Getting it right – Alberta’s American Fact must not be forgotten
Posted on | December 4, 2011 | 1 Comment
“Settlers and farmers founded this province and their values run deep.
Albertans are proud, resilient, generous and independent-minded. We believe in family and freedom, and are passionately devoted to the land on which we live.”
- Premier Alison Redford, speech to AAMDC Fall Convention, 24 November 2011
I started this blog two years ago to ensure the memories of an exceptional generation of individuals, the first homesteaders of southeastern Alberta, who endured unimaginable hardship to build the region into what is today, were not forgotten.
As most of my learning on this subject took place outside of school (post secondary included), I was keen to learn that the province intended to review the proposed Education Act, Bill 18, and was opening the discussion up to the public.
“Education legislation is not reviewed very often and I am committed to getting it right,” stated Education Minister Thomas Lukaszuk, in a government media release dated 15 November 2011.
Seeing an opportunity to add some constructive comments to the discussion, I reviewed Alberta’s Social Studies Program of Study to see what our students were learning about their own history.
What I found was an education in itself. When history is taught (this is social studies after all, not history) the emphasis seems to be national (Canadian) and global themes, with the exception of Grade Four, where students learn about “Alberta: The Land, Histories and Stories”.
Encouraged that at least one year is dedicated to teaching Alberta history, I glanced through the Grade Four Program of Study to see what students would be learning, and to gauge whether local or regional themes were included within the curriculum.
I discovered the Program of Study is broken down into “Benchmark Skills and Processes”, and in the case of Grade Four, three “General Outcomes” for students. The second of these outcomes states that students will “demonstrate an understanding and appreciation of the role of stories, history and culture in strengthening communities and contributing to identity and a sense of belonging”. Specifically students would:
- recognize how stories of people and events provide multiple perspectives on past and present events recognize oral traditions, narratives and stories as valid sources of knowledge about the land, culture and history
- recognize the presence and influence of diverse Aboriginal peoples as inherent to Alberta’s culture and identity
- recognize the history of the French language and the vitality of Francophone communities as integral parts of Alberta’s heritage
- recognize British institutions and peoples as integral parts of Alberta’s heritage
- recognize how the diversity of immigrants from Europe and other continents has enriched Alberta’s rural and urban communities
- demonstrate respect for places and objects of historical significance
The second general outcome also states that students will “assess, critically, how the cultural and linguistic heritage and diversity of Alberta has evolved over time by exploring and reflecting upon the following questions and issues”:
- Which First Nations originally inhabited the different areas of the province?
- How is the diversity of Aboriginal peoples reflected in the number of languages spoken?
- What do the stories of Aboriginal peoples tell us about their beliefs regarding the relationship between people and the land?
- What movement or migration within Canada contributed to the populating of Alberta?
- In what ways did Francophones establish their roots in urban and rural Alberta (i.e., voyageurs, missionary work, founding institutions, media, politics, commerce)?
- How did the Métis Nation and Métis settlements contribute to Alberta’s identity (i.e., languages, accomplishments)?
- How did French and English become the two languages most used in business and politics in Alberta during the 19th and early 20th centuries?
- How did British institutions provide the structure for the settlement of newcomers in Alberta (i.e., North West Mounted Police, schools, lieutenant-governor, Assembly of the Northwest Territories)?
- How did European immigration contribute to the establishment of communities in Alberta in the late 19th century and early 20th century? How did the arrival of diverse groups of people determine the establishment and continued growth of rural and urban communities? How are agriculture and the establishment of communities interconnected?
This brings me back to the quote at the beginning of the piece by Premier Redford. It’s interesting to note that when defining the values of Albertans, she selected those of the “settlers and farmers”, who are “independent-minded”, believe in “family and freedom”, and “are passionately devoted to the land on which we live.”
