The role of the North West Mounted Police (NWMP) in facilitating the “peaceful occupation” of the North-West Territories is so pervasive in Canadian national iconography it needs no introduction.1 For non-Canadians, the iconic status of this colonial police force provides a singular example of how an arm of government—more often regarded elsewhere in the world with anti-authoritarian suspicion—forms the centrepiece of a narrative of peaceful national foundation. The starting point for this national narrative is the March West, which the newly established mounted police force undertook from southern Manitoba in the autumn of 1874. From that historic march arises the cherished story of the arrival of law and order in western Canada, whereby the NWMP conquered the lawless frontier not through force but through the powers of peaceful negotiation and the respect they commanded amongst First Nation peoples of the prairie lands. “Law and Order Heads West”; “the establishment of law and order in our Dominion”; “peace and progress”; “justice and civility”: these are some of the repeated phrases through which the arrival of the NWMP in the North-West Territories is remembered along the historic trail of the March West through southwestern Canada, and which commemorate their role in helping to build the modern nation.
This mythic image of the NWMP has come under some stress in recent decades with the rise of a critical historical scholarship on the role of the NWMP as agents of colonial governance whose tasks entailed the suppression of First Nations’ cultural autonomy.2 This critical historiography emphasizes the importance of the NWMP to Ottawa’s intention to develop agricultural and industrial economies in the North-West Territories through land settlement, a process that required ensuring First Nations compliance with Canadian sovereignty. Since its officers held magisterial powers, the force could function as a self-contained instrument of the Queen’s law without reference to distant authorities in Ottawa, enabling it to implement the government’s Indian policy with “benevolent despotism.”3 The NWMP’s contribution in facilitating the treaties that were signed with First Nations of the western territories through the 1870s has traditionally been constructed as part of the force’s peacemaking role. More recently, historians have argued that the treaties were the starting point from which First Nation sovereignty gave way to a longer era of “oppression, land theft and starvation.”4
The NWMP strengthened the leverage of their legal authority by pressing senior First Nations men to police their own people.5 This strategy proved to be successful in policing Aboriginal peoples who were subject to treaties, and was expanded with the introduction from the mid-1880s of “native scouts” as attachments to NWMP patrols. Scouts were considered particularly useful to police in being able to travel easily within the country, and although they played a mediating role between police and First Nations—the most famed instance in Canadian historical memory being Jerry Potts—less central to the national mythology is the fact that scouts also served to police their own people, particularly in providing information as to movements on the reserves.6
By the 1880s, policing tasks became more explicitly tied to persuading First Nations peoples to settle on reserves, backed, when needed, by forcible removal. The granting or withholding of rations was one strategy employed by the government to facilitate this process, administered by the mounted police in cooperation with the Department of Indian Affairs.7 For the remainder of the nineteenth century, as Sarah Carter puts it, a government policy to “supervise and monitor the movements and activities of reserve people” was pursued “with great vigor.”8 The NWMP played a vital role in the fulfillment of this policy. It could be said that this was no more than an extension of the NWMP’s original task to bring the protection of the Queen’s law to the First Nations peoples of the North West, since the protective function of the law was conditional on their enforced obedience to the legal authority of the new nation state.
The NWMP, then, are at the centre of two potentially competing narratives of national origin: one geared around their role as bringers of peace and good government to the North West, and the other around their role as a colonial instrument of Aboriginal surveillance and containment. This paper seeks to examine how much these potentially competing narratives of nation-building are visible in the public forums of historical memory across western Canada that commemorate the NWMP’s original March West and their role in the North-West Territories over the decades to come. In examining the regional markers and memories of the March West, this chapter considers not just the role given to the NWMP in the national story of Canada’s “gentle occupation,” but more particularly whether and how that national mythology varies in its regional expressions.
The commemoration of national foundational moments constitutes a central aspect of the “sites of memory,” to use Pierre Nora’s famous phrase, that define the current age of concern with the role of history in shaping concepts of national identity. Over the past several decades and across Western democracies globally, Nora notes, the question of how societies relate to the past has moved squarely into the foreground as we witness a revived interest in national history at the same time as we witness the recovery of once-repressed or minority histories.9 In response, a growing body of scholarship has examined the social and political implications of how the national past is remembered, and the purposes it serves in the public domain.10 This is as true of Canada as it is of other western democracies that have seen an unprecedented expansion in the realm of public history, at the same time as a national re-examination of the past in terms of recognizing and reconciling with once-marginalized histories.11 In this respect, heritage sites and commemorative events that speak to narratives of national foundation are particularly relevant, as they constitute a particular form of public history-making, one that relies upon the symbolic power of central moments in the past as being emblematic of national consciousness.
