West Unbound: Social and Cultural Studies

A groundbreaking study of urban sprawl in Calgary after the Second World War. The interactions of land developers and the local government influenced how the pattern grew: developers met market demands and optimized profits by building houses as efficiently as possible, while the City had to consider wider planning constraints and infrastructure costs. Foran examines the complexity of their interactions from a historical perspective, why each party acted as it did, and where each can be criticized.

Canada is regularly presented as a country where liberalism has ensured freedom and equality for all. Yet with the expansion of settlers into the First Nations territories that became southern Alberta and BC, liberalism proved to be an exclusionary rather than inclusionary force. Between 1877 and 1927, government officials, police officers, church representatives, ordinary settlers, and many others operated to exclude and reform Indigenous people. Presenting Anglo-Canadian liberal capitalist values and structures and interests as normal, natural, and beyond reproach devalued virtually every aspect of Indigenous cultures. This book explores the means used to facilitate and justify colonization, their effects on Indigenous economic, political, social, and spiritual lives, and how they were resisted.

Sarah Carter reveals the pioneering efforts of the government, legal, and religious authorities to impose the "one man, one woman" model of marriage upon Mormons and Aboriginal people in Western Canada. This lucidly written, richly researched book revises what we know about marriage and the gendered politics of late nineteenth century reform, shifts our understanding of Aboriginal history during that time, and brings together the fields of Indigenous and migrant history in new and important ways.

An investigation of the meanings and iconography of the Stampede: an invented tradition that takes over the city of Calgary for ten days every July. Since 1923, archetypal 'Cowboys and Indians' are seen again at the chuckwagon races, on the midway, and throughout Calgary. Each essay in this collection examines a facet of the experience-from the images on advertising posters to the ritual of the annual parade. This study of the Calgary Stampede as a social phenomenon reveals the history and sociology of the city of Calgary and the social construction of identity for western Canada as a whole.

The West and Beyond explores the state of Western Canadian history, showcasing the research interests of a new generation of scholars while charting new directions for the future and stimulating further interrogation of our past. This dynamic collection encourages dialogue among generations of historians of the West, and among practitioners of diverse approaches to the past. It also reflects a broad range of disciplinary and professional boundaries, offering new ways to understand the West.

Recollecting is a rich collection of essays that illuminates the lives of late-eighteenth-century to mid-twentieth-century Aboriginal women, who have been overlooked in sweeping narratives of the history of the West. Some essays focus on individuals-a trader, a performer, a non-human woman. Other essays examine cohorts of women-wives, midwives, seamstresses, nuns. Authors look beyond the documentary record and standard representations of women, drawing on records generated by the women themselves, including their beadwork, other material culture, and oral histories. Exploring the constraints and boundaries these women encountered, the authors engage with difficult and important questions of gender, race, and identity. Collectively these essays demonstrate the complexity of contact.

Amer-European settlement of the Great Plains transformed bountiful Native soil into pasture and cropland, distorting the prairie ecosystem as it was understood and used by the peoples who originally populated the land. Settlers justified this transformation with the unexamined premise of deficiency, according to which the Great Plains region was inadequate in flora and fauna and the region lacking in modern civilization. Drawing on history, sociology, art, and economic theory, Frances W. Kaye counters the argument of deficiency, pointing out that, in its original ecological state, no region can possibly be incomplete. Goodlands examines the settlers' misguided theory, discussing the ideas that shaped its implementation, the forces that resisted it, and Indigenous ideologies about what it meant to make good use of the land. By suggesting methods for redeveloping the Great Plains that are founded on native cultural values, Goodlands serves the region in the context of a changing globe.