Always an Adventure: An Autobiography (review)

It is the era of thoughtful self-examination as baby boomers (and those slightly older) look back on their lives. Geoff Eley’s A Crooked Line and this journal’s new series, ‘A Life in History,’ suggest a certain taste these days for scholarly self-reflection. Hugh Dempsey’s autobiography Always an Adventure lacks critical self-examination but it offers insights into museum and archival practice in the era of professionalization, the politics of cross-cultural organizing in the decades of official multiculturalism and assimilationist Indian policy, and the singular perspectives of a man who was involved in many of the important cultural moments of mid-twentieth-century Western Canada. This is a highly personal account. Dempsey’s opinions, empathies, and enmities are clear and unabashed. His relationships with First Nations of southern Alberta and his love of early settler history infuse this book, as it did his commitment to the preservation of Alberta’s past during his tenure at Calgary’s Glenbow Institute. Yet at the same time, he is dismissive of First Nations who press, in his view, less than fully justified claims, and he has little time for non-Natives who interfere with or romanticize First Nations. His critical gaze focuses mainly on individuals, while the larger structural contexts that shaped his perspectives and those around him are only ever implied.

As a teenager watching Edmonton develop as a gateway to the resource-rich north and later, on the rural beat writing for the Edmonton Bulletin, Dempsey developed an affinity for rural people, local lore, and particularly history. During his time with the Bulletin, he met John Laurie and covered the work of the Indian Association of Alberta (iaa), where he encountered James Gladstone and his daughter Pauline. All that was to be significant about Dempsey’s life was established in these years. Through the Indian Association, his marriage to Pauline, and his friendship with his senator father-in-law, doors opened for Dempsey in Aboriginal homes across southern Alberta – crucial relationships to his work for the Glenbow.

Dempsey’s account of the Glenbow’s early years focuses on his own role collecting documents and artifacts and on the complicated relations between the Glenbow’s founder, Eric Harvie, its governing bodies, and staff. Founded in 1954 and financed by oil profits, the Glenbow Institute reflected Harvie’s interest in Western Canadian history. Dempsey was the institute’s first archivist. He was mostly self-taught, attending training courses for historical administrators when they were available, but learning principally by observing the archival practices of other institutions. Though Harvie set the larger collection policy, Dempsey was given a free hand in collecting documents, photographs, and Aboriginal artifacts, and so it is to Dempsey that historians of Western Canada must give credit for the important collections held by the Glenbow today. Still, despite his energy and wisdom, Dempsey’s tenure at the Glenbow was marred by uncertainty borne of internal conflicts within the institute and between it and the Alberta government.

Not all of Glenbow’s conflicts were managerial, however. Dempsey observed at close range one of museology’s most significant controversies of the late twentieth century. The Spirit Sings exhibit was organized by the Glenbow to coincide with the Calgary Olympics in 1988. It was intended to be a kind of ‘homecoming’ for a selection of the many Aboriginal artifacts from southern Alberta that had found themselves in museum collections in Europe and the United States. But present-day Aboriginal politics saw the event and its organizer in quite a different way. The Lubicon Cree had been pressing the Alberta and federal governments for a treaty to recognize their sovereignty over unceded lands and their right to a say in oil and gas exploration in their region. First, the Lubicon called for a boycott of the Olympics, but when the Glenbow received funding from Shell Oil for the exhibit, the Lubicon shifted their focus to the Glenbow and the Spirit Sings exhibit. Many important and high-profile museums acquiesced...