Shields BanffImaginarySites Erased Space

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R. Shields 'Imaginary Sites' Creative commons non-commercial copyright 1991, 2011

(First published with illustrations as 'Imaginary Sites' in Between Views, Exhibition Catalogue.

Banff Alberta Canada: Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for the Arts, 1991. pp. 22-26.)

Looking for Banff and not Finding It

Byron Harmon was a local photographer who made the Rockies famous partly through his s hort but profitable 'Souvenir View Book of Banff'. If we re-read his Introduction with the attention of

treasure hunters searching for every clue, we find that Banff is an "entrance" to a park for whichtwo names are given, "Canadian National" and "Rocky Mountain Park". Which park is it - and if

it is both, which name is more important? Repetition stresses that the town is "Canadian" an

important "Canadian National" and "Government" site. But "on the American continent" makesone unsure about whose "Dominion" it is. Is Banff anomalously Canadian on a continent whose

essence is really American? Surely at least this is certain: Banff is in the "valley" of the "BowRiver", surrounded by mountains and "immense crags". Yet, by some trick of the light we see

over the peaks: mountains "stretch away...rolling back". It seems to be both high, with acommanding view; yet low, in a valley. The place itself is "varied and sublime confusion."

Is this equivocal site where descriptions fail us real? Perhaps our bafflement comes from notunderstanding that at Banff, the real is overshadowed by the imaginary. This little spot is a site

of mountainous myths and national dreams. What begins as just a game of careful readingsuggests that there is reason to dig deeper. Two problems arise from the questions we have put to

Byron Harmon's introduction. The first is one of names and representations, and the second isone of location. These are related in more ways than just being two fault lines around which the

Introduction vacillates. In the old photographs produced by Harmon and others we find the first

European settlers stumbling about in the landscape as if in a dream (Figure 1). The parties andgames captured on glass negatives have a curious make-believe quality, an atmosphere of denial.

Not a cover-up, but something forgotten like a repressed trauma which can now only beapproached by stealth.

Native Traces

At Banff, and in its National Park, there is a long record of this encounter with nature and other,

native cultures, of appropriation, and of settlement. Byron Harmon doesn't tell us about whathappens before the familiar history of textbooks begins. For Europeans, the history of

settlement always involved first a "clearing out" of the space: the construction of a stage for history which is then relegated to a taken-for-granted backdrop against which events are played

out. This displacement happens both subtly and through the direct application of force, but in both cases it is a matter of the use of power to remap, recode the landscape and thus reform

knowledge at the level of commonsensical, everyday understandings of the environment in

which we live.

The project of naming, mapping and coordinating is central to the project of freeing thelandscape from the yoke of another culture's spatialisation. The result is a purified space,

stripped of the regime of places. With the erasing of place, the history of human habitation is

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rendered unreadable, unrecognizable. Recoded as wilderness space, signs of ownership, of

previous occupations and appropriations are discounted, devalued. In the process of 'dicovery' itwill be surveyed, reconquered, granted as lots and properties. The fabric of the landscape is to

be rewoven, features renamed, place-making reattempted.

Through the (a) mapping activities of explorers and naturalists; (b) the Dominion survey which

cast a Cartesian grid of lots, concessions and townships across the continent; (c) the earlydispatch of the North West Mounted Police; (d) declaration of nature reserves and the delineation

of a frontier, and (e) even the tale tales of a Robert Service, the landscape becomes respectively,(a) a known, (b) predictable and (c) disciplined territory, in which (d) nature is exhibited and put

on display as a scenic wonder (what Tony Bennett has called the "exhibitionary complex") and

(e) overlaid with a new history and mythology. In short, the land is recast into a new rational,homogeneous, abstract role as part of a European spatialisation of the entire globe.

In this colonial spatialisation, the identity of civilised places now flows from their distinctness

from natural spaces. This new "mapping", with its new names, understandings and practices,imposes a binary division of settled, civilised places and natural, barbaric wilderness spaces.