The March West of the NWMP can be regarded as one such central moment in the making of Canadian national consciousness. At the national level, it has a tangible “site of memory” at the RCMP Heritage Centre in Regina, which serves as Canada’s centralized institution for the history and ongoing legacy of the world’s most loved police force. The NWMP headquarters moved to Regina in 1882 and, more than a century later, RCMP recruits are still trained at the Academy there. Opened in May 2007, the Heritage Centre aims, its visitor brochure states, “to share the RCMP story with the world” as “a great Canadian story.”12 Exhibits on the history of Canada’s mounted police at the Heritage Centre are structured chronologically from the NWMP’s establishment in 1873 and its history over time to its seamless transformation into a contemporary police force. An exhibit dedicated to the work of the NWMP in the North-West Territories, Maintaining Law and Order in the West, is primarily a material collection of NWMP photographs and artefacts. A set of summarizing panels reminds us that the NWMP force was based on the Royal Irish Constabulary, “famed for its competence and fairness,” and that its tasks were “to establish friendly relations with the Indigenous peoples, enforce Canadian authority, pave the way for settlers, and maintain law and order on the frontier.” As the RCMP’s official site of remembering, the Heritage Centre is understandably geared towards a touristic eye, whereby a familiar national story is told—and sold in myriad forms of merchandise at the Centre’s shop—for the world’s visitors.
If the RCMP Heritage Centre is the official forum for the collection and display of NWMP history, the March West re-enactment in 1999 was its lived expression. The re-enactment of foundational moments forms an integral part of commemorative history-making in that it makes history broadly accessible by condensing complex historical processes into symbolic scenes.13 As a commemoration of the 125th anniversary of the March West, the 1999 re-enactment held nationally symbolic significance in bringing back to life “the treacherous journey that brought peace and order to Canada’s prairies.”14 Over two and a half months, from 8 May to 24 July, some 200 riders, including members of the contemporary police force as well as civilian participants, followed in the path of the NWMP’s original trek in a journey that took them from Fort Dufferin in southern Manitoba to Fort Saskatchewan in Alberta. The March West re-enactment created an opportunity to relive, both across the nation and across western Canada’s regional communities, the story of a force formed “to establish friendly relations with the Aboriginal Peoples and to maintain the peace as settlers arrived.”15 From this original achievement, the re-enactment brochure states, arose the remembered achievement of the mounted police in “forging the nation that exists today.” Some contemporary members of the RCMP who had participated in the re-enactment afterwards described how moving it had been to take part in an event where the police were, in contrast to their everyday roles as urban law enforcers, remembered and welcomed as peacekeepers and protectors.16 One RCMP member who participated recalled how in the small towns they passed through, children would run up to the riders for an autograph.17 Along the route, families joined the march for part of the way, some dressed in period costume. A local from Boissevain in southern Manitoba described how she and her family, dressed as nineteenth-century settlers, had hitched horses to a wagon and accompanied the march to the next town: for her, the March West re-enactment had engaged the whole community, and was a means of expressing community identity.18 In these terms, the re-enactment of the March West was a great success in celebrating western Canada’s pride in its NWMP history, come again to life. The trek’s progress was recorded in a documentary film, and detailed in a commemorative book which traces the spirit of the contemporary RCMP back to “the men of the Great March.”19
Not everyone remembered the NWMP’s achievements in such positive terms, however. Responding to the RCMP’s news release of the re-enactment in May 1999, an anonymous commentator noted that this re-enactment of “peace and order” could be seen instead as a re-enactment of invasion, and wryly observed that the history of colonization offered “nothing to celebrate.”20 Although this observation provides a glimpse of an alternative perspective in which the March West symbolizes a history of colonial occupation, it does so in the face of a much more powerful national narrative which regards this foundational event as the point of origin for a history of peace and progress.
While commemorative events such as the March West re-enactment will inevitably hold a symbolic role in their representation of national history, perspectives on national history do of course demonstrate shifts as an index of changing social and political climates, and may also vary from region to region, shaped by more specific networks of place. How then is the story of the NWMP’s March West told at regional sites across western Canada, and how much do those sites articulate with the iconic national narrative about the March West and the nation-building role of the NWMP?
