Theodore (Ted) Binnema and Melanie Niemi

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Theodore (Ted) Binnema and Melanie Niemi | 'Let the Line be Drawn Now': Wilderness, Conservation, and the Exclusion of Aboriginal People from Banff National Park in Canada | Environmental History, 11.4 | The History Cooperative

'let the line be drawn now': WILDERNESS, CONSERVATION, AND THE EXCLUSION OF ABORIGINAL PEOPLE FROM BANFF NATIONAL PARK IN CANADA

ABSTRACT

This essay elaborates upon the history of the removal of aboriginal people from national parks through a case study of the exclusion of the Stoney from Rocky Mountains (Banff National) Park in Canada between 1890 and 1920. It argues that the example of Banff National Park suggests that in Canada at least, and probably in the United States, aboriginal people were excluded from national parks in the interests of game conservation, sport hunting, tourism, and Indian assimilation, not to ensure that national parks became uninhabited wilderness.

THE HISTORY OF THE REMOVAL of Indians from national parks in the United States has received a great deal of recent attention. Some scholars have argued that this Indian dispossession was rooted in Americans' desire to create uninhabited wilderness. This essay is inspired by those studies. It examines a Canadian case in which aboriginal people were removed from parks in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century at a time when Canadian national park managers thought it was normal for national parks to have permanent inhabitants. Furthermore, those who pushed for the removal of aboriginal people in Canada defended their arguments without even using the word or idea of wilderness. This study also is inspired by the knowledge that the removal of resident peoples from national parks and preserves is an old and international phenomenon that continues to this day. In many cases, notions of wilderness seem to play a small part in decisions to remove people. Government officials perceived (and still perceive) serious threats to what we might today call ecological integrity, endangered species, and biodiversity.¹ Clearly, we need to understand the international phenomenon more completely. Our purpose is to contribute to that understanding by explaining the motivations of those who advocated the exclusion of aboriginal people from Rocky Mountains (Banff National) Park in Canada. The example of Banff National Park suggests that in Canada at least, and probably in the United States, aboriginal people were excluded from national parks in the interests of game (not wildlife) conservation, sport hunting, tourism, and aboriginal civilization, not to ensure that national parks became uninhabited wilderness.²

Aboriginal people were removed from most Canadian national parks in patterns similar to those of the United States.³ But they were barred from Banff National Park (and other national parks) at a time that administrators assumed that it was acceptable for national parks to have permanent human residents. In fact, in Canadian national parks established before 1930, if they did not exist already, towns were established in parks to cater to visitors. In the case of Banff National Park, the number of permanent residents rose from about 650 to 2,000 between 1887 and 1911.⁴ In 1904, two years after the coal mining village of Bankead was established within Banff Park, the park's annual report boasted that "the new village of Bankhead, instead of being a detriment to the beauty of the Park, will on the contrary add another to the many and varied attractions of the neighbourhood.... Nestling under the shadow of the Cascade, with its beautiful homes and its teeming industrial life it has become a popular stopping place for tourists." And in 1906, Frank Oliver, the minister of the Interior, wrote of Banff park that "there must be a town some place in the Park if outsiders from a distance are to have full advantage of it."⁵ Even today the tightly managed towns of Banff, Jasper, and Waterton are tourist destinations within the parks, and Canada's Rocky Mountain national parks have several thousand permanent residents.

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