But the European entry into the mountains was a meeting with an already inhabited landscape.As such, it was not just "land" but 'spatialised' within a web of other territories, of sacred and

mundane sites, of behaviour and ritual appropriate for certain places and never others - a network of spaces and places which represented a social layering of myth and memory onto the datum of

topography and distances. Beyond a simple topos these mountains were topoi: sites of metaphoric meaning, anchoring blocks of an edifice of cultural identity. To the amazement of

European settlers, the native spatialisation excluded that capitalistic space of tradeable properties

and lots. For most native cultures before "contact", land was distinctly heterogeneous, stronglydifferentiated, non-exchangeable and inalienable.1

Much like successive vacations to a cottage, in the cycle of s uccessive encampments a place

became the significant locus of seasonal activities with which it was associated. Place becomesthe point at which the temporal, infinitely repeated cycle of seasonal time connects with the

spatial circuit of annual camps to produce an absolute presence where the spatial and the

temporal memory of past annual occupations and anticipated, future visits are fused in anenduring spirit of place.

Banff and its Park testify to the effectiveness of this recoding of space and the production of a

new spatialisation of the mountains. But the difficult encounter with an native cultural Other, the problematic European brush with cultural difference was less conclusiver. The native was elided

in a romantic division of the landscape into spaces of mastery and natural spaces for which a

clear prescription exists which will lead to them being mastered. Science, administration, eventourism are part of this Rx. It becomes hard even to imagine a cultured status for native societies

and nations. The native vanishes into the category of natural wilderness. To invert an oldsaying, it is hard to see the trees (and the natives) for the forest.

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And this forest is a forest for the eye. The tourist gaze on this re-imagined landscape slips more

easily over even the most rocky terrain, for it is now an unproblematic vista. In this culturallyconstructed space, gazing on nature in this way (knowing that we are armed with an

horticultural, biogenetic and administrative arsenal) gives back only the confirmation of Euro-Canadian civility. One of the pleasures of the tourist gaze is thus a reaffirmed, proven (éprouvé )identity. And it is portable, represented in a million postcards and picture books which allow one

to repeat the experience commemoratively. The mirroring of One and the natural Other (me andit), of virtual and real has a stability which locks one into the reciprocal gaze. Re-introducing the

third term of the cultural Other problematises this stable logic.

One could develop the same argument around the Banff 'Indian Days' festival. Natives sought to

challenge the self-assessment of the settlers in contests such as a rodeo; European were interestedin the natives only as alter-egos; as unchallenging icons of a nature rapidly being museumified.

The demand was that "they" sit cross-legged (Mounties always stand to attention), like stuffedanimals for the tourist gaze. Silent, saying nothing of their identity, natives are cast in a

caricatural persona which serves only as a foil for European culture.

Firmness of place, Fullness of space

Banff was an important icon for the spatialisation of the Canadian wilderness that was sketchedout by the state and monopoly corporations such as the Canadian Pacific Railroad. But as a town

it was held uneasily at the margin of the capitalist spatialisation of private property. Banff remained an unincorporated town until just recently, anomalously caught within the Park reserve

of 'contained' nature. A system of revocable leaseholds remained the only and uncertain form of land-tenure until the late 1960s. The town has retained an equivocal sense of being not quite a

'proper' place, in and for itself, but rather simply a point in a wider space. Is one 'in Banff' or 'at

Banff'? Hints of a past native spatialisation of the site, the local emphasis on wilderness tourism, proximity of the difficult terrain of the mountains and the distance of other centres only

contribute to this sense of Banff's unfulfilled status as 'place' even while the mountains andvalley endows it with a remarkable genus loci.

If this is correct, then the status of the place-making and place-marking European civilisation

that invaded the area is peculiarly 'unsettled' at Banff. What kind of place is this place-that-isn't?