Fort Dufferin, in southern Manitoba, was the starting point of the March West where, in 1874, the police recruits undertook three weeks of training before their long trek across the prairie lands. Now a quiet historic site on the muddy banks of the Red River set amidst a thicket of elms, it marks the beginning of the Boundary Trail Heritage Region. A sign welcoming visitors to the Boundary Trail Heritage Region carries an image that can be seen along the paved roads that now more or less follow the 49th parallel marked out by the North American Boundary Commission in 1873. Celebrating as it does two historic treks, the image depicts William Hallet, Chief Scout for the Boundary Commission, alongside G.A. French, first Commissioner of the NWMP and leader of the March West. As the starting point of the March West, the Fort Dufferin historic site focuses less upon the police force’s acclaimed peacekeeping or law-bringing role after its arrival in the North-West Territories, and more upon its task of nation-building. A memorial plaque near the front gate informs the visitor that the “newly delineated boundary paved the way for settlement and resource development in the Canadian West.” Although within a decade the arrival of the railway would “blaze a new path across the vast prairie,” the old trail serves as an important reminder of the first march towards Canadian sovereignty and an emblem of “our pioneer heritage.” Another sign near the entrance states that the NWMP force was formed to secure Canadian sovereignty: with the opening of the American west and the risk of American expansion, “it was time to send a message that Manitoba and the Northwest belonged to Canada!”
The story of the March West, as it is told at the Fort Dufferin historic site, is fundamentally a Genesis story of Canadian sovereignty. A visitor’s guide brochure describes in more detail how this point of national foundation was defined by three groups who “changed the Canadian west.” The first of these are the men of the Boundary Commission who marked out the long line of the 49th parallel. The second are the men in Red Serge, who were “sent to the frontier to maintain law and order as settlers arrived, and to establish friendly relations with the First Nations.” The last are the settlers who followed “with little more than dreams of owning their own land.”21
Amongst a series of photographic panels that dot the grassy footpaths around Fort Dufferin, one shows a gathered group of thirty Métis scouts—the “49th Rangers”—who travelled in advance of the Boundary Commission “to negotiate with the First Nations and to establish storage depots.” This is the only reference at the historic site to the Métis, who supported the westward push as scouts and negotiators; there is no visible record of the First Nations peoples with whom they would mediate. A full-wall mural on a site building, painted in 2007, features as its centrepiece a NWMP officer astride his horse. To his left is the police camp as it can be imagined at Fort Dufferin in 1874, and from his right approaches a steamer that will bring settlers along the Red River in readiness for their journey west. In the right-hand corner is a silhouette of the future pioneers, for whose lives in the west the NWMP would pave the way. This history, the mural’s title tells us, is “A History of Firsts.” Curiously absent is any reference to the First Nations people upon whose acquiescence Canadian sovereignty would ultimately depend.
Travelling west from Fort Dufferin along the route of the Boundary Trail Heritage Region, the historic story of the March West is everywhere evident in murals that adorn the walls of buildings in country towns north of the Canadian border, and that celebrate both the specificity of the town’s history and the national narrative of the opening up of the west. In other contexts, scholars have examined the function of murals as a dynamic form of political practice as well as a symbolic expression of place and identity, one that both reflects and determines the ways in which the history of place can be understood.22 Boissevain, in southern Manitoba, lies just north of the original NWMP trail and is famous for its murals. On the wall of the Redcoat Inn, located on the eastern edge of town, a large mural tells the story of the March West from G.A. French’s record. French’s 1884 account of the March West provides a parable of foundation of the Canadian west, told through hardships encountered and overcome. In the Redcoat Inn’s mural, the top left-hand corner illustrates the thunderstorm which, in French’s account, nearly blew away the police camp; in the top right-hand corner is the forest fire which similarly threatened the safety of the riders west. Such hardships have served over time to strengthen the mythic potential of the NWMP’s achievement, a mythic potential discerned early on by French himself when he reported on the trek at its end: “Day after day on the march, night after night on picquet or guard, and working at high pressure during four months from daylight until dark, and too frequently after dark, with little rest, not even on the day sacred to rest, the Force ever pushed onward.... The fact of horses and oxen dying for want of food never disheartened or stopped them, but pushing on, on foot, with dogged determination, they carried through the service required of them.”23
The role of the NWMP in “paving the way,” despite the hardships they faced on their journey, takes centre stage in the mural, with the image of the redcoats riding west followed by a wagon train of pioneers. This story is one that is nationally familiar, but in this iteration it also includes a regionally specific reference. In the bottom left-hand corner sits a retired officer of the NWMP, his dress uniform draped beside him. The named journal he holds tells us that he is G.A. French himself, now an old man, and from it he reads to a young recruit who listens intently at his feet. The young recruit, a memorial plaque nearby tells us, is Dominick French, great-grandson of G.A. French, who had joined the redcoats “after hearing the stories of his great-grandfather’s adventures” and who had served for a time in Boissevain. The story of the March West is foundational at the national level, and in this mural, a personal connection renders it locally meaningful.
