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

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.

Still, aboriginal people were forbidden to hunt in the Banff Park soon after its creation in 1887, and officials intensified enforcement of these prohibitions in the very year they celebrated Bankhead's charm. Aboriginal people were excluded from provincial and city parks in Canada at the same time. In 1893 the Ontario government prohibited all hunting in the newly created "Algonquin National Park," and the Québec government did likewise in 1895, when it established "Laurentides National Park." Again, residents, including aboriginal people, were forcibly removed from Stanley Park in Vancouver. All of these events occurred before the advent of Canada's wilderness movement.⁶

Several aboriginal communities had connections to the area that became Banff National Park. Ancestors of the Ktunaxa (Kutenai) almost certainly traveled and hunted in the region before the smallpox pandemic of 1781, although it is not clear how much use they made of that region after the epidemic. Some Cree bands were familiar with the region too—the park was along the southwestern edge of their territories. The Niitsitapiksi (also known as the Blackfeet or the Blackfoot) are best known as a plains people, but they have connections with the Rocky Mountains that certainly extend back hundreds, and perhaps thousands of years. The area that has become Banff National Park was along the western periphery of their territory. The Siouan-speaking Stoney (Nakoda) probably arrived in historic times—almost certainly after 1790, and perhaps not until the mid-1800s—but they knew the place well by 1870. Surveyors and explorers of the late nineteenth century typically turned to Stoney guides, and as a result many landforms in Banff National Park are still known by their Stoney names.⁷

In 1870, three years after three of Britain's North American colonies federated to form the Dominion of Canada, the Canadian Dominion government bought Rupert's Land (the Hudson's Bay Company territories) in the western interior of the continent, including all of what is now Banff Park. It then began to negotiate land cession treaties (the so-called "Numbered Treaties") with aboriginal groups. Government negotiators drew upon the treaties signed previously in Upper Canada (today's southern Ontario), particularly on the so-called Robinson Treaties of 1850, in which the Province of Canada explicitly guaranteed Indian hunting and fishing rights except on occupied private property.⁸ The texts of most of the Numbered Treaties guaranteed hunting and fishing rights as well, but they also reflected growing Canadian concerns about game depletion. Treaty Number 7, signed with the Blackfoot, Peigan, Blood, Tsuu T'ina (Sarcee), and Stoney in 1877, stated that the Indians retained the "right to pursue their vocations of hunting throughout the tract surrendered as heretofore described," but "subject to such regulations as may, from time to time, be made by the Government of the country, acting under the authority of Her Majesty; and saving and excepting such tracts as may be required or taken up from time to time for settlement, mining, trading or other purposes by her Government of Canada, or by any of her Majesty's subjects duly authorized therefore by the said Government."⁹ This institutionalized the constant tension that has existed between the aboriginal hunting rights and the goals of game conservation in Canada. In 1886, a revision to the Indian Act empowered the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs to "declare that ... the laws respecting game in force in the Province of Manitoba or the Western Territories, or respecting such game as is specified in such notice, shall apply to Indians within the said Province or Territories."¹⁰

By 1880 the plains bison in Canada had become so scarce that Indians were unable to subsist on them. The destruction of the bison helped the Canadian government move Treaty 7 Indians onto reserves and sharpened Canadians' awareness of game depletion, although it affected the Stoney less severely than the other Treaty 7 signatories. Some of the Stoney were the first Treaty 7 Indians to settle in permanent homes. The Methodist mission at Morleyville (Morley) was established in 1873, before its residents signed the treaty. Parts of their reserve, surveyed in 1879, were suitable for grazing, but none was promising agricultural land (see Map 1). On the other hand, the reserve provided easy access to the game of the foothills and Rocky Mountains, and many of the Stoney did not live on the reserve at all. In 1914, the district inspector of forest reserves in Alberta noted that many Stoney traveled along the east slope of the Rocky Mountains, especially between Morley and the Saskatchewan River where they depended "almost exclusively upon the wild game of the east slope for sustenance."¹¹ By contrast, when the Blackfeet groups and Sarcee chose their reserves, they chose places farther from the Rockies, and by 1903, they rarely hunted there.¹²

Map 1. Banff National Park and the Stoney Reserve, 1879–1930.

Map by authors.

The Stoney, then, maintained their close connection with the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains even in the reserve era. Immediately after Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) officials became familiar with the Stoney, they recognized that the Stoney hunted in the Rocky Mountains. In his annual report of 1879, Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney wrote that the Stoney "are good hunters and trappers, and spend a good deal of their time in the Rocky Mountains, between the [U.S.-Canada] Boundary line and Jasper House."¹³

Completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) through the Stoney reserve in the fall of 1883 changed life for the Stoney. Most obviously, the CPR brought rapid environmental change. Game had never been particularly common in the mountains, but wildfires—caused by cinders from locomotives and by the newcomers and visitors that the railway brought to the country—swept through the nearby valleys, further depleting the game. Also, according to W. F. Whitcher in 1886, "skin-hunters, dynamiters and netters, with Indians, wolves and foxes, have committed sad havoc."¹⁴ Already in 1886 the DIA annual report noted that "the hunt of these Indians for fur-bearing animals and game has not been attended with the same success since the railway was built. The latter had the effect of driving the animals to much more distant parts ... relief has had at times to be sent by the Department to the hunters to enable them to return to their reserve."¹⁵ By 1888 the Stoney began "extending their roaming further and further afield," even west of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia.¹⁶ Clearly then, the CPR and the activities of non-Native newcomers it brought to the region contributed significantly to the depletion of game animals.

The CPR was also important because it promoted the establishment of Canada's first national park. That the early histories of national parks in Canada and the United States are so similar is unsurprising because the national parks movement in the United States directly influenced Canadian decision makers and the public. William Pearce even used some of the wording of the act that created Yellowstone National Park and the regulations for the Arkansas Hot Springs when he drafted the Rocky Mountains Park Act of 1887.¹⁷ But in neither country were national parks created to protect wilderness. As Roderick Nash explained, "Yellowstone's initial advocates were not concerned with wilderness; they acted to prevent private acquisition and exploitation of geysers, hot springs, waterfalls, and similar curiosities. In New York the decisive argument concerned the necessity of forested land for an adequate water supply. In both places wilderness was preserved unintentionally. Only later did a few persons begin to realize that one of the most significant results of the establishment of the first national and state parks had been the preservation of wilderness."¹⁸ In Canada, Banff Park was also created to prevent the despoliation of hot springs. The "discovery" of the Cave and Basin Hot Springs by CPR surveyors led to the formation of the twenty-six-square kilometre (ten square mile) Banff Springs Reserve in 1885. In 1887 the protected area was enlarged to 673 square kilometres (260 square miles) to include Devils' Lake (Lake Minnewanka), and in 1902 it was further expanded to the point where it abutted the Stoney reserve and included much of their hunting grounds, as well as their main north-south trail between Morley and the Kootenay Plains.¹⁹

Just as the Northern Pacific Railroad pushed for the creation of Yellowstone Park in 1872, the CPR was the primary lobbyist for Canada's first national park. As Leslie Bella argued, in Canada, national parks "were built ... to centralize control of that landscape in the hands of the railroads. That control was used to reduce competition in the parks, and to restrict access to the mountains. Businesses that might be patronized by the working class were not sufficiently aesthetic. Access to the mountains was provided instead to upper- and middle-income tourists willing to pay substantial sums for a sanitized view of the mountains."²⁰

Although the national parks were not established as game sanctuaries, even their enabling legislation and early management provided for a measure of protection of game. Superficially, the Canadian legislation was somewhat more protective than that of the United States. Whereas Yellowstone's enabling legislation prohibited the "wanton destruction" of game, the Canadian legislation allowed for the "preservation and protection of game and fish or wild birds generally," although the mechanisms for achieving such protection were not created until later.²¹

In 1886, William F. Whitcher, appointed to advise the government on the management of the park, recommended against restrictive hunting laws: "Amongst the rules sanctioned by the U.S. Congress, for the governance of the Yellowstone National Park, no allowance is made for sporting, beyond the mere permission to angle for amusement and actual consumption. I think it inadvisable to deny rational freedom in this particular within the boundaries of the Canadian reservation, because it is quite controllable and it will remove every appearance of exclusive preservation from the protective measures to be rigidly enforced." Whitcher, who as fisheries commissioner had opposed special aboriginal fishing rights, added that "exceptions of no kind whatever should be made in favor of Indians. Those who now invade that territory are stragglers and deserters from their own reserves, where they are well cared for in food and clothing at the public expense. Any misplaced indulgence could only serve to entice them away from their settled homes and tempt them to frequent and traffic meat ... with all the attendant demoralization so fatal to aborigines."²² George Stewart, a civil engineer and landscape architect and a Conservative, became the park's first superintendent in 1887. In his first annual report he wrote "it is of great importance that if possible the Indians should be excluded from the Park. Their destruction of the game and depredations among the ornamental trees make their too frequent visits to the Park a matter of great concern."²³ Despite Whitcher's recommendations to allow some hunting, all hunting was prohibited in Banff Park in 1890.²⁴

The Stoney, as well as nonaboriginal people, continued hunting in the park notwithstanding the prohibitions. Enforcement was lax for several years, but in May 1894 the Indian commissioner decided that, as of January 1895, the game laws of the North-West Territories should apply to the Stoney at Morley. When he informed P. Grasse, the department's farmer in charge of the reserve of this decision, A. E. Forget, the assistant commissioner, wrote "kindly also have orders issued that no Indians are to be allowed to hunt or trap within the limits of the Rocky Mountain Park. The N.W.M. Police have been asked to cooperate with you in enforcing this prohibition by driving out of the park any Indians found hunting or trapping therein. Complaint has been made especially with regard to your Indians." In a subsequent letter, Forget informed Grasse that "the instructions given to prevent Indians from hunting in the Rocky Mountain Park should be rigidly enforced."²⁵ Officials were responding to an array of forces that worked to restrict aboriginal hunting rights generally, and in national parks particularly.

