Always an Adventure: An Autobiography by Hugh A. Dempsey (review)

When I began to teach western Canadian history at the University of Alberta in 1969, I joined the Historical Society of Alberta and started getting their quarterly, Alberta History. Hugh Dempsey had been its editor for fifteen years at that time. He is still the editor as of the last issue of 2012. This must be some kind of record for editors of historical journals, perhaps for periodicals of any sort. His nearly six decades spent bringing the history of the province to readers in the pages of Alberta History is just one part of Hugh Dempsey’s contribution to the intellectual life of the province. Publicist, editor, archivist, and historian, Hugh Dempsey did it all, and this autobiography is as readable and engaging as his many other books.

Dempsey grew up poor in Edmonton in the 1930s. A combination of trouble with mathematics and an urgent desire to ease the burden on his family by getting out and making a living meant he never quite managed to finish high school. After trying various things including working as a commercial artist painting signs for an advertising firm, he got a job as a reporter with the old Edmonton Bulletin and discovered his writing skills. Covering meetings of the Indian Association of Alberta for the paper introduced him to First Nations history and to his future wife, Pauline Gladstone. Unlike Europeans like Grey Owl or Adolph Hungry Wolf, Hugh Dempsey never aspired to be an Indian but he was intensely empathetic to their circumstances and did as much or more than anyone in the twentieth century to preserve the history of the northern plains peoples.

When the Bulletin folded, Dempsey found a position doing public relations for the Alberta government. His work attracted the attention of oilman Eric Harvie, who in 1956 offered Dempsey the position of archivist at his recently established Glenbow Foundation in Calgary. As an archivist Dempsey built up a magnificent collection of First Nations materials while managing to restrain some of the more eccentric impulses of the notoriously wilful Mr. Harvie. Dempsey turned down the offer of a job as Provincial Archivist and stayed to help Glenbow make the transition from private foundation to provincial institution. Largely as a result of Hugh Dempsey’s work, the Glenbow-Alberta Institute evolved into one of the country’s great museums and archives.

Canada, and particularly western Canada, is not over-endowed with memoirs that chronicle intellectual journeys. In addition to being a fascinating individual story, this one is reflective of Alberta’s transition from the poverty-stricken have-not province of the 1940s to its current situation of great public and private wealth. Anyone who aspires to understand that process should read Hugh Dempsey’s autobiography.