Through the southern belt of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, most towns display public murals, and most of them feature the NWMP’s March West. These murals offer localized expressions of the NWMP story that are both regionally specific and nationally generic: it is a story that can be locally claimed, but that still remains shared across the nation. The largest mural in southwestern Canada covers a community sports centre wall in Fort Macleod, Alberta: painted in 1992, it was created to celebrate the town’s 100th year of incorporation. To one side an “Indian Brave” stands alongside Chief Crowfoot and an Indigenous camp. To the other is the eponymous mounted redcoat, seated next to Colonel Macleod and the famous interpreter and guide Jerry Potts. These nationally familiar scenes of the pre-settler west frame an extended “photo album” of the town’s own historical highlights.
In murals across Canada’s southwest, other kinds of local references enrich the national tale. Pictorial histories of the region’s oil or wheat industry are painted alongside a well-known triptych of figures: mounted redcoats at the centre, framed by the First Nations on one side and the arriving settlers on the other. In this repeated triptych, the NWMP represents the hinge that brings together a passing world of ancient tradition and a dawning one of modernity; it is the mounted police force’s place in historical memory to mediate peacefully between these worlds. On a mural at Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, a Mountie standing beside an Aboriginal man fulfils his historical role as “friend of the Indian”; another depicts the NWMP at Fort Walsh while Indians camp safely nearby, witnesses to a wagon train that bring settlers to the west, while overhead a steam train, symbol of the near future, flies surreally through the clouds. Some murals also contain a hint of melancholy for a lost Aboriginal past: at the far left of one mural at Maple Creek is the portrait of a chief, his headdress trailing behind to frame a future of settlement in which, presumably, he is not destined to take a part. Towns take pride in their murals. A printed brochure and map of Boissevain’s nineteen murals tells us that all had been commissioned by the town council. As the murals have weathered they have been restored, ensuring the story they tell is not lost to succeeding generations.
At Calgary International Airport, near the base of the Rockies where the NWMP ended their westward push, one can see another historical mural, or rather a smaller version of the original that was damaged when the new terminal was opened in 1977. The scene depicts a group of settlers travelling in covered wagons to their new home on the Bow River. From their hill-top vantage point the settlers behold a vision of the future city of Calgary, illuminated in a shaft of light emanating from a cloud above. Within the cloud is a group of key historical figures who appear like angels standing guard over the future: framing the group are the Reverend John McDougall and Father Lacombe, who travelled to Alberta as missionaries and are remembered for their work in establishing friendship with the First Nations; to the left is Colonel James Macleod, foundational figure of the NWMP; in the centre, Chief Crowfoot shakes hands with an early settler. The plaque accompanying the mural tells us that the cloud formations depict the outline of Canada and the British Isles. The mural depicts the apotheosis of this foundational group: having made the west safe and peaceful, they have ascended to heaven.
If murals across western Canada tell a remarkably consistent kind of foundational narrative, the historical memory of the March West has more material expression in the several forts which once formed the base of police operations in southwestern Canada, and which are now open to the public as historical sites. Each of these former forts held a significant strategic role in policing the border with the United States. As the starvation era increasingly affected First Nations groups from the mid 1870s, the police forts became important locations for the distribution of vital rations and for the management of the policing patrols, which undertook surveillance of First Nation peoples with the aim of suppressing cross-border traffic and inter-clan horse stealing.24 At strategic locations along the boundary, for instance, “look-out” posts were established which would prevent the sale of ammunition to First Nation refugees from across the border, and in the words of Commissioner James Macleod, “to give information as to their movements.”25 Even from the early years of the NWMP’s presence in the west, the goal of establishing friendly relations with the First Nations would become combined with the task, as Commissioner James Macleod understood it, to “keep them in check.”26 By 1880, a mood of discontent fuelled by starvation amongst the First Nation populations moved Macleod’s successor Commissioner Irvine to consider that more police power was required to handle this potentially “dangerous class.”27 A critical historiography of the NWMP suggests that within a few years of its arrival, the role of the NWMP on the western frontier became geared less towards the task of peaceful mediation between First Nations and the Canadian government, and more towards coercive strategies in making First Nations peoples compliant with the Queen’s law and Ottawa’s Indian Policy.28 At the historic sites that mark the NWMP’s former forts, how much of this strategic policing role is evident?
On the route from the east, the first westward fort the visitor reaches is Fort Walsh in Saskatchewan. Named after its commanding officer Superintendent James Morrow Walsh—now primarily remembered for his friendship with the refugee Sioux leader Sitting Bull—Fort Walsh was the NWMP headquarters between 1878 and 1882. Once linked in communication to Ottawa only by the Fort Benton Trail, it is now part of the “Old Forts Trail” and a National Historic Site administered by Parks Canada. Situated about fifty kilometres southwest of Maple Creek, it sits strategically in the lee of a range of hills that rise from the prairies. The contemporary fort is a reconstruction of the original square palisade made of hand-hewn tree trunks. Around the perimeter of the compound are reproductions of the stables, officers’ quarters, troopers’ dormitory, and kitchen, and near the centre flies the Maple Leaf flag.29 Beside it squats a field artillery piece capable, if need arose, of enforcing it.