Sportsmen certainly influenced these decisions more than any wilderness advocates. Big game hunters had been coming to the western plains and Rocky Mountains since the mid-1800s, and by the time Rocky Mountains Park was established they had been disparaging subsistence hunters for a long time. As early as 1847 a sport hunter wrote of his horror when his Cree guide began to butcher an animal before the animal had actually died.²⁶ After the completion of the CPR, however, the number of sport hunters (both local and extra-local), other tourists, and sportsmen's associations, and their significance to the economy, increased dramatically. Many of them also took an active interest in the game of western Canada. This is not surprising because political activism was understood to be an important responsibility of the sportsman. In 1908, the American conservationist and sportsman William T. Hornaday wrote the "Sportsman's Code of Ethics," which fish and game associations and sportsmen's associations in Canada soon adopted. That code said that "every man who finds pleasure in hunting or fishing should be willing to spend both time and money in active work for the protection of forest, fish and game."²⁷ But by that time sport hunters already had become influential, organized, and activist, and their opinions of aboriginal hunters already were reflected in policy and legislation.

Aboriginal hunting practices violated the sportsmen's code in several ways. For example, aboriginal people hunted for subsistence when sportsmen prided themselves on hunting for sport and for trophies, rather than for food. Thus, the sportsman's code disparaged those who ate the meat of their quarry but left heads with trophy-sized horns or antlers to rot in the field.²⁸ But sportsmen were even more appalled that many Indians sold their hunts—both heads and meat—commercially. Just as the CPR brought sport hunters, it brought a different kind of tourist: one who might never enter a forest with a gun, but might nevertheless return home with an impressive trophy—purchased at a tourist shop. Particularly troubling to officials in the Department of the Interior were men like Tom Wilson. Most famous for "discovering" Lake Louise in 1882 when the Stoney showed him the lake, Tom Wilson had arrived in the region as a surveyor for the CPR, but settled in Banff as a guide and outfitter. He was one of two men in Banff who, according to officials in the Department of the Interior, employed the Stoney to supply them with heads to sell to tourists. In 1895 officials complained that "Mr. Wilson has now a taxidermist in Banff setting the heads up for him which he has purchased from the Indians to the extent of 30 or 35, about 25 sheep heads."²⁹ The deputy minister of the Interior wrote the deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs that "I can hardly imagine that it would not be within the power of your Department to so arrange matters as to prevent them from killing game within the borders of this comparatively limited area. In view of the purpose for which the Park has been established, namely, to serve as a reservation ground for all the people of Canada, I am sure you will agree with me as to the desirability, in the public interest, of having the depredations complained of put to a stop to as promptly as possible."³⁰ Not everyone in the DIA, however, was convinced that the hunting could be easily stopped. Grasse, for example, wrote that "I do not see what I can do," and the deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs responded by writing that "this Department has no legal power to compell [sic] Indians to remain on their reserves."³¹ And so the head trade continued. In 1905 the Vancouver Daily reported that "mountain pioneer" and outfitting guide Jim Brewster complained that "the Indians from the prairies," were "making about twenty-five dollars for each bighorn sheep sold to tourists."³² Game guardians also complained that the meat of Stoney hunts sometimes ended up in butcher shops to be sold to non-Indian settlers.³³

Aboriginal hunting methods were also an affront to sportsmen. Sportsmen developed and adhered to a system of rules intended to guard hunting's respectability. This meant that animals had to be killed "fairly." Fish were to be hooked, not speared, netted, or lured to torchlight; wildfowl were to be shot on the wing; and game was to be stalked, so that it had a reasonable chance of evading and escaping the hunter. The hunter's ethics also insisted that hunters use restraint. For example only stags and bulls were to be killed, and then only in season.³⁴ Many pot hunters, including Indians and ethnic minorities, did not conform to such rules. Observers often complained that a single Stoney hunter might kill several head of large game per day, and dozens in a year. In 1905 Banff outfitter and guide Jim Brewster complained "of the havoc wrought by the Stoney Indians.... There is no discrimination in their shooting, rams, ewes and lambs all look alike to the Indian and if a whole herd is cornered up they are all exterminated.... When they start out hunting all they take is a little flour and depend on what they shoot for their supply of meat."³⁵ People also complained that the Stoney killed entire herds of animals after driving them into deep snow or cornering them with dogs. In 1914, W. N. Millar, the District Inspector of Forest Reserves in Alberta wrote "not only do these Indians kill game vastly in excess of the legal restrictions, and to the great detriment of the game supply of the region, but they also exercise no restraint whatever in the matter of age or sex." He added that "the confining of game killing to males alone is a thing absolutely incomprehensible to a Stony" (see Figure 1).³⁶ In 1915 he told Canada's commission of conservation that Stoney hunting methods included, "the killing of game regardless of age or sex, the extermination of whole bands of sheep or elk whenever possible, the killing of moose when yarded up in the winter, the use of dogs and the making of drives in which the whole camp, men, women and children participate, the slaughter of game at all seasons of the year and its constant harrying and disturbance regardless of season."³⁷ It is not surprising that aboriginal people and ethnic minorities typically failed to adhere to these rules since the ethics were so entwined with male, urban, British-American preoccupations, but sportsmen seemed unable to appreciate this fact.³⁸

Figure 1. Aboriginal Hunters Posed with Trophy Skulls.

W.N. Millar, Conservation of Fish, Birds and Game, 1916.

This photograph was taken by W. N. Millar, the district inspector of Forest Reserves in Alberta. Millar, an influential opponent of aboriginal hunting rights, appears to have posed the photograph so that it would offend in several ways the sensibilities of sport hunters and conservationists. The cover illustration of this issue of Environmental History, from the same publication, also was taken by Millar for the same purpose.

Because aboriginal hunters offended the values of sport hunters in so many ways, and since sport hunters were so politically and economically influential and active, it is not surprising that sport hunters and government officials were among the most important opponents of aboriginal hunting rights, not just in parks, but more generally. Sport hunters began to argue that no one, not even aboriginal people, had the right to hunt for subsistence. The Sportsmen's Code of Ethics stated that "the value of wild game as human food should no longer be regarded as an important factor in its pursuit," that "in the settled and civilized regions of North America there is no real necessity for the consumption of wild game for food purposes," and that "an Indian has no more right to kill wild game, or to subsist upon it all the year round, than any white man in the same locality. The Indian has no inherent or God-given ownership of the game of North America, any more than of its mineral resources; and he should be governed by the same game laws as white men."³⁹ During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries influential sport hunting groups, both local and extra-local, called on the government to force Indians to adhere to provincial and territorial game laws. In Canada their lobbying was decisive. In February 1893, after repeated unsuccessful appeals to the government by gun clubs and newspapers, the Calgary Rod and Gun Club led a campaign which saw sportsmen's organizations in that city, in Edmonton, Red Deer, Moose Jaw, Macleod, Lethbridge, and Maple Creek submit petitions to the DIA claiming the "imperative necessity of placing the Indians, so far as possible, on the same footing as the white man, in respect to game laws." The superintendent general delayed issuing the proclamations, but the records show that his decision to extend provincial and territorial game laws to over forty Indian bands in western Canada, and to enforce the ban on hunting in Banff Park were made in direct response to these petitions.⁴⁰

Sportsmen's continued appeals kept up the pressure to enforce these laws and further restrict Indian hunting rights. After the turn of the century, complaints seemed to have more effect. The last known wild passenger pigeon was killed around 1900. Although some must still have hoped that there were more pigeons to be found, in February 1903 The Canadian Magazine published its obituary for the species, concluding that "laws for the protection of our fish and game we have in plenty, but laws that are not enforced, and which are not supported by public sympathy, are worse than useless." In 1902, game warden and national parks advocate John George "Kootenai" Brown complained that the Stoney "kill more game in a week than all of the sportsmen kill in a year." Influential Americans such as Hornaday, and the Texan, C. J. "Buffalo" Jones also appealed to Canadian authorities to end aboriginal hunting freedoms in Canada.⁴¹ The decisive letter, however, appears to have been one sent to the Department of the Interior in December 1903 by Madison Grant, secretary of the New York Zoological Society. Had he sent the letter to the Department of Indian Affairs it might have had no effect. Officials in the DIA often responded cynically to criticism "when coming from prejudicial and self-interested sources."⁴² Fred White, of the North-West Mounted Police, skeptically responded to Grant's letter by writing that he thought "scientific men are apt to exaggerate the conditions; they always want to get specimen heads for themselves and do not hesitate to use the Indians in accomplishing their object—and yet they very seldom return from a hunting trip without raising the cry of ruthless slaughter by the poor Indians, who has not the advantage of returning to a home plentifully supplied with more palatable food than Rocky Mountain big horn mutton."⁴³ But Clifford Sifton, the minister of the interior, ordered Frank Pedley, the deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs, to investigate, and, after the investigation was complete, enforcement was stepped-up.⁴⁴

