Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada (review)

In their introduction, editors James Opp and John C. Walsh describe Placing Memory and Remembering Place in Canada as a work that “engages with ‘public memory’—memories that are made, experienced and circulated in public spaces” (9). It is that, as well as an exploration of what makes public memory tangible and how we find public memory imbedded in tangible objects and landscapes. For example, Russell Johnston and Michael Ripmeester, in “That Big Statue of Whoever,” argue that public memorials—statues, plaques, and commemorations—can be used as a key and tabulated to measure the impact of historical events and persons on public memory, while Kirsten Emiko McAllister, in “Archive and Myth,” explores an archive of photographs from a Japanese internment camp to understand how the camps impacted the community of youths coming of age in Canadian internment camps during World War II, as well as how these internment camps shaped a generation of Japanese Canadians.

Photographs are also the focus of James Opp’s “Finding the View: Landscape, Place, and Colour Slide Photography in Southern Alberta.” These photographs, however, illuminate landscapes instead of cultural groups. The photographs that become Opp’s subject span a fifty-year history of the Chinook Camera Club, offering a record of place over time from an aesthetic point of view, while also recording familiar features and culturally influenced landmarks. To the reader’s delight, Opp includes several of the photos as color plates, underscoring his discussion of “human love of place” (figs. 10.3–10.8).

As its title suggests, the book explores the triangular relationship between place, community, and history (or time). Joan M. Schwartz observes that “place is a slippery concept and the relationship between place and memory is difficult to pin down” (294), while Steven High notes that “place is more than a static category where things happen. It must be understood as a social and spatial process, undergoing constant change” (181). A place is also changed by economic events. In “Placing the Displaced Worker,” High discusses what he calls the “flip-side” of place making—the unmaking of place (162). When the paper mill at Sturgeon Falls, Ontario, closes, workers respond to the mill’s closing the only way they can, by creating a “history binder” that preserves the history of the mill and the mill community.

Just as such occupational communities are explored, Placing Memory and Remembering Place examines other communities that transcend geography. The tension between a colonial viewpoint toward aboriginals and aboriginal self-determination becomes the subject of Cecilia Morgan’s “History and the Six Nations.” Here she follows Native attempts to speak to their history with their own voice and determine their own direction. In “Capital Queers, Social Memory and Queer Places in Cold War Ottawa,” Patrizia Gentile, meanwhile, writes about the struggle to resist surveillance work by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and to create safe spaces for Ottawa’s gay and lesbian communities during the security-conscious Cold War. The piece has resonance in today’s terrorism-conscious Western society. Simply substitute “Muslim” for “gay.”

The authors of the various essays in the book use various means and mediums to trace the development of community. Frances Swyripa uses the changing landscape of Jasper Street in the business district of Edmonton, Alberta, while High analyzes the “history binder” as a way for displaced workers to preserve a community within its pages. The reviewer is reminded of his own conversations with workers at a closed sardine factory in Prospect Harbor, Maine, and how often they spoke of their workplace as a community where workers arrived early so they could sit and have conversation over coffee before starting work. Similarly, John C. Walsh examines traditional events, such as reunions and homecoming festivals, as the media for preserving and celebrating community in “Performing Public Memory and Re-Placing Home in the Ottawa Valley, 1900–58.” In the process, he examines the way in which the shift from...