On arrival at Fort Walsh, visitors today first view a short documentary film in the interpretative centre. It tells the story of how the NWMP force was established, and of how its presence in the west was triggered by the Cypress Hills massacre of 1873, in which some two dozen Assiniboine people were murdered by wolf hunters. This remains a familiar starting point of the national myth of the NWMP, whereby the force marched west to bring law to a lawless frontier and to protect Aboriginal peoples from any further such atrocities. This historical memory of the NWMP’s foundational purpose forms the basis of a positive national myth which appears to be little diminished by the more critical argument of some historians that the NWMP was primarily formed to fulfil Ottawa’s determination to bring the North-West Territories within its jurisdiction and so gain access to the region’s vast economic potential.30
Although the documentary film that introduces the visitor to Fort Walsh presents a nationally familiar story of NWMP origins, the interpretative centre offers a less mythic, more critically engaged story of the NWMP—one that speaks directly to the particular history of the immediate region. Panel displays describe the sometimes-fraught relations of that part of the western frontier, and the interactions of diverse groups that “were not always peaceful.” The installations describe the complex roles the NWMP performed. As part of the task of establishing Canadian sovereignty in the region, the police “acted as customs and excise agents and border guards. They acted as quarantine agents and brand inspectors. They established mail routes and other communications infrastructure. They arrested whiskey traders and enforced the various criminal statutes of the day.... Should circumstances require, they were trained to fight.” In short, they represented “both the civil and the military authority in the West.”31
One of the policing roles examined at the interpretative centre was the challenging task of implementing controversial aspects of the government’s Indian Policy in an era of starvation and rising discontent in the west. The brochure accompanying the Fort Walsh interpretative centre notes: “The years Fort Walsh existed, 1875–1883, were a period of tremendous struggle and misery for everyone and the Cypress Hills region staged some of its saddest scenes.”32 Fort Walsh was also at the heart of the legendary story of Sitting Bull and the Sioux who sought refuge from the US cavalry on Canadian soil after defeating General Custer in 1876 at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Although Canada’s part in providing sanctuary to the Sioux and the famed friendship between Sitting Bull and James Morrow Walsh are key aspects of popular Canadian mythology, the Fort Walsh interpretative centre offers, in more critical depth, the story of the “long diplomatic nightmare” that this history entailed, including Ottawa’s three-year effort, eventually successful, to remove the Sioux from Canadian territory and induce them to return to the United States.
From the interpretative centre, visitors are driven to the reconstructed Fort compound itself, now an immersive style of museum that revitalizes the past into living history. In contrast to the traditional museum, which serves as a repository of the past, the emphasis here is on recreating a sense of place and time in ways that invite identification with history as lived experience.33 Visitors to the Fort can experience the lived conditions of mounted police life on the prairies, to the point of participating in a court hearing from a list of cases tried at the Fort and recorded in the Magistrate’s colonial reports. Receiving sentences for such crimes as trading whiskey to the “Indians,” contemporary visitors can be reminded, if they wish to think of it, of the magisterial powers that gave the NWMP their authority as a virtually self-contained instrument of Canadian law on the western frontier.
Further west, at the historic town of Fort Macleod in southern Alberta, the history of the NWMP is remembered at the Fort Museum, a latter-day reconstruction near the site of the original fort established under Assistant Commissioner James Macleod. Here, as a text panel near the entrance informs us, “visitors can experience what it was like to live at a NWMP post and explore the influence the NWMP had on the settlement of Western Canada.” Unlike at Fort Walsh, however, there is little sign of a critical engagement with the specific history of the NWMP in the region. The historical memory of the NWMP at Fort Macleod is broadly geared toward relating the wider national story of the police force as “one of Canada’s most recognised symbols,” primarily as symbols of the arrival of law, order, and peace in the North-West Territories. The museum’s Tradition in Scarlet exhibit room is filtered through the figure of Macleod himself, whose local significance is ensured by the fact that the town takes his name. Macleod’s intention, a text panel tells us, “was that firm and cordial relations alone would prevail, that honesty and perseverance would be the watchwords of the force, and that the native peoples could be afforded justice and fair play.”
