Crude Optimism: Romanticizing Alberta’s Oil Frontier at the Calgary Stampede

Designed to preserve and promote western heritage and culture, the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede has become entwined with, and politically and economically expedient for, Alberta’s oil and gas industry. Performances at the Stampede relieve guilt about the expropriation of Indigenous territory and conquest of the natural world, and produce an affective climate of “crude optimism,” an optimistic attachment to fossil fuel production and consumption despite the brutal realities of extractivism.