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.
Vancouver’s ‘revitalization’ has been characterized by the influx of upper-end restaurants and bars into parts of the city home to marginalized communities. We argue that some of these establishments code Vancouver’s complex racial and colonial present as a benevolent remembrance of things past. We employ and compare three modes of analysis to underscore the relationship between the historical geography of colonialism/imperialism and its modern guise in Vancouver. First, critical toponymy looks at the connection between place names and meaning. We then take a postmodern framework to explore the production of authenticity and heritage in bars emphasizing a colonial era decor. Finally, we draw from Stoler’s notion of ‘imperial debris’ to argue that these places are literally the detritus of empire revitalized as the material markings of nostalgia. In each part of the article, we demonstrate the critique offered by a different means of historical analysis. We conclude that the deployment of historical markers in the gentrification of Vancouver ultimately demonstrates the use of history as a claim to locality.
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