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Authorized heritage : place, memory, and historic sites in prairie Canada

"Authorized Heritage analyses the history of commemoration at heritage sites across western Canada. Using extensive research in Parks Canada records, it argues that heritage narratives are almost always based on national and conventional messages that commonly reflect colonialist visions of the past. Throughout western Canada there are vivid examples of original and official views of what constitutes a national narrative. Yet many of the places that commemorate Indigenous, fur trade, and settler colonial histories are contested spaces, places such as Batoche, Seven Oaks, and Upper Fort Garry being the most obvious. At these heritage sites, Indigenous perceptions of the past confront the conventions of settler colonial history and denote the fluid cultural perspectives that must define the shifting ground of heritage space. Robert Coutts brings his many years of experience as a Parks Canada historian to this detailed examination of heritage sites across the prairies. He shows how the process of commemoration reflects social and cultural perspectives that privilege a confident and progressive national narrative. He also examines how class, gender, and sexuality often remain apart from the heritage discourse. Most notably, Authorized Heritage examines how governments became the mediators of what is heritage and, just as significantly, what is not."--Authorized Heritage analyses the history of commemoration at heritage sites across western Canada. Using extensive research from predominantly government records, it argues that heritage narratives are almost always based on national messages that commonly reflect colonial perceptions of the past. Yet many of the places that commemorate Indigenous, fur trade, and settler histories are contested spaces, places such as Batoche, Seven Oaks, and Upper Fort Garry being the most obvious. At these heritage sites, Indigenous views of history confront the conventions of settler colonial pasts and represent the fluid cultural perspectives that should define the shifting ground of heritage space. Robert Coutts brings his many years of experience as a public historian to this detailed examination of heritage sites across the prairies. He shows how the process of commemoration often reflects social and cultural perspectives that privilege a conventional and conservative national narrative. He also examines how class, gender, and sexuality often remain apart from the heritage discourse. Most notably, Authorized Heritage examines how governments became the mediators of what is heritage and, just as significantly, what is not.

Online EBSCO Academic Comprehensive Collection

Memória, cultura e sociedade

Social memory

We remember the past in a number of different ways, some of which we can barely describe. But we talk about the past in more specific social contexts, at home, at work, in the bar, reminiscing about past experience or narrating past events with specific groups of family friends and colleagues. How people talk about the past helps define their identity. In this book the perspective, the philosophy and the psychology of remembering and the ways in which events are narrated are used to help work out how remembering and talking define societies in circumstances as diverse as medieval France and Iceland and contemporary Brazil and South Wales.

Online ACLS Humanities E-Book

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