Early in the history of Banff Park, officials began to manage the park in the interests of sportsmen. As early as 1894, the lieutenant-governor of the North-West Territories, when calling for better measures to stop Stoney hunting in Rocky Mountain Park, predicted that if policies similar to those adopted at Yellowstone Park were in force at Banff, "natural increase would supply outlying Districts after a period and then the sportsman might have his day."⁴⁵ According to George Colpitts, Howard Douglas (1850–1929), a former CPR employee who became the second superintendent of Rocky Mountains Park in 1896, sought to make the park "more attractive to sportsmen."⁴⁶ This did not mean opening the park to hunting but making the park a breeding ground for game animals that would supply sportsmen outside the park. In 1914 W.N. Millar assumed national parks and forest reserves served this function. Gorden Hewitt, dominion entomologist and consulting zoologist, also expressed this view clearly in the early 1920s when, after describing the general increase of game in the National Parks, he wrote that Banff National Park, "together with Jasper and Waterton Lakes Parks, will serve as an unrivalled breeding-ground for the big-game animals of the Rocky Mountains region, and the surplus wild-life population will afford a constant supply of big-game and fur-bearing animals for the adjacent unprotected regions. This is one of the great advantages of such natural reserves."⁴⁷ Clearly then, although laws protected game in the national parks from all hunting, the central goal was conservationist—geared toward sustained yield for sportsmen outside the park—not preservationist.⁴⁸ Proponents of the policy often pointed to the economic importance of the sports hunters. In 1905 a Banff resident estimated that sportsmen had spent an average of $1,500 dollars each in Banff over the previous three years, and a newspaper estimated that foreign sportsmen spent about $500 for each big horn sheep killed, although the Indian agent at Morley, Howard Sibbald, noted that American sportsmen sometimes spent two or three thousand dollars for one or two heads.⁴⁹

Sport hunters who adhered to the sportsmen's code of ethics were conservationists, although many nonhunters, including bureaucrats and scientists, were also conservationists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Conservationists were concerned about the rapid destruction of game in the west by the 1880s. Like the sport hunters, conservationists attacked aboriginal hunting rights, but primarily based upon their belief that aboriginal people more than any other group, overhunted the game. Many conservationists were not as adamant about subsistence hunting as were the sport hunters. George Colpitts has argued that during the 1880s and most of the 1890s, game laws in the Canadian west were passed more to conserve a food supply than to protect the game for sport hunters. For example, in 1898, the North-West Territories Game Ordinance specifically excluded from its prohibitions those who hunted "for the purpose of food for himself or his family."⁵⁰

Some officials, especially in the DIA, sometimes defended aboriginal hunting rights, especially in more remote areas, but they grew less likely to so do over time.⁵¹ By 1907, when the Stoney complained of the Alberta game laws the Indian commissioner wrote that "the protection of the game is a matter of the utmost importance to the Indians" and he warned that "they need not expect the Department to interfere on their behalf."⁵² Some missionaries also supported aboriginal hunting rights. John McDougall, the Methodist missionary at Morley, annoyed officials in the DIA when he told the Stoney to continue hunting for subsistence (outside the park) in accordance with Section 15 of the Indian Act.⁵³ In 1920 Gordon Hewitt wrote that "our moral obligations to the Indians render it necessary that means shall be taken to ensure them an adequate food supply and a potential source of revenue."⁵⁴ Over time, however, laws increasingly restricted subsistence hunting more generally, and aboriginal hunting specifically.

Still, those appointed to manage the park and protect game animals were grappling with a real problem. The destruction of the plains bison had been impressive enough, but other game was disappearing too. According to W. N. Millar, "from the number of old horns scattered over the foothills region it is very evident that elk were at one time enormously abundant."⁵⁵ But they were already in serious decline in the 1880s. By 1900, only a few hundred elk were left in Alberta, perhaps none at all in the Rocky Mountains Park. It took an introduction of several hundred elk from Yellowstone National Park between 1917 and 1920 to reestablish them in the Canadian national parks.⁵⁶

There is little doubt that the construction of the CPR, fires set by railway locomotives, and the activities of non-native people caused much of the game depletion in the Rocky Mountains. But observers and government officials placed most of the blame on aboriginal people. In the early 1920s Gordon Hewitt wrote that "it cannot be too often remarked that the Indian, when unspoiled by white men, is traditionally a conserver of wild life," but he added that the "advent of the independent fur trader" destroyed their relationship with the game and "their passion for killing was inflamed by the example of the white hunters." As a result the aboriginal people had waged a "relentless war on the animals."⁵⁷

At least the latter part of Hewitt's theory seems to have informed many of those who made decisions about Rocky Mountains Park. In his annual report for 1895, the farmer in charge on the reserve argued that "this was the first year the Stonies had been subjected to the game laws, and considering that they have always previous to this spent the greater share of their time hunting, they are to be commended for the manner in which they obeyed the law."⁵⁸ Not everyone was so sanguine. It is clear that by mid 1895 authorities believed that Indians, rather than nonnatives, were responsible for "the unlawful destruction of game" in the park. L.W. Herchmer, the comptroller of the North West Mounted Police reported to the Department of the Interior that

I am almost certain that no big game has been killed within the Park limits during the existence of the regulations by white men; to protect game thoroughly, the Park must be enlarged and the Indians kept out, and a severe punishment to any one carrying fire arms.
The Game is destroyed by the Stoney Indians who are constantly passing through the Park, and frequent parts not frequented by white men; these Indians, there is no doubt, kill everything that they can find in or out of season, they are exterminating all kinds of game in the Mountains, and until they are compelled to keep out of the Park altogether, and remain on their Reserves during the close season, it is quite impossible to preserve game as long as Indians are allowed to carry fire-arms.⁵⁹

Others, such as Park Superintendent Howard Douglas, also championed Herchmer's suggestion that the park needed to be larger in order to protect the game. Their efforts met with success in 1902, when the park was dramatically enlarged to 11,400 square kilometers (4,900 square miles)—larger than it is today—and its eastern boundary wrapped around the western edge of the Stoney reserve.⁶⁰ The Indian agent on the reserve, Howard E. Sibbald, clearly summed up the implications of these changes for the Stoney. In his annual report for 1902 he wrote that the Stoney "took the enlargement of the Banff National Park very hard, as it took in nearly all their hunting ground." A year later he added that "I consider these Indians have behaved very well under certain restrictions put upon them in connection with their hunting in the National Park; this was a hard blow to some of the old hunters who have hunted over this ground all their lives, but the majority see the benefits to be derived from this preserve in years to come."⁶¹ The park superintendent was clearly less happy with the Stoney. In his annual report for 1903, Howard Douglas blamed the Stoney for the game depletion:

Moose were frequently seen, elk, and black tail deer, big horns, and goats were plentiful; now some of these have totally disappeared ... [and] there can only be one opinion on the subject. The Stony Indians are primarily responsible for this condition of affairs. They are very keen hunters, and have always been, and they are the only Indians who hunt in this section of the mountains. For years, from their reserve, they have systematically driven the valleys and hills and slaughtered the game. Their lodges are full of wild skins and meat. From thirty to fifty of the lodges are continually in the mountains from September 1 till Christmas ... [T]he old haunts are deserted, the sheep runs are falling into disuse, and the greatest game country the sun ever shone upon is fast becoming a thing of the past. True, within the last few years, there has been a close season in which the Indians are supposed to stop harassing the game, but no notice has been taken of the law, and in short time this vast tract of mountain land, abounding in all that is required for the sustenance of wild animals, will be deserted, unless the Indians are compelled to live on their reserves. Laws are useless unless they are enforced. There seems to be a feeling that it would not do to press the more radical feature of the law amongst Indians. I feel that we have reached the time, when we can take a step in advance, when we can apply the laws more forcibly than we have, without creating any adverse sentiment. Let the line be drawn now; if we wait longer, the game will be gone.⁶²