What kind of history is it possible to enact in this ambiguously-spatialised site which wavers between the firmness of place and the fullness of space?

Laid out in the grid pattern pioneered for Roman military encampments, Banff retains that sense

of impermanence and stubborn force pitted against the natural odds of the overwhelming,mountainous sweep of the wilderness spaces. Pure time is the vector of erosion, of 'passing

away'; pure space is the field of flows, of the nomadic 'passing by'. But place is the point of their

intersection, the spatial 'point' at which the the temporal 'instant' can be apprehended as ahistorical moment or event. Place centres, grounds, brings permanence, underwrites community

- place-making is the binding of time and space into a knot, into a stitch which holds.2 Theessence of Banff is being there without leaving a trace, and what traces can't be avoided are

forgotten, disguised or misrecognized. Caught in the touristic and nomadic moment of 'just

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passing through', Banff has stubbornly stayed. Residents still talk of a sense 'guilt' at their

fortune to live in the middle of a National Park. Thus persistence has not been accompanied by asense of permanence, of a 'binding of space and time' to make a history in which a local vision of

the world is elaborated. Rather it has repeated over and over the guilty moment of colonialvision. The time of settlement, of seizure and anxious consolidation.

Witnessing the local town parade on Canada Day, one is struck by the appearance of troops of past armies of colonial settlers - Scots, Irish, Americans, Swiss, and even a fake Indian step past

in a cacophony of bagpipes and marching bands. Unable to move beyond the moment of conquest, the history of the townsfolk is tied to the commemoration of their various originary

colonial pasts. Unable to make their own history, the settlers make a colonial simulation of

Europe, inscribing a European past on a Canadian present until they arrive at the point at whichthey have no guide post for the resolution of distinctly Canadian problems.

History at Banff-Europe

The first Europeans reached the Banff area only six years before the missionary, Rev. RobertRundle, arrived in 1847, after which there was little further interest in the area until the pushing

through of the Canadian Pacific railroad in 1883, when interest in the tourism possibilities of the

local hot springs increased. The nearby depot of Siding 29 was baptised as the more picturesque-soundingBanff at the request of Lord Strathcona. The newly surveyed government

townsite was laid out for a spa and hotels were thrown up 1885. In the early days of the sparesort from 1886-1910, development was led by the CPR which constructed the Banff Springs

Hotel (1886-88) and other tourist facilities in the newly created National Park which was thenserved only by the railway.

In the establishment of the National Park, early surveying of the springs gave way to ongoingsurveillance through explanation and "improvements" on nature and the administration that one

encounter s today from the moment of entry into the Park domain. Today, each town garbageconatiner is of a specially designed type and all are carefully numbered to discourage bears - or

is it for the administrative census of their marauding activities? Banff National Park is a type of open-air museum of the administrative coding of space which was so necessary to wrest the area

from an earier native spatialisation.

Although the first public reserve of 10 square miles around the hot springs was set aside in 1885,

the area had already been a subject of the usual extractive activities which were part of thefrontier staples economy of trapping, hunting, logging and mining. These continued in the

reserve into the 1890s and left the local ecosystem depleted and the landscape denuded. TheBanff scenery of 1887 was, "grand and majestic but almost devoid of vegetation"3. 40,000 trees

were ordered from the Northwestern States and a nursery established to reforest the town and

surrounding slopes as part of an effort to improve the landscape.

A Museum of Natural History (1904) and a zoo and aviary were established (1903 - containingelk, buffalo, Rocky Mountain sheep, antelope, monkeys, a polar bear, Persian sheep, Angora

goats, a yak, red foxes and 9 varieties of pheasant, imported by the CPR President, "with the

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thought of stocking the Park with these birds"4 so that "animal species weeded out (ie. predators)

could be used in a satisfactory manner"5. The introduction of exotic species "grouped so as toadd much to the beauty of the village"6 permanently changed the natural flora, however. The

CPR restocked the rivers and lakes around the town in which fish populations had beendecimated due to over-fishing and railroad dynamiting.

