Western Canadian Fur Trade Sites and the Iconography of Public Memory‪.‬

Fur trade sites such as Lower Fort Garry, Fort Langley, Fort Edmonton and Fort William attract several hundred thousand visitors every year--cumulatively far more people than will ever read scholarly or even popular histories of the fur trade or sit through a university seminar on Western Canadian history. (1) In western Canada, fur trade sites are a prominent sector of the heritage industry. They help define the image of western Canada, which is presented as developing from fur trade roots through pioneer settlement to a modem, urban, multicultural society. Fur trade sites serve as physical monuments to Canada's origins in western North America. Even those sites without tangible remains are replete with historic associations of heroic figures, dramatic events and colourful pastimes. They are portals through which the imaginative site visitor can travel back in time as one might visit another country. As such, they have become cultural icons, places to which we attach layers of belief, meaning and significance. In this article we would like to examine these notions of fur trade sites as cultural icons and explore the questions "why were such numbers of these sites selected in the first place?" and "how have they been interpreted over time?". The answer to the first question is rooted in both the development of Canadian historiography and the evolution of government administered heritage programs. The latter question is closely tied to changing fashions in site development and programming and complex interactions between often conflicting public policy goals ranging from local economic development and community pride to in situ conservation of historic resources and public education.