Howard Douglas continued his plea for improved enforcement in his 1904 annual report. This time he used the example of the Stoney hunters to call for game wardens. Ironically, he noted that the expansion of the park, undertaken to protect game, had increased the difficulties in enforcement: "every effort has been made to preserve the game which at one time abounded in the Park. The Stony Indians are, as I have already stated in my last report, the offenders in this regard. Owing to the enormous area of the park it is impossible to prevent infractions of the game laws. The only additional suggestion which I can make is the establishment of a rigid and thorough system of game guardians to maintain the legislation needed for the enforcement of much more severe penalties for its infraction."⁶³ Douglas had to wait several more years, but the government did provide for the hiring of game wardens in national parks in June 1909. The degree to which Douglas still viewed the Stoney as the most serious threat to the game of the park can be seen in his choice of the first chief game guardian. He chose Howard E. Sibbald.⁶⁴ The Sibbald family had arrived in the Canadian west from Ontario in 1875 when Howard's father, Andrew, arrived at Morley to teach at George and John McDougall's mission at Morley. In May 1900, Sibbald became the farmer in charge at Morley, and from 1901 to 1904 he was the Indian agent there.⁶⁵ Douglas's decision to hire the former Indian agent at the Stoney reserve indicated his resolve to deal with the Stoney hunters in the park. That decision has an interesting parallel in Glacier National Park in Montana where, in 1910, William R. Logan, the park's first superintendent, was the former Indian agent on the Blackfeet reservation.⁶⁶ In 1911, the Canadian government passed the Dominion Forest Reserves and Parks Act, which established the Dominion Parks Branch—the world's first national park service—and helped institutionalize the Warden Service of the national parks.⁶⁷ It also altered the boundaries of national parks so that areas that were not important tourist destinations were removed from the national parks. As a result much of the land in Banff Park was reallocated to a forest reserve. The Stoney only briefly took heart. In August 1911, the assistant secretary of the Department of the Interior sent a sternly worded letter to the secretary of the DIA announcing that it intended to enforce a new regulation that stipulated that no one was allowed to enter the forest reserves without special permission from the Department of Forestry.⁶⁸

Government officials remained concerned about game depletion. When W. N. Millar discussed the "chief violators of the game laws," in Alberta in 1914 he cited three groups of people. These were "transients" whose effects were "practically negligible." "Resident miners" were "a more important and dangerous class," who were "to a very large extent foreigners, many of them of nationalities to whom the slaughter of wild game of all kinds appears to appeal as a sort of duty." But, he added, "none of the other agencies of destruction,... nor indeed all others put together—can in any way compare with the depredations on big game for which the Stony are responsible." He explained that "this is not hearsay, but facts resulting from my own observation gained through frequent intercourse with the Stonies at all periods of the year throughout the larger part of the East Slope region.... I feel safe in stating that the Stony tribe kills not less than two thousand head of big game in each year in that portion of the Rocky Mountains lying between the Crowsnest pass and the Brazeau river."⁶⁹

But the Stoney complained too. As Banff Park grew in size, and as the power of those administering games laws in the national park grew, the Stoney found their access to game increasingly curtailed. In 1907 they appealed to the government, writing in response to a new provincial game law that

they tell us that we must not hunt the goat and sheep in the mountains; ... that we must not kill more than one moose, one caribou, one deer and that we must pay $2.50 before we can hunt.
Now, when we made a treaty with your chiefs, we understood that there would always be wild animals in the forest and the mountains. But the white men come every year, more and more, and our hunting grounds are covered with the houses and fences of white men. We are poor people. We do not know how to get money as white men do ...
Look kindly upon us, oh white chiefs. Let us still hunt the game in the fall as our fathers did. We work hard and make all the money we can, and we buy what the white men eat, but sweeter to us than all, is the flesh of the wild animals ... Give us freedom to go into the mountains and the forests to look for meat of the wild animals, and the birds, when our children ask for it.⁷⁰

Notwithstanding such complaints, the prohibitions continued, and observers soon reported that game populations were growing. In the early 1920s, Gordon Hewitt reported that "in the southerly part of their range [bighorn sheep] have suffered severely through the excessive hunting of the Stoney Indians, but a number of circumstances are now tending not only to prevent their further reduction, but to insure an increase in abundance. The Indians are now compelled to observe the provincial game laws ... The most important factor, however, in protecting the sheep and insuring an increase is the protection they secure in the Dominion Parks."⁷¹ In 1915 Millar listed several areas along the Rocky Mountains in which Stoney hunting had been restricted, including the park, and claimed that "in spite of a very large mining population, and an increase in both local and foreign hunters, there has been a very notable increase in all kinds of game."⁷² Those responsible for the national parks must have felt vindicated by such reports.

The documents suggest then, that the policies of barring aboriginal people from Banff National Park were rooted primarily in the goals and values of conservationists and sportsmen. But aboriginal subsistence hunting also frustrated one of the central goals of the DIA at the time: the civilization and assimilation of aboriginal people. Indian agents did tolerate or even encourage Indians to hunt for subsistence during the winters during the 1880s and early 1890s, and even later in more remote regions, but they believed that when a sedentary agricultural way of life was feasible for any given community, that community should be dissuaded from hunting. Thus, from the perspective of some Indian officials, the restriction of aboriginal hunting rights might be a blessing in disguise. When Québec established its 2,531-square-mile Laurentides National Park in 1895 it also prohibited all hunting in the park. Five years later, the deputy superintendent general reported that the aboriginals' loss of hunting rights in the park near their reserve was one of the important factors that led them to direct their efforts towards agriculture.⁷³ When he was still the Indian agent at Morley, in 1903, Howard Sibbald opined that "as long as they can hunt you cannot civilize them. I have lived alongside of them for twenty six years, and with the exception of a few of the younger ones they are no more civilized now than they were when I first knew them, and I blame hunting as the cause." In his annual report for 1902, Sibbald, reflecting on the enlargement of Banff National Park, wrote "I hope it will be for the best, for as long as there was any game so close to the reserve, it was hard for them to get down to work." A year later he added that although hunting restrictions were "a hard blow to some of the old hunters,... the majority see the benefits to be derived from this preserve in years to come."⁷⁴ By that time, more Stoney had taken up paid work as guides even in the national park, and by the 1930s, few could depend on full-time subsistence hunting.⁷⁵

Fundamentally, according to Leslie Bella, Canadian national parks were about profit.⁷⁶ That fact also played a part in the prohibition of hunting in the national parks. In one of his first annual reports, the first Dominion Parks commissioner, J. B. Harkin, noted that the national parks "attract an enormous tourist traffic and tourist traffic is one of the largest and most satisfactory means of revenue a nation can have ... The commercial potentialities of tourist traffic are almost startling ... On every hand there is evidence of a powerful and prevailing desire on the part of the people to see and commune with the beauties of nature, their willingness to pay for it and the pecuniary benefit of the locality concerned."⁷⁷ Thus, while many sportsmen hunted for trophies, many tourists simply wanted to observe and photograph large game animals. Parks officials reported their pleasure when relatively tame deer and elk wandered through town sites, and tourists enjoyed watching beavers at work.⁷⁸ Predator control was a widely accepted game management strategy both inside and outside national parks, but since the absence of predators made large game more common and docile, predator control had other advantages in the national parks. And thus the removal of human hunters from national parks was paralleled by a policy to reduce all predators ("that prey upon furred and feathered game with savage impartiality") so that the large herbivores could proliferate and become tamer.⁷⁹ There was room too, for tamer Indians in the park. Reflecting similar developments in U.S. national parks, the representation of "Indianness" at Banff in the early twentieth century took on a new carnival-like form in the "Banff Indian Days." "Indianness," could be reconstructed as a tourist friendly "useful institution" in the park.⁸⁰

There is no evidence that Indians were excluded from Canadian national parks to preserve or create "wilderness"—at least not in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. In fact, sportsmen and conservationists never appealed to ideas of "wilderness" when they called for an end to the Stoney hunt in the park. This is not surprising. Few people in Canada before World War II assumed that "wilderness" was, by definition, uninhabited. The usage of the word in DIA annual reports before 1920, on those rare occasions that it was used, shows that officials thought of wilderness simply as forested land. In 1890, the annual report of the DIA described the region around Lake of the Woods by saying that "the territory within which these Indians dwell, is for the most part still a wilderness." Similarly, in 1911, the Indians of the Norway House area were described as living "by fishing and hunting, and by serving the Hudson's Bay Company in boats and canoes, moving freight and passengers into the wilderness where the company's business is carried on." The annual report of 1898 describes the reserve of the Woodstock band in New Brunswick as containing "an area of two hundred and sixty acres, of which there are about thirty-five acres of cleared land, the remainder being wilderness."⁸¹ The word "wilderness" appears to have been used less often and more narrowly thereafter. In 1921, the annual report remarked about civilization forcing its way into the wilderness, and in 1945 the word was used more narrowly to refer to "beaver and fur preserves" as "wilderness areas."⁸² There is reason to believe that the idea of an inhabited wilderness persisted in the United States too. In 1894, Forest and Stream printed a front page editorial, likely written by George Bird Grinnell, who was instrumental in the establishment of Glacier National Park. It did not imply that wilderness was uninhabited as it noted that "game still affords food for the dweller in the wilderness."⁸³ Indeed founding members of the Wilderness Movement themselves seem to have assumed that wilderness could be both modified and occupied.⁸⁴ It also seems that officials at the time intended that national parks and game preserves be anthropogenic landscapes where game animals were "more abundant than they would be under natural conditions."⁸⁵ As Roger Byrne concluded in 1968, "even scientific advisors to the Park's administration had no idea of preserving the landscape in a primeval, or pristine condition.... [T]he main objective behind Park management was to 'improve' the Park and make it a more attractive place for the tourist."⁸⁶