To develop and manage the springs "in the best possible manner" the Dominion Governmentcommissioned a report on American spas, notably Hot Springs, Arkansas, which laid out the

problems and type of development that was to be avoided. Against this negative study, the planning of Banff followed the manner of exclusive nineteenth century English spa towns.7 This

idea of exclusivity dominated the development of Banff even though its practical role was as a

base for exploring the enlarged National Park. The town plan catered to the wealthy byincluding larger "beautiful sites for villas...to be leased to people of wealth, who will erect

handsome buildings upon them."8 The editorial of the Toronto Globe of July 13 1886foregrounded the contrast between this wealthy clientele and the social conditions in Western

Canada by remarking caustically,

"The Salubrious Rocky and Selkirk ranges may now become a summer resort for the fashionable

and crowded populations situated between Callander and Rat Portage."

The importation of the European spa model, with its s et of appropriate attitudes and exclusivesports compounded the colonial aspects of Banff. A colonial mindset demands continual

repetition of the colonizing act, emulation of the order of values founded not in the locality but inthe now-mythical topoi of Europe: Banff and Grampian; Edelweiss; Innsbruck and so on. Signs

and ritual actualise these absent pasts, making them present, making them "real" in the action of

remembering/repeating. Thus, which historical photos document significant moments andactivities portray climbing and hiking, the hunt, golf and tennis and skating. These 'must' sports

return their players to the comportment of their Western European forebears distant in time andspace. Both settlers and tourists are portrayed excelling in European-ness, even when staring the

scale of Canadian topography in the face.

Any instability in colonial status - and we have found much of it - calls for the reinforcement of

the spell of identities cast around and at Banff. The old colonial line of defense was the spikedwooden palisade of the fur traders' 'Fort Peigan', now simulated by the facade of the local Luxton

Museum. But buildings can also be turned towards a semiotic defense of E uropean civilisation.A neurotic architecture erected a palisade of brazen style and imported opulence. And so the

great ship of the Banff Springs hotel lies at beached around the river's bend like Noah's Ark onArafat. A simulation of a European chateau, it is a reassuring sign of sovereignty and dominion.

But in contrast to the luxurious hotels in the "villa section" south of the river, the northern sectionremained a frontier settlement of false-fronted frame buildings. Contrary to the image of a

National Park, the inhabitants were also substantial poachers, there was much drunkenness,smuggling and sales of whiskey, and tramps sometimes outnumbered tourists.9 Here too an

ambiguousness was and is inscribed in the architecture and planning of the town. One of the few

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areas that has escaped the National Park administration's fabrication of an 'authentic' experience,

is the cheap-reproduction quality architecture of the town. The buildings obsessively restatetheir European roots - Swiss alpine, Austrian tudor, Scottish stone - dreaming of E urope,

dissociating themselves from local conditions. If they can afford it, wealthy parents still sendtheir children to European schools. Metaphorically, the community is displaced from its spatialcontext.

Cosmopolis in the Wilderness

Contradictions and tensions continue between nature, tourists and local inhabitants. Natureconfronts Banff with the illogicality of its privileged existence as an urban centre within a nature

reserve. A new set of cultural Others have appeared in the guise of strangers and tourists who

flock to Banff. A truer encounter with cultural Others would be an ambivalent "equation of interpretation, for it is the elusive assignation of my-self with a one-self, the elision of person and

place."10

The status of activities and constructions at Banff is still firmly denominated in Euro-values. But powerful foreign cultures, most visibly Japanese, compete for space on signs, shop windows and

in the "culture" of the main street. A tide of strangers from across Canada and around the world

gives small Banff a cosmopolitan, big city atmosphere. The town's inhabitants face the problemof generating a sense of local community in the face of millions of visitors annually.

Reactionary debates over Japanese ownership of local hotels reveal the old difficulty the Euro-Canadian mind still encounters when faced with the cultural Other.

