– a will to power

– officially sanctioned and managed, but that’s only from above: we use from-below names all the time.

– Why not a three-level renaming project for Rossdale? this would follow on the Alice Major poem, calling for the Public, Sacred and Private names? Or, if that’s not the right breakdown, what about a postcolonial renaming project?

– Could we engage an Aboriginal group in renaming the Flats?

– Let’s  not forget this this is also connected to Haunt, a way of commemorating the dead. And there are all those blank spaces on the Rossdale Memorial tablets….

“Name”: consider using Alice Major’s 3 names (public, priestly, secret)? So we would make alternate histories, e.g., using the stories in Linda Goyette’s book or the Urban Aboriginal History Project. OR we could wait until Kisha’s pathways are done, and see how those names belong on the Rossdale map. We could also, of course, have a layer of historical names (i.e., the actual names of Rossdale roads before they were simply numbered.)

Other ideas: 1) upload the EUAAC Urban Aboriginal History on our site??? We would have to clearly mark this as Not our property, and copyrighted, but I worry that that doc is getting lost. 2) Rossdale biblio? 3)

As our conversation develops, it looks like we might work chronologically, incorporating all kinds of data (housing, industry, roads, etc) into a single map environment, and then build out from there later, developing themed maps along the conceptual lines we’ve identified. “Take everything we can map, and map it.”

Takeaway: use Shift+Enter to single space in WordPress

TRADE

–          We would want to map the Fort’s location on the flats 1812/13 – 1830. The boundaries of the fort itself are quite definite, but if there is a way to visually depict the amorphous trade boundaries and patterns of  movement related to trade (particularly use of the river, disembarkation on the flats, etc.), this would suggest continuity w/ subsequent uses. We would also probably want to map the Fort under DWELL.

–          Likewise important to reflect that the flats remained a site for treaty payments into the 1890s (and the oral hist. suggests that Papaschase was the most active interlocutor b/w area bands and the Indian agents for a period, so we could pin a textual description here that links Rossdale to the territorial politics of present-day south Edmonton)

HAUNT

–          There is a suggestion in the oral history (from Buff Parry, who I think also worked on the Lifeways study as an archeologist) that there may have been a number of open-air “burials” following the limited arrival of smallpox in the 1780s. Location is indeterminate.

–          Obviously, we need to map the cemetery’s boundaries, but we’ll need also to display this diachronically. There is the period of the Fort’s occupation, during which there were certainly burials of both Aboriginal people and company traders, with some indeterminacy as to the boundary between these; the end of the cemetery’s use in/around 1864; its fencing c.1870; the opening of the municipal cemetery in 1896; and then the (I think) 1899 flood that ostensibly erases all visual trace of the burial ground. There are also suggestions in the oral history of a burial ground w/ boundaries extending all the way to the current High Level Bridge, and while those recollections are not archeologically accurate, they do exist as a kind of landscape-in-memory that we need to capture.

–          Maybe this should all just be communicated through varied textual description, but it would be good if this could be visual as well. I haven’t compared this timeline w/ any of the base maps, but maybe it would be sufficient to pin different descriptions of the cemetery’s evolving boundaries and function to different base maps.

–          There are also some great anecdotes in the oral history that would be powerful to capture. For example: the story (1904/1908) of a woman waiting day after day at a construction site for an infant’s corpse to be excavated; Pamela Cunningham’s recollection of being told not to visit the ballpark because of its proximity to the burial ground; and of course the more recent accidental excavations of bodies that reignited political interest.

DWELL

–          I think it would be interesting in the DWELL and PLAY categories to juxtapose the use of the Flats as a site for the Sun Dance and the subsequent exhibition grounds.

–          DWELL could also reflect various engagements with the plant site by neighbourhood residents over years, including community interventions that helped to shape the expansion of the power plant (both through electricity consumption and through aesthetic and other judgements and complaints); disputes over the future of the site I the 1990s and 2000s; and the current  debates about repurposing the plant site as a public space following its surrender by EPCOR.

POWER

–          I think it’s important to reflect that the plant’s dynamism over time and its relationship to prevailing industrial and domestic concerns. Key milestones might include the major expansions of 1939, 45, 47 (which were initially prompted by industrial demands but also, esp. postwar, reflected new patterns of domestic consumption, or at least anticipation of these); the debates at various points about conversion from coal to gas (which reflect changing concerns first for the state of the city’s coal industry and later for aesthetics and efficiency); and the emergence esp. in the 1960s of the plant as an aesthetic highlight in the city’s river landscape (e.g. from this period there are many newspaper items lauding the idyllic winter landscape of the city, the picturesque [!] smokestacks and steam clouds, etc.).