Our ideas of wilderness and nature are socially constructed, and so we should reflect on how humans have attempted to modify the physical reality to conform to our notions of what wilderness and nature ought to be. In the case of the nature that was modified in the national parks and forest reserves before the 1920s, however, aboriginal people were not removed to create uninhabited landscapes, but in the service of efforts to create landscapes abundant in wild game (primarily for sportsmen and tourists), as well as a broader goal of civilizing and assimilating aboriginal societies.⁸⁷

It has not been our purpose to defend or condemn past or present park managers for their decisions. We have sought instead to explain their decisions more fully. Neither has it been our purpose to examine the consequences of these decisions for human and natural communities, although we believe that those consequences have been significant. Those who decided that the Stoney needed to be excluded from Banff National Park, by choosing to focus on the Stoney, seem to have ignored other causes of environmental decline. Furthermore, those responsible for removing peoples from parks have often been highly trained people who assumed that their knowledge and oversight were far more valuable than that of local people whose knowledge—accumulated over many generations—and constant presence on the land rendered them highly attuned to subtle changes in the environment. We ought not to be so naïve as to assume that this local knowledge and oversight was sufficient to prevent serious environmental decline in Banff National Park in the period under study, or that local environmental knowledge is necessarily sufficient to prevent environmental tragedies elsewhere today, but we can regret that much important aboriginal environmental knowledge about national parks in North America has been lost after generations of exclusion. The loss is made more apparent when we admit that it is simplistic to believe that modern scientific knowledge was (or is) sufficient to prevent environmental ruin in carefully managed landscapes today. But we need to recognize the complexity of past and present realities. It appears that most of those responsible for managing national parks and sensitive environments did not make their decisions simply to create uninhabited wilderness playgrounds for the well-heeled, but many did make, and continue to make their decisions based on their perceptions that ecological integrity and biodiversity are seriously threatened. This case study offers some new insight into the history of aboriginal removal. But more research—including comparative research—is required before the global phenomenon is well understood.

Theodore (Ted) Binnema is associate professor of history at the University of Northern British Columbia. He is the author of Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Oklahoma, 2001). Melanie Niemi is a PhD student in history at the University of Alberta.

NOTES

^1. The most influential and controversial critique of the wilderness idea is found in William Cronon, "The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," Environmental History 1 (1996): 7–28; and in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton, 1995), 69–90, which, when reprinted in 1996, was given the less provocative subtitle of Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Cronon also published these thoughts in The New York Times, August 13, 1995, 42. In defense of his general argument that "far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, [wilderness] is quite profoundly a human creation," Cronon wrote that "the removal of Indians to create 'uninhabited wilderness'—uninhabited as never before in human history of the place—reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is"; Cronon, Uncommon Ground, 69, 79. A flavor of the immediate reaction in the scholarly community can be found in the responses by Samuel P. Hays, Michael Cohen, and Thomas Dunlap, and Cronon's rejoinder in Environmental History 1 (1996): 29–55, and the other articles in Uncommon Ground. Char Miller reflected on the fallout of the debate in "An Open Field," Pacific Historical Review 70 (2001): 71–74. Thomas R. Dunlap published a fine analysis of the debate (both among academics and non-academics) in Faith in Nature: Environmentalism as Religious Quest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), chap. 3. Cronon's article is best understood as a particularly effective and controversial articulation of what several scholars had already thought and said. For example, in 1989 Ramachandra Guha argued that "the [American] emphasis on wilderness is positively harmful when applied to the Third World," and criticized those "seeking to transplant the American system of national parks onto Indian soil": Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989): 75. The argument that ideas of wilderness went hand in hand with aboriginal dispossession also predates Cronon. Two Canadian scholars made that argument in 1992. And Mark Spence began his research into the history of Indian removal from national parks in the United States before Cronon presented his critique. See Bruce W. Hodgins and Jonathan Bordo, "Wilderness, Aboriginal Presence and the Land Claim," in Co-existence? Studies in Ontario-First Nations Relations, ed. Bruce W. Hodgins, Shawn Heard, and John S. Milloy (Peterborough: Frost Centre for Canadian Heritage and Development Studies, 1992), 67–80; Mark David Spence, "Dispossessing the Wilderness: The Preservationist Ideal, Indian Removal, and National Parks" (PhD Diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1997); and Cronon, Uncommon Ground, 69, 79. According to Spence, an "uninhabited wilderness had to be created before it could be preserved, and this type of landscape became reified in the first national parks." Examining the evolution of wilderness and preservationist discourse in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Spence argued that these popular nineteenth-century ideologies led to the removal and exclusion of Indians from America's constructed "wilderness" areas. Spence also argued that this history has global significance because "as the grand symbols of American wilderness, the uninhabited landscapes preserved in these parks have served as models for preservationist efforts, and native dispossession, the world over"; Mark David Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of National Parks, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 4, 5. Louis S. Warren's argument is also influenced by this assumption: see his The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), chap. 5, especially 136 and 151. Recent literature on American Indians and national parks also includes Robert H. Keller and Michael F. Turek, American Indians and National Parks (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998); and Philip Burnham, Indian Country: God's Country: Native Americans and the National Parks (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000). Useful historical studies outside North America include Jane Carruthers, The Kruger National Park: A Social and Political History (Pietermaritzberg: University of Natal Press, 1995); and Thomas R. Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora: Environment and History in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 231–39. Useful more-contemporary studies of the issue outside North America can be found in Patrick C. West and Steven R. Brechin, Resident Peoples and National Parks: Social Dilemmas and Strategies in International Conservation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991); and Roderick P. Neumann, Imposing Wilderness: Struggles over Livelihood and Nature Preservation in Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998); Sanjay Kumar Nepal and Karl E. Weber, Struggle for Existence: Park-People Conflict in the Royal Chitwan National Park, Nepal (Bangkok: Asian Institute for Technology, 1993). China also provides an excellent present-day example. After one of the authors presented an earlier version of this paper at a conference in Tianjin, China, in November 2005, delegates informed him that China's Western Development Strategy, introduced in 2000, proposes to remove about 8 million people, mostly ethnic minorities, from ecologically sensitive, damaged, and sensitive areas including national parks (many of which are inhabited). For example, the government is considering removing several Tibetan villages from Jiu Zhai Gou National Park to protect endangered species. The park, a U.N. Natural World Heritage Site, sometimes referred to as China's Yellowstone, is in Sichuan province.

^2. Rocky Mountains Park, often identified as the world's second oldest national park, was officially renamed Banff National Park in 1930, but it was often referred to as "Banff National Park" or "Banff Park" before that because there were several national parks in the Canadian Rocky Mountains by 1930. Thus both names will be used in this article. "Game" refers to animals that humans hunted for sport. The term "wildlife" did not appear until the 1920s. Neither did the idea that nongame animals should be given particular protection. Indeed, many people advocated the control or extermination of predators to protect game. See Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada's Wildlife in the Twentieth Century, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2006), 4, 14.

^3. The literature in Canada is small but growing. General histories of Banff and of Canadian national parks do not deal with this issue. The exclusion of the Stoney from Banff National Park is discussed briefly in John Snow, These Mountains Are Our Sacred Places: The Story of the Stoney Indians (Toronto: Samuel Stevens, 1977), 46, 68; and Janet Foster, Working for Wildlife: The Beginning of Preservation in Canada, 2nd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 30, 84. Ian MacLaren provides a sophisticated discussion of the "cultured wilderness" of Jasper National Park, including a brief discussion of the removal of resident people, in his "Cultured Wilderness in Jasper National Park," Journal of Canadian Studies 34 (Autumn 1999): 7–58. An examination of Riding Mountain National Park in Manitoba can be found in John Sandlos, "Not Wanted in the Boundary: The Expulsion of the Keeseekowenin Ojibway Band from Riding Mountain National Park," unpublished paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association Conference, York University, May 31, 2006. For a discussion of Prince Albert National Park, see William Waiser, Saskatchewan's Playground: A History of Prince Albert National Park (Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1989), 40–41. Also see John Sandlos, "Federal Spaces, Local Conflicts: National Parks and the Exclusionary Politics of the Conservation Movement in Ontario, 1900–1935," unpublished paper presented at the Canadian Historical Association Conference, University of Western Ontario, June 1, 2005. The expropriation of nonaboriginal resident peoples in a later period is discussed in Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935–1970 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001). For a discussion focused on aboriginal people in Ontario's Algonquin Provincial Park and other wilderness areas in Ontario, see Hodgins and Bordo, "Wilderness, Aboriginal Presence and the Land Claim," 67–80; and Jonathan Bordo, "Jack Pine–Wilderness Sublime or the Erasure of the Aboriginal Presence from the Landscape," Journal of Canadian Studies 27 (1992–93): 98–128. For brief discussions of the exclusion (and the reversal of the exclusion) of aboriginal people from Ontario provincial parks in this period, see Gerald Killan, Protected Places: A History of Ontario's Provincial Parks System (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1993), 14–15, 25–26; and David T. McNab, Circles of Time: Aboriginal Land Rights and Resistance in Ontario (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 1999), 89–100. In 1942, when the Canadian government created the Kluane National Park Reserve in response to game depletion related to the construction of the Alaska Highway, the local Southern Tutchone peoples were barred from the protected area. See Mike Walton, Paula Banks, and Robin Bradasch, "Healing Broken Connections: Kluane National Park and Reserve Traditional Knowledge and Regional Integration," in Interdisciplinary Research and Management in Mountain Areas, ed. Leslie Taylor and Anne Ryall (Banff: Banff Centre, 2005), 76–78. Paralleling the history of the United States, however, resident and aboriginal people were allowed to hunt and fish (with restrictions) in some northern national parks. See Theodore Catton, Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997); Patricia A. McCormack, "The Political Economy of Bison Management in Wood Buffalo National Park," Arctic (December 1992): 367–80; and John Sandlos, "Where the Scientists Roam: Ecology, Management and Bison in Northern Canada," Journal of Canadian Studies 37 (Summer 2002): 93–129. For a useful survey that explores literature from the Third World and looks at more recent developments, see Lawrence Berg, Terry Fenge, and Philip Dearden, "The Role of Aboriginal People in National Park Designation, Planning, and Management in Canada," in Parks and Protected Places in Canada: Planning and Management, ed. P. Dearden and R. Rollins (Oxford University Press, 1993), 225–55; and Barry Sadler, "National Parks, Wilderness, Preservation and Native Peoples in Northern Canada," Natural Resources Journal 29 (1989): 185–204.

