A Wilder West: Rodeo in Western Canada by Mary-Ellen Kelm (review)

Mary-Ellen Kelm’s A Wilder West is a recent addition to the densely populated field of Western history. But whereas most authors discuss the wildness of the West in terms of violence (or lack thereof), Kelm shows that it is equally a product of the unpredictable, spontaneous, social relationships that permeated the West, relationships that simultaneously reflect the lived experiences of settler colonialism and challenge dominant historical narratives. Through parades, commemorative programs, and various kinds of performance, rodeos legitimized the triumph of Western society over other peoples and the environment. Yet, despite the hegemonic power of these scripted representations, ‘how those patterns played out in small communities in Western Canada’ was far less formulaic. In communities across British Columbia and Alberta, Kelm argues, ‘the careful staging of rodeos as masculinist celebrations of settlement encountered the unpredictable.’ Aboriginal people triumphed in competitions, animals bucked their riders, and standard colonial narratives were upset both within the arena and throughout the West. This unpredictability, Kelm concludes, is what made the West truly wild.

Kelm explores the improvised, ephemeral history of rodeos through archival documents, including association records, personal memoirs, newspaper accounts, and publicity material, as well as ethnographic research, primarily oral interviews. The organization of the resulting six chapters is both chronological and thematic, with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of rodeo history from the early twentieth century through the 1970s. Employing Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of ‘contact zones,’ chapters 1 and 2 trace the origins of rodeos in western Canada, the economic benefits they offered to small towns, and their role in reflecting and sometimes challenging gender, racial, and class norms of the time. Much like the book as a whole, these chapters successfully illuminate the intersections of scripted macro-narratives and the more spontaneous micro-narratives of personal experience.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the professionalization of rodeos and rodeo personnel through the middle of the twentieth century as cowboys and other participants began to exert greater control over the sport itself, the rodeo business, and the increasingly popular image of the cowboy. This era is epitomized by the formation of the Canadian Professional Rodeo Association, an organization that simultaneously challenged certain social norms – through its inclusion of aboriginal participants, for example – while reinforcing others, especially in its affirmation of post–World War II ideas of masculinity. The book’s final two chapters discuss the effects this professionalization had on small-town and reserve rodeos. Due in part to increasing costs associated with staging a rodeo, small-town rodeos struggled to attract and pay for professional shows while ‘reserve rodeos’ increased in frequency to accommodate the many aboriginal cowboys who could not afford to compete on the professional circuit. In the process, the unpredictability of social interactions of previous decades was partly eroded as rodeos became more segregated and the West a little less wild.

Evident in each of these themes and time periods is the complicated and unscripted nature of human relationships. Despite the material and discursive power inherent in colonial narratives celebrating the dominance of settlement and masculinity, cowboys and others attached to the rodeo formed surprising, unpredictable relationships that defied simplistic representations and categorization. These personal experiences demonstrate ‘the wilder, more complex, and less bounded’ history of the West. In addition to her unearthing of captivating personal stories and previously unstudied archival documents and photographs, this exploration of contradictions and paradoxes in the historical record is Kelm’s greatest contribution to Western, Canadian, and aboriginal history. Her book’s rejection of conceptual binaries and deterministic analytic frameworks carves out space within which many different, and sometimes contradictory, experiences and perspectives can coexist and where the unpredictable need not be seen as exceptional. Although it may be argued that the ‘even playing ground’ offered by sport, as one interviewee phrased it, is at best fleeting and largely insignificant compared to the lasting consequences of colonialism, and although Kelm’s analysis at times implies there...