Where do you suppose these values, so distinct as to be identified as uniquely Albertan by our Premier, come from, at least in part? Canadian historian, Nelson Wiseman, in a presentation to the 2010 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, offers the following suggestion:
“In delineating English Canadian political culture, many highlight the values of a decamped offshoot of revolutionary America, Upper Canada’s Loyalists. The analysis here has been of a later American offshoot, Alberta’s pioneering Americans and their formative imprint on Alberta politics. It underscores the individualist-liberal values of Alberta’s settler Americans as a founding ideological fragment. Those values congealed in the province’s formative years and they continue to define the parameters of political discourse in Alberta. Favoured by rural overrepresentation in the electoral system and their early concentration in southern rural Alberta, American homesteaders launched a politics of consensus, what C. B. Macpherson has described as Alberta’s ideologically hegemonic quasi-party system. They ingrained in the Albertan psyche an ardent individualist streak on issues of property, provincial rights, and suspicion of centralized authority, of designs crafted in a distant capital where central Canadian calculations overshadow Albertan interests. Alberta’s American market liberal and anti-communitarian heritage continues to infuse its political ethos.”
American values, introduced to our province by American settlers, who by 1916 comprised over one-third of our province’s foreign-born population, still “run deep” today, engrained in our politics, popular culture and economics. Unfortunately, this vital strain of Albertan DNA, one that is not present to any great extent in any other Canadian province, seems to have gone undetected by those who created our Grade Four curriculum.
For those who need initiating, Alberta’s American Fact has been well documented. Academics such as Wiseman, Michael Percy and Tamara Woroby, Howard and Tamara Palmer, Karel Bicha, Paul Sharp and Randy William Widdis, have covered the impact of these early American settlers, who constituted 22 per cent of Alberta’s population by 1911, on agriculture, religion and our political institutions.
According to Howard and Tamara Palmer, in their book, Peoples of Alberta:
“American settlers had a strong and lasting impact on Alberta. Their experience in dryland farming and irrigation made them ideally suited to adapt to the dry climate of the southern section of the province. Not all were successful. Some discouraged by drought, returned to the United States. But they were better suited than most groups to farm the southern Prairies.”
Even as the 20th Century progressed, the American influence continued to be felt in oil patch and the boardrooms of the province. As Nelson Wiseman concludes:
“After the American influx at the turn of the twentieth century, the proportion of Americans among Alberta’s immigrants declined steadily. However, even in a context of relatively few American-born Albertans, their influence and ideas continued to exceed their numbers.”
By omitting the American contribution to Alberta’s identity, the crafters of our curriculum have left out a key component of what makes Alberta unique within the context of Confederation.
Hopefully in facilitating a “21st century transformation” of our education system, we can begin to revisit the contributions made by American-Albertans during 20th century, which were essential in making Alberta into what it is today.
When it comes to educating Albertan youth about the “cultural and linguistic heritage and diversity” of the province, we need to get it right.
…
Update: A link to these comments was submitted to the “Getting it Right- Other ideas” forum on the Alberta Education website, located here.
Update#2: It appears a Runtime error on the Alberta Education site is preventing my comment from being uploaded. I’ll keep trying…
Update#3: Quick work by @AlbertaEd has resolved the issue. Comment up, but hyperlink broken! Zounds!
Update#4: Another great resource is Paul Vosiey’s, Vulcan: The making of a prairie community, which discusses the role American settlers played in the settling of Vulcan, Carmangay, Champion and western Vulcan County.
Tags: American settlers > Education > Politics
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Drawing on over 100 years of family history in the southeast, this is my attempt to shine the spotlight on southeastern Alberta's forgotten history.
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January 17th, 2012 @ 12:09 pm
I found this blog entry really interesting. When I moved to Southern Alberta from the midwestern U.S., because of the American past and presence in Alberta I felt more at home than I did when my family moved from Colorado to Illinois. The climate and topography where I live in SW Alberta are amazingly similar to parts of Wyoming, my home state. As a Rocky Mountain Westerner with ties to both countries, I greatly appreciated the content of the blog entry.