The homesick retrenchment into archly European identities (Bavarian, Swiss, French and so on)

through architecture, language, cuisine and other aspects of local commercial culture reiterates

an earlier refusal to accept the challenge of a more equal cultural encounter than either imperialism offered in the past or tourism industry transactions offer in the present. The

maintenance of such a colonial identity is almost impossible, leading to confusion as to one'scultural and national status. The local crowd does not seem to notice the incongruity of a band

closing Canada Day celebrations with 'America the Beautiful'. It appears that cosmopolitanismis most possible in placeless areas like Banff.

In our game of re-reading, we were searching for treasure, for an 'x marks the spot.' We have the'x', but it does not identify a spot, only a field of contradictions. 'X' marks a repressed encounter

with a cultural Other. Forgetting the 'third term' of the native prevents us from moving beyondthe narcissistic pendulum of identity where the naturalized Other of mountain and forest

wilderness merely serves as a culturally-constructed foil for our own idealized self-image as aculture. Such a liminal ambivalence is enormously inspiring for artists but it condemns Banff to

a forgotten mountain outpost of a European culture which no longer cares to send cultural

reinforcements. With three terms instead of just the two of nature and Euro-Canadian culture,the play of cultural difference and uncertain outcomes returns to the experience.

Current, near pathological gestures of elsewhereness hint back at that earlier traumatic

experience which is recalled like a dream. This might be seen as a metaphor for the Canadian

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condition. "The challenge of the mountains", as one postcard puts it, is simply resolved, but the

encounter with the cultural difference of the native and other societies is both more difficult andnow more pressing if we are to make our own history. An unsuccessful erasure, a guilty memory

of ethnocide troubles the anxious mind of Euro-Canadian society and warps contemporarycultural encounters whether with tourists or contemporary imperialists. The unresolvedCanadian self of the present clings to an image of itself in a European past unable to contemplate

the future and refusing to confront the violence and paradox of its own making.

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1Concerning the theory of social spatialisation see R. Shields 1991. Places on the Margin (London:

Routledge).

2Heidegger's essay 'Being Dwelling Thinking' (in Basic Writings of Martin Heidegger A. Hofstadter trans. New York: Academic Press) is the starting point for understanding the difference being made

between space and time here. See also Shields 1991 Op.Cit. Chap. 1.3W.H. Barneby 1889. The New Far West and the Old Far East (London: Edward Stanford) p. 17.

4A. Harmon undated. 'History of Banff National Park' pamphlet (Banff: Superintendent's Office). p.20.See also W.W. Mair 1952. 'The Impact of an Introduced Populat ion of Elk upon the Biota of Banff

National Park' M.A. Thesis, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

5Alberta Department of the Interior 1886. Annual Report (Edmonton: Government of Alberta) Pt. I. p.87.

6Alberta Department of the Interior 1889. Annual Report (Edmonton: Government of Alberta) Pt. V. p.4.

7Notably Buxton, England (developed through the extension of railway service to a mineral spring

high in the Pennine Hills).8Government of Canada 1887. Victoria 50-51 Commons Debates Vol. I. (Ottawa).

9Unsigned, undated comments in the Norman Luxton Papers Box 1, file 1 (Glenbow-Alberta Institute,Calgary) cited in R. Scace 1968. Banff: A Cultural-historical study of land use and management in a

National Park context to 1945 Phd. Dissertation, Dept. of Geography University of Calgary, Calgary. p.46. See also W.D. Wilcox 1900. The Rockies of Canada (New York: Putnam) p.6. Alberta Dept. of

the Interior. 1888. Annual Report (Edmonton: Government of Alberta) Pt. VI. pp.6-8.

10Homi K. Bhabba 1989. 'Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition' in B. Kruger and P. Mariani, ed. Remaking History (Seattle: Dia Art Foundation and Bay Press) p.141-2.

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