^4. Eleanor Georgina Luxton, Banff, Canada's First National Park: A History and a Memory of Rocky Mountains Park (Banff: Summerthought, 1975), 64. Roger Byrne, Man and Landscape Change in the Banff National Park Area before 1911 (Calgary: University of Calgary, 1968), 126.

^5. Leslie Bella, Parks for Profit (Montréal: Harvest House, 1987), 24–27; the quoted annual report is on 24. The Oliver quote is from Frank Oliver, minister of the interior, to Mr. Rothwell, January 6, 1906, in Library and Archives Canada (hereafter LAC) RG 84 A-2-a, vol. 653, f. B2, part 1. The town of Waskesiu (Prince Albert National Park), established in 1927, was probably the last town established in a national park in Canada. In 1930 the Canada's National Park Act was revised to permit the expropriation of land, including Indian lands, in national parks, "National Parks Act," Statutes of Canada (SC) 20–21 Geo. V, Cap. 33. It seems that expropriation of land in National Parks began immediately afterward. See Sandlos, "Federal Spaces," 23; and Waiser, Saskatchewan's Playground, 38. The existence of the town site goes a long way to explaining why, by 1900, Banff Park was normally attracting at least twice the number of annual visitors as Yellowstone Park.

^6. Those responsible for creating Algonquin Park literally forgot about aboriginal people until the park had been created: see Killan, Protected Places, 14–15. In Québec (and in Ontario at the time) provincially owned and administered parks are called "national parks." For Stanley Park, see Jean Barman, Stanley Park's Secret: The Forgotten Families of Whoi Whoi, Kanaka Rance and Brockton Point (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2005). For a comparative study of wilderness ideas, see Roderick Nash, "Wilderness and Man in North America," in The Canadian National Parks: Today and Tomorrow, ed. J. G. Nelson and R. C. Scace (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1968), 84.

^7. Luxton, Banff, Canada's First National Park, 49–50. For the Kutenai, see Raoul A. Andersen, "Alberta Stoney (Assiniboine) Origins and Adaptations: A Case for Reappraisal," Ethnohistory 17 (1970): 48–61; and Theodore Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 81–82. For the Blackfeet, see Spence, Dispossessing the Wilderness, chap. 5; Brian Reeves and Sandra Peacock, "'Our Mountains Are Our Pillows': An Ethnographic Overview of Glacier National Park" (Glacier National Park, 2001); Brian O. K. Reeves, Mistakis: The Archaeology of Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park (Bozeman: Montana State University Press, 2003); and Binnema, Common and Contested Ground, chap. 2. The ancestors of the Stoney were among the Assiniboine who broke from the Sioux sometime before 1640. Some of their descendants were in the forests and foothills of the Rocky Mountains by the late 1700s, and in the area of present-day Banff Park by the mid 1800s. See Hugh A. Dempsey, Indian Tribes of Alberta (Calgary: Glenbow Museum, 1988), 42–43. Also see Luxton, Banff, Canada's First National Park, chap. 4

^8. Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories, Including the Negotiations on which They were Based, and Other Information Relating Thereto (Toronto: Belfords, Clarke & Co., 1880), 303.

^9. Ibid., 369.

^10. Revised Statutes of Canada 1886, c. 43, s. 133.

^11. W. N. Millar, Game Preservation in the Rocky Mountains Forest Reserve (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1915), 20.

^12. See the following letters, all LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2: J. A. Markle, Blackfoot agency, to Frank Pedley, December 22, 1903; A. J. McNeill, Sarcee agency, to Frank Pedley, December 29, 1903, J. H. Gooderham, Macleod, to Frank Pedley, December 18, 1903.

^13. Edgar Dewdney, "Report of the Indian Commissioner," Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs (ARDIA), 1880, 80.

^14. For environmental change generally, see Byrne, Man and Landscape Change, 87, 95–96. The quoted passage is in W. F. Whitcher, "Report," Annual Report of the Department of the Interior (ARDI), 1886, part 1, 86.

^15. John A. Macdonald, "Report of the Superintendent General of Indians Affairs," ARDIA, 1887, lii.

^16. Michael Phillipps, Indian agent, Fort Steele, to A. W. Vowell, superintendent of Indian Affairs, Victoria, BC, September 30, 1891, LAC RG 10, vol. 3855, f. 80,143. Quoted passage is from Hayter Reed to L. Vankoughnet, May 20, 1893, LAC RG 10, vol. 3855, f. 80,143.

^17. Compare "An Act to Set Apart a Certain Tract of Land Lying Near the Headwaters of the Yellowstone River as a Public Park," US Statutes at Large, 17 Stat. 32 (1872); "Act Respecting Rocky Mountains Park of Canada," SC 50 Vic. Cap. 32 (1887), W. F. Lothian, A History of Canada's National Parks (Ottawa: Parks Canada, 1976), 24, 26. Also see Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections, 29; and William Pearce, "Establishment of National Parks in the Rockies," Alberta Historical Review 10 (1962): 12. For comparable histories of national parks, see Alfred Runte, National Parks: The American Experience (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997); and Bella, Parks for Profit.

^18. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 108. Also see Runte, National Parks, especially chaps. 1 and 2.

^19. Luxton, Banff, Canada's First National Park, 54. H. E. Sibbald, chief game guardian, to Howard Douglas, commissioner of Dominion Parks, June 2, 1909, LAC RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 653, f. B2, part 1.

^20. Bella, Parks for Profit, 24. Also see Foster, Working for Wildlife, 16–26; and Robert Craig Brown, "The Doctrine of Usefulness: Natural Resource and National Park Policy in Canada, 1887–1914," in Canadian Parks in Perspective, ed. J. G. Nelson (Montreal: Harvest House, 1970), 46–62. For a more recent study that includes the significance of wilderness, see MacEachern, Natural Selections, 2001), chap. 2.

^21. Curiously, the same sentence provided for the protection and preservation of "cattle allowed to pasture in the park." SC, 50 Vic. Cap. 32. For a discussion see Foster, Working for Wildlife, 26.

^22. Both quoted passages are from Whitcher, "Report," ARDI, 1886, part 1, 92. For more on Whitcher and native people, see Bill Parenteau, "'Care Control and Supervision': Native People in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1900," Canadian Historical Review 79 (1998): 16.

^23. The quoted passage is from George Stewart, ARDI, 1887, parts 6 and 10. Information about Stewart is drawn from Byrne, Man and Landscape Change, 139.

^24. J. Burns with Mike Schintz, Guardians of the Wild: A History of the Warden Service of Canada's National Parks (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2000), 3.

^25. Both letters are found in LAC RG 10, vol. 3796, file 47441–2. The first is A. E. Forget, Regina, to P. L. Grasse, Morley, May 14, 1894, and the second is A. E. Forget, Regina, to P. L. Grasse, Morley, June 11, 1894.

^26. Greg Gillespie, "'I Was Well Pleased with Our Sport among the Buffalo': Big-Game Hunters, Travel Writing, and Cultural Imperialism in the British North American West, 1847–72," Canadian Historical Review 83 (2002): 555–84, esp. 558, 561–62. The incident is described on 562.

^27. The sportsman's code is quoted in Gordon Hewitt, Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, (New York: Scribner's Sons, 1921), 298; its history in Canada is described on pages 297–98. Bill Parenteau has explored the role of sportsmen in bringing about fishing regulations, including the exclusion of aboriginal people from the fisheries in Atlantic Canada, in his "Care, Control, and Supervision," 1–35; and "A 'Very Determined Opposition to the Law': Conservation, Angling Leases, and Social Conflict in the Canadian Atlantic Salmon Fishery, 1867–1914," Environmental History 9 (2004): 436–63.

