Report Cover Composite by Author / the underlying photograph of the woman and bear is from the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies
Dispossession by Design: Recovering the role of landscape architects in the early colonial history of national parks in Canada
Tiffany Kaewen Dang, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge, UK / Recipient of the Gunter Schoch Bursary /Grant: $6,000
National Parks hold iconic significance in the Canadian imagination as the proverbial ‘natural jewels’ of the nation. However, behind these important landscapes lies a dark history of colonization, beginning with the establishment of Banff National Park in 1885 and the subsequent displacement of the Stoney Nakoda First Nation. For over a century, the Canadian national parks system has been utilized as an instrument for colonizing the so-called ‘frontier,’ promoting through tourism and conservation, an imaginary vision of untamed wilderness; thereby implementing procedures of Indigenous erasure and cultural domination. Landscape architects have contributed to this national myth-building through the design of landscape projects within the national parks; the first Superintendent of Banff National Park, the first national park of Canada, was himself a landscape architect. Accordingly, this historical research allows for the interrogation of an alternate lineage of landscape architecture in Canada as having emerged from a geographical practice. This project aims to revisit the early history of the Canadian national parks system—as a continentally-scaled political tool of settler-colonialism and territorial assertion of settler-supremacy across the Canadian dominion—revealing its colonizing intent and dispossessive design through intersectional studies in geography, cartography, conservation, political theory, and landscape studies.
Update
19.12.12 > Read LACF Final report _ Dispossession by Design by Tiffay Kaewen Dang