The regional relevance of the NWMP story and its impact upon this part of western Canada is intertwined with other exhibits of regional significance, including the Ranching Gallery, which tells the story of the cattle industry in the Fort Macleod area, the Centennial Gallery, which displays the decorative art of the region’s First Nations peoples, and the Cultural Gallery, which highlights the broader history of southern Alberta. After visiting the museum’s exhibits, visitors can stay to experience the famed NWMP Musical Ride, which is performed daily through the summer months.
Further west from Fort Macleod is the historic town of Fort Steele, British Columbia. Fort Steele’s prospects as a thriving mining town in the late-nineteenth century were short-lived. When the Canadian Pacific Railway bypassed it in 1898 in favour of nearby Cranbrook its fortunes waned, and by the mid-twentieth century it was little more than a ghost town. It is now reinvigorated as an historic site where visitors can stroll through its reconstructed streets, mingle with one-time “residents” in period costume, and participate in the life of a colonial township. Before its life as a town, Fort Steele’s origins were as a police post, established there in 1887 for just under a year by Superintendent Sam Steele in response to an uprising by the Ktunaxa people. A reserve had been laid out for the Ktunaxa in 1884 on St. Mary’s River, but conflict over land use led to rising tension between ranching investors and the Ktunaxa when Chief Isadore forcibly removed two of his men from gaol in 1887.
The larger history of inter-cultural tensions underlying this event are not described in great detail at the contemporary historic site of Fort Steele, though the outcomes are summarized on a plaque outside the former police buildings: “The police presence led Chief Isadore to relinquish his claims and retire to the reserve. Within a year order had been imposed, leaving the area open for development, and the police post was abandoned.” Nearby, a text panel featuring photographs of Chief Isadore and Superintendent Sam Steele tell the same story in somewhat more conciliatory terms: “The combination of Steele’s diplomacy and Chief Isadore’s wisdom peacefully diffused the tensions,” and by the time the NWMP left the district the following year, a “mutual respect had grown between the Ktunaxa and the red coats.”34 Not far from Fort Steele, the imposing building of the former St. Eugene Mission—now a First Nation–owned hotel and casino complex and home to the Ktunaxa Interpretative Centre—provides an alternative glimpse into the future of the reserve-bound Ktunaxa people in the years following the NWMP presence, and the institutionalized life from 1912 of Ktunaxa children at the residential school.
In the vast majority of popular sites relating to the historical memory of the March West and the NWMP’s role in “making” western Canada, First Nation histories and personalities appear alongside those of the NWMP as part of an enduring story of cross-cultural negotiation and mutual respect. Rarely does a First Nation perspective on the arrival and role of the NWMP provide an actual alternative to this nationally powerful narrative. An attempt to do so is visible in two exhibitions at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary: Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta and Nitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life. A history of the Mounties forms one part of the Mavericks exhibition, and is represented through parallel perspectives. On the one hand, the NWMP story emerges in terms familiar within the national mythology, emphasizing the hardships the force encountered on its westward march and its role in establishing law and order on the frontier. A diorama of a NWMP encampment includes a darkened tent which, when illuminated, casts the silhouette of a young recruit who relates events of the March West. A display on the foundational figure of James Macleod tells how he “meted out tough but fair justice” on the western frontier, and “embodied the larger-than-life myth of the Mounties.” Most entertainingly, a “Great March West” board game sits on display, inviting players to throw a dice and join the NWMP on their long trek west—depending on how the dice falls, players can participate in the different challenges the police faced on their route from Fort Dufferin.