^28. Tina Loo, "Of Moose and Men: Hunting for Masculinities in British Columbia, 1880–1939," Western Historical Quarterly 32 (2001): 308. See "Indian Hunters Killing Off Game," Vancouver Province, February 24, 1906. A clipping of this article is found in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2.

^29. A. M. Burgess, to Hayter Reed, deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs (DSGIA), May 31, 1895, LAC RG 10, vol. 3796, f. 47441–2. George Colpitts argued that sportsmen were among the first to object to this "head trade": George Colpitts, Game in the Garden: A Human History of Wildlife in Western Canada to 1940 (Vancouver: UBC Press), 153. He suggested that John McDougall, one of the missionaries on the reserve, encouraged the Stoney to sell animal heads, much to the anger of sport hunters in the late 1880s. He went on to say that the Stoneys at Exshaw and Morley sold heads long after the provincial government banned their sale in 1905. He argued (p. 153) that "infractions reported in courts suggest that Amerindians were selling the pelts and heads of animals that they were probably hunting for food to travelers and urban businesspeople far into the 1920s." Unfortunately, Colpitts did not cite his sources.

^30. A. M. Burgess to Hayter Reed, DSGIA, May 31, 1895, LAC RG 10, vol. 3796, f. 47441–2.

^31. P. L. Grasse, farmer, Morley, to the Indian commissioner, Regina, June 15, 1895, LAC RG 10, vol. 3796, file 47441–2; and Hayter Reed, DSGIA, to A. M. Burgess, deputy minister of the interior, June 6, 1895, LAC RG 10, vol. 3796, file 47441–2.

^32. Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 153. The Brewsters themselves were one-time poachers in the park. See Burns with Schintz, Guardians of the Wild, 15. Burns and Schintz (p. 16) argued that local residents, including guides were "undoubtedly" the greatest threat to game in the park.

^33. R. H. A., game guardian, to commissioner of agriculture, Regina, December 19, 1902, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2A.

^34. Gillespie, "I Was Well Pleased," esp. 557–59; Loo, "Of Moose and Men," 307; Nancy B. Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank, "'Sportsmen and Pothunters': Environment, Conservation, and Class in the Fishery of Hamilton Harbour, 1858–1914," Sport History Review 28 (1997): 1–18; Parenteau, "Care, Control, and Supervision," 7.

^35. Brewster quoted in "Killing Off the Big Game," from a Calgary newspaper clipping found in LAC RG 10, vol. 3855, f. 80143. Also see "Indian Hunters Killing Off Game," Province. A letter with almost exactly the same wording can be found in Philip Moore, Banff, to Frank Oliver, May 25, 1905, in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2. An official in the Department of Indian Affairs dismissed Brewster's complaints as rooted more in self-interest than in the interest of game conservation. See J. A. Markle, Alberta inspectorate, to the secretary of the DIA, December 18, 1905, LAC RG 10, vol. 3855, f. 80143. Many documents complaining of Stoney hunts can be found in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2. In 1903, Howard E. Sibbald, Indian agent at Morley, estimated that the Stoney killed at least nine hundred head of big game each year, and referred to an individual who took thirty-six big horn sheep in a season, twelve of them in one day. Howard E. Sibbald to Frank Pedley, December 23, 1903, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–22.

^36. The quoted passage is in Millar, Game Preservation, 20. Descriptions of hunting methods are found in Lieutenant-governor Mackintosh to T. M. Daly, May 2, 1894; and H. E. Sibbald to Frank Pedley, December 23, 1903, in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2.

^37. Also see W. N. Millar, "The Big Game of the Canadian Rockies: A Practical Method for its Preservation," in Conservation of Fish, Birds and Game (Toronto: Methodist Book and Publishing House, 1916), 113.

^38. Gordon Hewitt's articulation of the recreational value of game, published in 1921, is telling for its masculine, urban, British, militaristic, and imperialistic emphases: "What man is there who, after months of unremitting toil, takes down his gun, rod, or camera, and, seeking the silence of the open air for a week or two, does not come back physically and mentally refreshed and remade? ... Nothing can ever equal our wild life as a means of increasing human efficiency where the tendency of modern life is to work under the high pressure of city conditions. As our population increases the need will become greater, and unless every possible step is taken to conserve the wild life for the refreshment of the men of the future we shall gradually lose this unequalled source of national vigour.... Nothing calls for resourcefulness so much as the quest of wild life, when the beaten tracks of a more civilized life, where everything is provided for one, are left and one has to return to the primal competitive habits.... Resourcefulness is a characteristic of all those called upon to conquer new lands. And on no occasion has resourcefulness of such men stood them in so good stead as when the Canadians barred the way to Calais in the second battle of Ypres, or when the Australians and New Zealanders held impossible positions in Gallipoli": Hewitt, Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 15–16.

^39. Ibid., 299, 298. This is discussed in Tina Loo, "Of Moose and Men," especially page 308. Also see Tina Loo, "Making a Modern Wilderness: Conserving Wildlife in Twentieth-Century Canada," Canadian Historical Review 82 (2001): 112

^40. The Calgary petition (February 1893), and the other petitions are in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2. On October 2, 1895, the Macleod Gazette stated that it "and the Lethbridge and Calgary newspapers repeatedly argued that the Stonies be made amenable to the game laws and the Gun Clubs of these places personally interviewed the Minister and the Indian Commissioner on the same subject." A clipping of the article is found in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2. For evidence that the proclamation was in response to the petition, see L. Vankoughnet to T. Mayne Daly, superintendent general of Indian Affairs (SGIA), February 18, 1893; and A. Power, deputy minister of justice, to L. Vankoughnet, February 28, 1893, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2. Officials decided to delay issuing the proclamation to over forty bands so that agents could prepare them for the announcement. That proclamation was effective on December 31, 1893. The proclamation regarding the Stoney did not take effect until January 1, 1895, because the officials felt the Stoney needed more time to adjust. The game laws were applied to twenty-one more bands on July 1, 1903. See Frank Pedley to Short, Cross, Biggar and Ewing, Barristers, June 15, 1906; and T. Mayne Daly to lieutenant-governor Mackintosh, May 8, 1894. Both letters are in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2.

^41. On the passenger pigeon, see C. W. Nash, "Passing of the Pigeons," The Canadian Magazine of Politics, Science, Art and Literature 20 (February 1903): 315–17, quote on 317. In 1912, Alberta's chief game guardian warned the DIA that without better protection Alberta's game "will have disappeared like the passenger pigeon and the buffalo." B. Lawton to Secretary, DIA, May 18, 1912, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2A. The last captive passenger pigeon died in 1914. On George Brown, see John George Brown, Waterton Lake, October 15, 1902, LAC RG 10, v. 3855, f. 80143. On Hornaday and Jones, see Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 128–29. At times Banff outfitters and game guardians even suggested that the Stoney be removed to a reserve farther from the National Park. See "Killing Off the Big Game," (1905) as found in LAC RG 10, vol. 3855, f. 80143; and chief game warden to W. T. Finlay, minister of agriculture, November 14, 1908, in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732 f. 420–2A.

^42. Both letters are in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2. They are Madison Grant to Clifford Sifton, minister of the interior, December 2, 1903; and J. D. Maclean, secretary, DIA, to D. Laird, March 20, 1906. After two Stoney were arrested in 1896 for killing sheep near Canmore, in Banff National Park, P. L. Grasse wrote that "when white men hire the Indians to break the law, you will realize how difficult it is for me to inspire them with respect for the laws made by white men." Grasse to Indian commissioner, Regina, February 24, 1896, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2. Similar passages can be found in the following documents found in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2: T. J. Fleetman, Morley, to Indian commissioner, Winnipeg, March 10, 1906; J. A. Markle to Frank Pedley, December 22, 1903.

^43. Fred White to Clifford Sifton, December 9, 1903.

^44. Clifford Sifton to Frank Pedley, December 11, 1903, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2.

^45. Lieutenant-governor Mackintosh to T. M. Daly, minister of the interior, May 2, 1894, in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2.

^46. As quoted in Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 140. For Douglas's connection with the CPR, see Byrne, Man and Landscape Change, 139–40.

^47. See Millar, Game Preservation, and the quoted passage in Hewitt, Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 238.

^48. Brown, "Doctrine of Usefulness," 58–59. Although "conservation" and "preservation" often have been used interchangeably, we agree with scholars such as Samuel P. Hays and Ramachandra Guha who emphasize the different ideological roots of utilitarian conservationism and aesthetic preservationism. See Samuel P. Hays, Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959); and Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (New York: Longman, 2000).

^49. Philip Moore, Banff, to Frank Oliver, DSGIA, May 24,1905, in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2; undated newspaper clipping, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2A; H. E. Sibbald to Frank Pedley, December 22, 1903, in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2.

