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

Rodeo Conjures Up particular images in the popular imagination. Hypermasculine riders decked out in leather chaps and plaid kerchiefs act out their manhood roping calves or riding bulls in a performance intended to celebrate a pioneer sensibility and harken back to an idealized West. But, as Mary-Ellen Kelm highlights in A Wilder West: Rodeo in Western Canada, life on the North American rodeo circuit in the first half of the 20th century was more nuanced than stereotypes suggest.

Rodeo combined events that tested toughness (such as horse, steer, and bull riding) with timed events (such as roping) that challenged the teamwork of rider and mount. The touring rodeo circuit, including those events hosted by small towns in Alberta and BC, and native reservation rodeos in BC, are the focus of Kelm’s study. As well, she examines those that took place in the East or extended south into the US, involved men and women, Aboriginals and settlers, in a touring community that participated in rodeo’s transition from pioneer exhibition to codified commercial sport.

As the circuit moved from town to town, each rodeo’s competitions were inaugurated by a parade, intended to tell the back story of the events that were to follow. Parades celebrated the conquest of the environment and peoples of the frontier, and were often led by Aboriginal people “demonstrating their indigeneity and, in the minds of organizers, their pre-modern place in an unfolding history of settlement.” (4) Yet, as Kelm illustrates, the role of Aboriginal peoples in western Canadian rodeo, as participants, organizers, and craftspeople is far more complex than paraded representations suggested.

Kelm approaches western Canadian rodeo using Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of a “contact zone.” Rodeo – both the individual events hosted by small towns and reserves as well as the roster of performers who travelled town-to-town competing in these events – offered a space where settlers and Aboriginals came together, both as participants and organizers. The concept of the contact zone enables Kelm to move beyond a straightforward portrayal of Aboriginal and settler interactions – as either working together or at odds with one another – to think of rodeo as a liminal space occupied by settlers and Indigenous peoples, men and women, who interacted in a multiplicity of ways. Rodeos may have been a site of struggle between settler and Aboriginal communities, but as is demonstrated in A Wilder West, we need to allow for the possibility of alternate relationships between the men and women who both participated in and organized rodeos.

Indeed, “Indian and reserve rodeos did not represent a complete retreat from the contact zone.” (207) Aboriginal men were among some of rodeo’s most successful participants, while in British Columbia there was a unique circuit of Aboriginal-organized rodeos, which welcomed both Aboriginal and settler competitors. Kelm argues that by and large rodeo eschewed racial identities in favour of masculine ones, offering spectacles that celebrated exhibitions of frontier manliness. The BC rodeos included Indigenous women who participated in the local economy as craftspeople, while women (cowgirls) appeared as performers in most rodeos in western Canada, albeit in different events from the men, contests that were deemed more gender “appropriate.”

The experience of rodeo, and its perceived importance, was not limited to promoters and participants. The meaning(s) communicated by rodeo were important to the communities that hosted them. For many civic boosters and entertainment entrepreneurs in these small towns, rodeos were among the events staged by communities to communicate something about their towns in a young nation that was expanding westward early in the 20th century. Performances of cowboy culture did not simply reflect these communities as they grappled with modernity, they actively constituted them.

In the early 20th century, rodeo was “included in community events for exhibition only, by the end of World War II, it was becoming a sport.” (108) Modern rodeo sought to celebrate the uniqueness of life in the rural West by codifying its events – creating a standard...