Alongside this well-known narrative of the March West is “A First Nations Perspective,” which does not override the mythic story but runs parallel to it. A panel titled “The North-West Mounted Police” relates how, when the force first arrived in Blackfoot territory, they were invited to stay for the winter: “They never left. At first our people thought the Redcoats were helping us...but soon [they] began enforcing their own laws.” Another panel describes how the NWMP became “the symbol of the great changes that were coming to our territory”:
We waited for them to learn about us and learn the proper way of co-existing with us.... Some of the police were good men who shared food with us when no bison could be found. Others...did not respect us or our ways.... The police brought laws from the East. The Indian Act, passed by the Canadian government in 1876, placed our lives under the rule of Indian Agents. Our ceremonies were banned. Our travel was restricted. The NWMP enforced these rules.35
Next door to the Mavericks exhibition is the Nitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life gallery, which opened in 2001 as the outcome of a long collaboration between Alberta’s First Nations communities and the Glenbow Museum. A fundamental aim of the gallery’s development was to shift the traditional museum focus on objects and artifacts to an emphasis on specific social relationships, experiences and stories.36 While the Mavericks exhibition includes “A First Nations Perspective” on the impact of the NWMP’s arrival, the Nitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life gallery tells the story of post-contact life entirely from a First Nations perspective. Its exhibits relate how traditional religious ceremonies were banned, access to traditional lands was lost, and treaties dishonoured as First Nations were subjected to the oppressive policies of the government’s Indian Act. The ongoing effects of these policies of the past are commented upon in a display on Treaty 7, the signing of which was overseen by NWMP Commissioner James Macleod in 1877, with the statement: “We do not believe that the governments have ever met their obligations to the treaties.”37
Despite the emergence of a critical Canadian historiography in recent decades which details the role of the NWMP in suppressing First Nations people’s autonomy on the western frontier in the course of securing Canadian sovereignty, the public historical memory of the NWMP across western Canada appears to remain overwhelmingly that of building peaceful relations with the First Nations as an integral aspect of establishing “law and order” in the west. At one level there is clear justification for this: the NWMP did enlist negotiating powers rather than force in their implementation of the Queen’s law, unlike the United States military not far to the south, whose contribution to the unfolding history of an explicitly violent frontier has helped to create a different kind of foundational mythology in American national consciousness. Yet despite this contrast with the making of the west in the United States, there seems to be little engagement in the public historical sphere with the ways in which, as Andrew Graybill has put it, Canada’s frontier policing history helped to facilitate a thorough conquest of First Nations peoples by the end of the nineteenth century.38
That this should be so is perhaps a sign of the practical factors that shape the heritage sector broadly. Reflecting on the changing nature of heritage policy in Canada over the past three decades, Frits Pannokoek argues that market conditions more than community debate has driven the ways that historical understanding is shaped, often leaving little room to “commemorate the marginalized.”39 Yet the benign national image of the NWMP also prevails because, more than their role as peacekeepers and negotiators with First Nations peoples, they play a central role in Canadian historical memory as founding fathers. In the range of historic sites that commemorate the March West across western Canada, the police are the figures who mediate between the pre-settler world and the world to come—precursors to the settlers who would build a life on the land and the railway that would define it as modern. In so far as this view of the NWMP’s role in opening up the west shows regional variations along the former route of the March West, it does so for the most part in ways that confirm rather than challenge the national mythology of gentle occupation. Exceptions are the interpretative centre at Fort Walsh and the exhibitions at the Glenbow Museum, which not only point out the often difficult, mundane tasks of a colonial police force, but also offer more critically detailed histories of the impact and consequences of the arrival of the NWMP for the region’s First Nations peoples. On the whole, however—from road markers to murals to museums—regional historic sites tend to own the national narrative of the NWMP in locally significant ways rather than to challenge its essentially familiar terms.
As Daniel Francis notes in National Dreams, the persistence of national myths entails some forgetting, and “what we choose to forget tells as much about us as what we choose to remember.”40 In an age of anxiety when the familiar is under siege, he argues, such national myths serve to inspire a sense of reassurance by providing a thread of continuity between the past and the present. At the same time, inevitably, they serve to obscure the less-reassuring undercurrents of national history.41 With few exceptions, the sites of memory relating to the path of the NWMP across western Canada suggest that remembering the role of this colonial police force in the foundation of Canadian sovereignty entails a forgetting or disremembering of its more nuanced roles as an instrument of colonial governance.
1 Ken Coates, “The Gentle Occupation: The Settlement and the Dispossession of the First Nations” in Indigenous Peoples: Rights in Australia, Canada & New Zealand, ed. Paul Haverman (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1999), 141.
2 See, for instance, Lorne Brown and Caroline Brown, An Unauthorized History of the RCMP (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company, 1973); John Tobias, “Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline History of Canada’s Indian Policy,” Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 6, 2 (1976): 13–30; R.C. Macleod, The North-West Mounted Police and Law Enforcement, 1873–1905 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976); Katherine Petipas, Severing the Ties that Bind: Government Repression of Indigenous Religious Ceremonies on the Prairies (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1994); Vic Satzewich, “‘Where’s the beef?’: Cattle Killing, Rations Policy and First Nations’ ‘Criminality’ in Southern Alberta, 1892–1895,” Journal of Historical Sociology 9 (1996): 188–212; Brian Hubner, “Horse Stealing and the Borderline: The NWMP and the Control of Indian Movement, 1874–1900” in The Mounted Police and Prairie Society, 1873–1919 ed. W.M. Baker (Regina: University of Regina, Canadian Plains Research Center, 1998), 53–70; John Jennings, “Policemen and Poachers: Indian Relations on the Ranching Frontier” in The Mounted Police and Prairie Society, 1873–1919, 41–51; Sarah Carter, Aboriginal People and Colonizers of Western Canada to 1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Roderick Martin, “The North-West Mounted Police and Frontier Justice 1874-1898” (PhD Diss., University of Calgary, 2005); Andrew Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875–1910 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007).