^50. Colpitts, Game in the Garden, chap, 3; An Ordinance for the Protection of Game, 1898, Sec. 2 Cap 85, as quoted in Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 77. A useful study of the conservation movement that includes attitudes toward aboriginal people and parks is found in John Sandlos, "From the Outside Looking In: bbbbsthetics, Politics, and Wildlife Conservation in the Canadian North," Environmental History 6 (2001): 6–31.

^51. Jean Friesen, "Grant Me Wherewith to Make My Living," in Aboriginal Resource Use in Canada: Historical and Legal Aspects, ed. Kerry Abel and Jean Friesen (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1991), 141–55. For an early defense of aboriginal hunting rights, in contravention of game legislation see, John Harlow, Indian agent, to SGIA November 20, 1876, in DIA Ann. Rep. 1876.

^52. David Laird to T. J. Fleetham, February 7, 1907, LAC RG 10, vol. 5155, file 271 as quoted in Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 97.

^53. J. D. McVicar, N.W. Mounted Police, to E. W. Jarvis, superintendent, NWMP, LAC RG 10, vol. 3796, file 47441–2.

^54. Hewitt, Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 12.

^55. Millar, Game Preservation, 31.

^56. Jack Ward Thomas and Dale E. Toweill, Elk of North America: Ecology and Management (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stockpole Books, 1982), 36. James B. Harkin estimated that there were twenty-seven elk in Rocky Mountains Park in 1919. See Hewitt, Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 34;and Millar, Game Preservation, 30–33.

^57. Hewitt, Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 12, 13, 118, 122.

^58. P. Lewis Grasse, Indian agent, Morley, July 5, 1895, ARDIA, 1895, 92.

^59. A. M. Burgess, to Hayter Reed, DSGIA, May 31, 1895, LAC RG 10, vol. 3796, f. 47441–2. Similar opinions about Stoney hunting outside the park are reflected in an 1895 Macleod Gazette editorial quoted (but not cited) in Hugh A. Dempsey Indian Tribes of Alberta, 46.

^60. SC 2 Edw. VII Cap 31.

^61. Howard Sibbald, Indian agent's annual report in ARDIA, 1902, 173; and H. E. Sibbald, Indian agent's annual report in ARDIA, 1903, 192.

^62. Howard Douglas, "Report of the Superintendent of Rocky Mountains Park, 1903," ARDI, 1903, part 7, p. 6. Sibbald also pointed to the need for a "game guardian." See Sibbald to Frank Pedley, December 23, 1903, in LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2.

^63. Howard Douglas, "Report of the Superintendent of Rocky Mountains Park, 1904," ARDI, 1904, part 7, p. 6.

^64. Burns with Schintz, Guardians of the Wild, 6, 8.

^65. He was transferred to the Blackfoot agency on July 1, 1904, where he was an agent until February 28, 1907. Biographical data for Howard Sibbald were gathered from "Personal Narrative by Howard E. Sibbald, Banff," Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies, Howard E. Sibbald fonds, M281, and from ARDIA, 1900, 184–6, 205; ARDIA, 1901, Part J, p. 162; ARDIA, 1905, 113; and ARDIA, 1907, part 3, p. 20.

^66. Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 51.

^67. Burns with Schintz, Guardians of the Wild, 7.

^68. Assistant secretary of the interior to secretary of the DIA, August 23, 1911, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2A.

^69. Millar, Game Preservation. The last passage is from p. 20, the previous from p. 18. Millar wrote that the Stoney were an immediate threat to the elk (pp. 30–33) and the bighorn sheep (pp. 38–39), but that the mountain goats were common and increasing "because they are almost entirely disregarded by the Stony Indians" (p. 43). Also see Millar, "The Big Game," 110–18.

^70. Chiefs Peter Wesley and Moses Bearspaw, Morley, to the government of Canada, April 9, 1907, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, file 420–2. The difficulties were compounded by the fact that in 1901 the British Columbia game laws forbade out-of-province Indians to hunt in that province. See E. M. Eberts, attorney general of British Columbia, to minister of Indian Affairs, November 5, 1901, LAC RG 10, vol. 3855, f. 80143.

^71. Hewitt, Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 80.

^72. Millar, "The Big Game," 114. Attitudes were evidently similar on both sides of the border. In January 1923, a park ranger in Glacier National Park in Montana wrote "Unless the Indians are curbed in their desire to kill everything in sight Glacier Park will soon have no game." Keller and Turek, American Indians and National Parks, 52. Ironically, as early as 1942 the park wardens at Banff began slaughtering overpopulated elk and donating the carcasses to the Stoney at Morley, Burns, and Schintz, Guardians of the Wild, 103–04.

^73. James A. Smart, DSGIA, ARDIA, 1900, xxx. Aboriginal people also protested the restrictions there. See Antoine O. Bastien, Indian agent, ARDIA, 1896, 42. Parenteau also discusses the connection between the game laws and the government's goal of assimilation in his "Care, Control, and Supervision," 11–12.

^74. The three Sibbald quotes come from H. E. Sibbald to Frank Pedley, December 23, 1903, LAC RG 10, vol. 6732, f. 420–2; Howard Sibbald, Indian agent's annual report, ARDIA, 1902, 173; and H. E. Sibbald, Indian agent's annual report, ARDIA, 1903, 192.

^75. Tolly Bradford, "A Useful Institution: William Twin, 'Indianess,' and Banff National Park, c. 1860–1940," Native Studies Review 16 (2005): 88.

^76. Bella, Parks for Profit.

^77. "Report of the Commissioner of Dominion Parks," by J. B. Harkin in ARDI, 1913, p. 5. Harkin often has been portrayed as an early preservationist. A useful corrective to this interpretation can be found in MacEachern, Natural Selections, chap. 2.

^78. Colpitts, Game in the Garden, 160–61.

^79. The quoted passage is in Whitcher, "Report," ARDI, 1886, part 1, p. 87. On predator control, see Dunlap, Nature and the English Diaspora, 121; Alan MacEachern, "Rationality and Rationalization in Canadian National Parks Predator Policy," in Consuming Canada: Readings in Environmental History, ed. Chad Gaffield and Pam Gaffield (Toronto: Copp Clark, 1995), 197–212; and Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections for Canada. Even Canada's 1930 National Parks Act, permitted the "disposal" of "predatory or superabundant animals," SC 20–21 Geo. V Cap. 33, 7 (1)(c). Government scientist Gordon Hewitt wrote that "Any rational system of wild-life protection must take into account the control of the predatory species of mammals and birds." See Hewitt, Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 193.

^80. Bradford, "A Useful Institution," 77–98; Laurie Meijer Drees, "'Indians' Bygone Past': The Banff Indian Days, 1902–1945," Past Imperfect 2 (1993): 7–28, especially 8. Also see Hugh A. Dempsey, Indians of the Rocky Mountain Parks (Calgary: Fifth House, 1998), 15–16; and Luxton, Banff, Canada's First National Park, 117–18. Outside the park it was acceptable for Indians to serve as hunting guides. This sort of transformation is discussed in Parenteau, "Care, Control, and Supervision," 3–4.

^81. The quoted passages are in ARDIA, 1890, xxi; ARDIA, 1911, 116; and ARDIA, 1898, 55. For similar other instances where the word "wilderness" implied forested land, see the following Annual Reports of the DIA: 1869, 6; 1874, part 2, 48; 1885, 8; 1890, xxi; 1891, 205; 1894, 36; 1896, 279; 1899, 59; 1904, 382; 1905, 348; 1907, 295; 1908, 343; 1920, 7. We have found one government document that seems to imply that wilderness was "unoccupied." In that case the superintendent of Banff implies that unoccupied sections of the park were "wilderness throughout." See ARDI, 1887, part 6, p. 10.

^82.ARDIA, 1921, 7; 1945, 175.

^83.Forest and Stream, February 3, 1894, 89, as quoted in John F. Reiger, American Sportsmen and the Origins of Conservation (Corvallis, Oregon State University Press, 2001), 103. Keller and Turek's American Indians and National Parks marshals more convincing evidence that Indians were removed from parks in the United States to manage game than Spence and Cronon presented that the exclusions was linked to wilderness: This suggests that the circumstances in the United States were similar to those in Canada.

^84. Paul S. Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); Joe Paddock, Keeper of the Wild, The Life of Ernest Oberholtzer (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2001); Killan, Protected Places, 57–58; George M. Warecki, Protecting Ontario's Wilderness: A History of Changing Ideas and Preservation Politics, 1927–1973 (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 20–22.

^85. Millar, Game Preservation, 27. Byrne, Man and Landscape Change, 34, 65–69, suggests that game was relatively scarce in the region in at least the last half century before the park was created.

^86. Byrne, Man and Landscape Change, 126.

^87. In this respect, the removal of aboriginal people in North America may be rooted in forces similar to those responsible for the restriction of people "generally not so civil" on lands that were marked for afforestation in Great Britain. See E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (London: Penguin, 1975). The quoted passage is from John Evelyn, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesties Dominions (London: Royal Society, 1664), 108, as quoted in Kevin Hutchings, Imagining Nature: Blake's Environmental Poetics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2002), 12.

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