Seven Oaks Magazine.

Mavericks: Examining Glenbow museum's presentation of Alberta history
July 27, 2007
Dale McCartney

Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta, exhibit at Glenbow Museum, Calgary.

Anytime a new attempt is made to explain Canadian history to Canadians, it is worth careful consideration. Mavericks, the new permanent exhibit at the Glenbow museum in Calgary, is no exception. Based on Anita Van Herk’s popular history of the same name, the exhibit has opened this summer, and features nine thematically organized galleries, which can be viewed in any order, by themselves or with the help of a multimedia presentation available on palm pilots. It is a creative way of telling the story, and despite a rampant spirit of boosterism for Canada’s Texas, it is surprisingly successful in creating an experience for visitors that is fresh, fun, and often historically relevant, if not always historically accurate.

Museums today are perhaps in a more precarious position than they ever have been. Part of this is the neglect of successive belt-tightening administrations, who truthfully don’t want effective chronicles of the past, since it may awaken people to how bad things are getting. Another part of the problem for museums, though, has been the antiquated way in which they deliver information, and more importantly for the bottom line, entertainment. Mavericks makes an attempt to rectify this as well. The exhibits are interactive, and involve re-creations of some of the historical settings of the stories it tells. Some of these are tacky, but most are fun and informative, and occasionally compelling.

The best of these is the Gushul exhibit. Thomas and Lena Gushul were immigrant Ukrainians, who lived in the Crowsnest Pass in the first half of the 20th Century. While Thomas was working at the mines, and Lena was caring for a home under the worst of conditions, the two of them started a photography studio, and jerryrigged every tool they needed to become the premiere chroniclers of the that period in the Crowsnest Pass. The exhibit really takes advantage of the power of the Gushul photographs, arranging a massive wall with more than fifty of their beautiful black and white prints. The palm pilot that acts as a guide to the exhibit offers the stories behind 8 of the photographs, but in the process pushes the viewer to look at the entire wall. Other small examples also shine, like a box of scents related to the fur trade, and a full size replica of WWI fighting ace Captain Fred McCall’s Curtiss J-4 Jenny. Some are not as successful, like the re-creation of NWMP founder James McLeod reading his letter to his wife, or the ridiculous CPR display, which discusses none of the adverse effects or controversy surrounding the construction of Canada’s first public-private partnership.

The exhibit does more than just these multimedia, interactive displays to attract audiences. It also fundamentally challenges some old museum tropes in an attempt to make Alberta’s history seem more accessible, and perhaps more explicable as well. Most obviously, the nine galleries are thematic, and they are arranged around themes that would be recognizable to modern historians, but appear less often in museums. These themes include chronological periods, like the fur trade and the Wars, but also more generally thematic areas, like a gallery devoted to immigrants (from the first Europeans to more recent immigrants) and a section on political life in Alberta.

The galleries also emphasize biography as a way of explaining history. The stars of the exhibit are the eponymous Mavericks, people who supposedly symbolize the renegade spirit of Alberta throughout time. In this analysis, explorer David Thompson, developer Bill Pratt, jazz drummer Melvin Crump, and Preston Manning all share something indefinably Albertan, that led them to the paths their lives took.

The biographical emphasis succeeds in that it makes the history compelling, and ensures an extended dose of the colourful. The sales of biographies generally, which far outstrips other forms of popular history, suggests that people generally would enjoy this sort of approach. The appeal of Alberta’s colourful characters is what Mavericks is betting on, since it is the very point of the exhibit. It is also the central flaw in the display, and demonstrates why creating a museum that can explain history as well as a good book, without just mounting pages of text on a wall, is so fraught with complications.

The biographies are of people from diverse backgrounds, including immigrants, women, people of colour, and aboriginals. But they are all linked by their designation as “mavericks.” It is hard to put your finger on what that means, and the exhibit never really makes an attempt. Instead, it assumes that you can see the links between them. Of course, the only link is Alberta, and so we have the exhibit’s central thesis – that there is just something special about Alberta, to have had so many amazing, larger than life, residents in its history. Thus, while they may have shaped that history, they could not have possibly existed without this essential maverick sensibility either, a sensibility that is uniquely Albertan.

This perspective misses the most important explanatory role of the study of history; the attempt to explain change over time. By suggesting that there is something uniquely Albertan about these characters, and that their colourful personalities have all shaped Alberta, the exhibit’s authors have written themselves a perfect circle, one that completely misses both the enormous social forces at work, and the fact that the way Alberta is today, or was at any moment in its past, was never inevitable. There is nothing essentially Albertan, of course – even the landscape looks wildly different today than it did in any decade in the past 200 years (just ask “maverick” John Palliser). Of course, the renegade sensibility that exhibitors mean when they describe these figures as maverick is simply a popular interpretation of an Alberta character today. Fifty years ago, the stereotype might have been more conservative; one hundred years ago, the stereotype would almost certainly have been more radical, and more progressive.

The point is, the essentialized nature of Mavericks history of Alberta, which is supported by telling the story through selective biography, is a big part of its appeal. But, as so often happens in popular history, it hides more than it explains.

So what is the answer? Obviously, I am not sure, but more work to suggest how contested this history was might be a good start. Every gallery in the exhibit makes a small attempt at this, with a plaque entitled “A First Nations Perspective.” The exhibitors hearts are in the right place, I think, and the plaques do consistently chronicle the enormous cost of much of the “progress” the gallery celebrates. It also reminds us that “mavericks” can be a nice name for inveterate racists, liars, thieves, and treaty breakers. But the plaques are small, and they are severely flawed, in that they are written as if the First Nations community itself was entirely monolithic. Every plaque is written in the first person plural, and it offers only the most broad criticisms of the message of the exhibit. When compared to the authorial voice of each gallery, whether it is written in displays or the actual voice of the palm pilot guide, the First Nations perspective can seem quaint, and very weak. Moreover, there are no other critical voices, no other serious challenges to the story of Alberta as a rich home to eccentrics who have created a paradise for the colourful individualist.

Mavericks is exciting in many ways. It is beautiful, the themes are a real advance on the traditional chronological narrative of museums, and it is unquestionably one of the most entertaining museum exhibits I have ever seen. For all that, though, its historical approach does a disservice to Canadians. The central lesson, as far as I can tell, from studying history is learning that things have not always been the way they are now, and that they will be different in the future. But if you believe Mavericks, all that will change is the names – the spirit is timeless