3 Macleod, The North-West Mounted Police, 22.
4 Syd Harring, “‘There seemed to be no recognized law’: Canadian Law and the Prairie First Nations” in Laws and Societies in the Canadian Prairie West, eds. L. Knafla and J. Swainger (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005), 92.
5 For instance, Commissioner’s annual report of 1877, republished in Opening up the West: Official Reports to Parliament of the Activities of the Royal North-West Mounted Police Force 1874–1881 (Toronto: Coles Publishing, 1973).
6 See, for instance, the annual report of P.R. Neale, Appendix E to Commissioner’s annual report of 1887, republished in Opening up the West.
7 Commissioner’s annual report of 1884, republished in Opening up the West.
8 Carter, Aboriginal People, 161.
9 Pierre Nora, “Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory,” Transit (April 2002). http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2002-04-19-nora-en.html.
10 For instance, John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration and Patriotism in the 20th Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); Roy Rosenzweig and D. Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Margaret Conrad, et al, “Canadians and their Pasts: An Exploration in Historical Consciousness” in Public History in Canada, special issue of The Public Historian 31, 1 (2009).
11 Lyle Dick, “Public History in Canada: An Introduction” in Public History in Canada, special issue of The Public Historian 31, 1 (2009): 7; Veronica Strong-Boag, “Experts on Our Own Lives: Commemorating Canada at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century” in Public History in Canada, special issue of The Public Historian 31, 1 (2009): 49.
12 RCMP Heritage Centre visitor brochure. http://www.rcmpheritagecentre.com (accessed 1 April 2010).
13 For instance Vanessa Agnew, “What is Re-enactment?”Criticism 46, 3 (2004); Stephen Gapps, “Performing the Past: A Cultural History of Historical Re-enactments” (PhD diss., Sydney University of Technology, 2002).
14 RCMP press release, 3 May 1999, http://www.mailarchive.com/nativenews@mlists.net/msg02504.html (accessed 1 April 2010).
15 RCMP March West re-enactment brochure, summer 1999, no publishing details.
16 Conversation with authors.
17 Brian Bergman, “RCMP Recreates Historic March,” The Canadian Encyclopaedia. www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm (accessed 1 April 2010).
18 Conversation with authors.
19 Fred Stenson, RCMP: The March West 1873–1999 (Ontario: GAPC Entertainment, 1999), Postscript.
20 “RCMP Re-enact Invasion aka ‘Peace and Order,’” anonymous submission, “Settlers in Support of Indigenous Sovereignty,” 7 May 1999. http://www.mailarchive.com/nativenews@mlists.net/msg02504.html (accessed 1 April 2010).
21 Points West Trail brochure, no publishing details.
22 See for instance Neil Jarman, “Painting Landscapes: The Place of Murals in the Symbolic Construction of Urban Space,” http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/murals/jarman.htm (accessed 1 April 2010); Bill Rolston, Politics and Painting: Murals and Conflict in Northern Ireland (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1991).
23 Journal of G.A. French, republished in Opening up the West, 27.
24 Hubner, “Horse Stealing and the Borderline,” 55-68
25 Commissioner’s annual report of 1877, republished in Opening up the West.
26 Ibid.
27 Commissioner’s annual report of 1881, republished in Opening up the West.
28 For instance, Carter, Aboriginal People, 129; Graybill, Policing the Great Plains, 4.
29 Although the national flag is a familiar aspect of historical sites commemorating national origins, an original flag at the Fort would of course have been the Union Jack.
30 For instance, Brown and Brown, An Unauthorized History of the RCMP, 11.
31 Fort Walsh National Historic Site of Canada brochure, Parks Canada, no publishing details.
32 Ibid.
33 Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-modern World (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 105–110.
34 Explanatory panel, historic site of Fort Steele (visited August 2009); see also http://www.fortsteele.ca.
35 Explanatory panel, Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta exhibition, Glenbow Museum (visited August 2009); see also http://www.glenbow.org/mavericks/.
36 Cara Krmpotich and David Anderson, “Collaborative Exhibitions and Visitor Reactions: The Case of Nitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life,” Curator 48, no. 4 (2005): 386.
37 Explanatory panel, Nitsitapiisinni: Our Way of Life Blackfoot Gallery (visited August 2009); see also http://www.glenbow.org/blackfoot/.
38 Graybill, Policing the Great Plains, 58–59.
39 Frits Pannokoek, “Canada’s Historic Sites: Reflections on a Quarter Century 1980–2005” in Public History in Canada, special issue of The Public Historian 31, 1 (2009): 74–75.
40 Daniel Francis, National Dreams: Myth, Memory and Canadian History (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1997), 11.
41 Ibid., 172–173.