and 1940, the Lady Tweedsmuir Prairie Library Scheme sent approximately 40,000 books to readers in rural areas of the western Canadian provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Founded and directed by Susan Buchan, Lady Tweedsmuir, the wife of the Governor General of Canada, after visiting Depression-ravaged Prairie communities, the Scheme received the support of philanthropic foundations in Canada and the United States, the Women's Institute, women's service organizations, and individual donors of books. While the Scheme is mentioned in passing in biographies and local histories, little is known about the scope and scale of its activities or how it was organized or operated. Using primary and archival sources in Canada and the United States, this paper explores the history of the Scheme and its role in the distribution of books, the promotion of literacy, and the creation of libraries in the Canadian West during the Great Depression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent call for heritage professionals to consider the 'spirit of place' is an attempt to reconcile the overlapping layers of tangible and intangible heritage within significant sites. However, the desire for wholeness can also displace the fragments and fragmented histories of place. This paper examines the history of heritage development in southern Alberta through two sites, namely Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump (a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park / Aisinai'pi National Historic Site (UNESCO World Heritage nomination currently being developed). Located only 200 km apart, these two places offer very different perspectives on the 'spirit of place' and present very different histories of the production of 'heritage' through archaeological excavation, preservation practices and Aboriginal consultation. These stories from the Canadian prairies raise questions about the processes of 'place-making', 'place-taking' and how we mobilize and conceptualize the practice of place in public history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constructed by colonial agents to resolve administrative problems unanticipated by the entrance of Metis individuals without band affiliation into treaty, the ‘straggler’ category was a reflection of the fluid nature of Aboriginal identities during a period of harsh economic and environmental realities on the Plains in the mid to late nineteenth century. This paper argues that Metis women and their families used the ‘straggler’ category in ways unexpected by colonial agents in Treaty Six – they continued to participate in the fur trade economy, refused to settle on reserves, and thus explicitly challenged boundaries of racial classification. This Native agency in turn forced the government to rethink and reformulate status categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]