VIEWPOINTS

Natural Landscapes of Canada
— Philip Vandermey

The mythologies of the Dominion Land Survey

“Myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.” —Roland Barthes, Mythologies[1]

“To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”—Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History[2]

Prologue

A few years ago, we toured a potential new location for our architectural firm. Several team members arrived at the scheduled time to tour the space with the property manager. Upon knocking, a seemingly distraught woman answered the door and stepped aside to let us in. Taken aback that the space was still occupied, we awkwardly introduced ourselves as we passed the woman in single file. Upon entering we discovered a disheveled mess of furniture, tools, paperwork. We attempted to tour and measure the space, remarking among our team on the qualities of the space and possible layouts, while simultaneously attempting to engage in polite conversation. While I don’t remember the details of the conversation, it went something like this: “What kind of business is this?” “A goldsmith.” “Are you moving to a new location, or closing the business?” “I’m closing it.” “It must be your business then; are you retiring?” To this she finally added the missing piece of the puzzle. “No, it was my husband’s. He passed away unexpectedly two weeks ago. I’m in the process of managing and closing his affairs.” We immediately stopped making plans, gave our sincere condolences, thanked her for letting us view the space, and left.

Expansion

Between 1870 and 1871, the recently formed Dominion of Canada purchased three land territories that were owned by or run by the Hudson’s Bay Company, a Royal Charter Company of England: Rupert’s Land, the North-Western Territories, and the Colony of British Columbia. Together, these areas measured 8.2 million square kilometers - one-third the size of North America and equivalent to approximately twelve times the size of the Holy Roman Empire.

Just three years prior in 1867, the same year that Canada was formed, the United States had purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire. The Alaska Purchase, together with the accelerating settlement of the American West, triggered concerns about American expansionism. W. H. Seward, the US Secretary of State, admitted that Canadian colonists were “building excellent states to be hereafter admitted into the American Union.”[3]

The Canadian response was one of reactionary protectionism. Sir John A. Macdonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada, remarked in 1870 that the Americans “are resolved to do all they can short of war, to get possession of our western territory, and we must take immediate and vigorous steps to counteract them.”[4] In order to secure space for geographic, economic, and political growth, and to contain American expansion, the British government negotiated the consolidation of Canadian territories under the new Dominion. In order to consolidate the pieces, the new Canadian government undertook an ambitious project: the passage of the Dominion Lands Act and establishment of the largest cadastral survey ever undertaken - the Dominion Land Survey.

Progress

Upon opening the cover of Crofutt’s Trans-Continental Tourist’s Guide, readers would discover, from 1873 onwards, a full page foldout of the painting American Progress. In John Gast’s work, time and progress are depicted in a gradient that shifts from the left/west to the right/east of the canvas in a transition from dark to light (in terms of both general illumination and skin colour), from human- to animal- to steam-powered transportation, from oral to written knowledge, from word of mouth to coach-delivered mail to electrical telegraph, from plentiful wild to occasional domesticated to nonexistent animals, and from wilderness to cultivated agricultural landscape to urban civilization. 

The inevitability of progress in Gast’s painting, represented by the serene central figure, Manifest Destiny, who moves ever forward, contrasts with Walter Benjamin’s description of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus in his essay “On the Concept of History.” In a mirror reversal of the interpretation in American Progress of the relation between progress and improvement, Benjamin describes what he perceives to be the Angel of History as a tragic figure helplessly driven backwards by the storm of progress, watching the rubble caused by “a chain of events […] one single catastrophe” pile up to the sky before him.[5] Whereas Angelus Novus gazes backwards in horror at the destruction left in the storm’s wake, Manifest Destiny has her eyes firmly fixed upwards on the horizon of progress. She is oblivious to all that lies in her ruinous path.

Surveyor

John Stoughton Dennis was appointed the first Surveyor General of Canada, and proposed the initial Dominion Land Survey (DLS) system. Although the DLS originally differed from Thomas Jefferson’s Public Land Survey System in the United States, Dennis argued for modifications that, with a few exceptions, matched the US system of 1 mile x 1 mile homesteads. 

Dennis was a controversial figure, even to Macdonald, who called him “a very decent fellow and a good surveyor” but quite without a “head.”[6] Alternating between disgrace as a military officer, and renown as a surveyor (military officers at the time were often also trained as surveyors), Dennis once had to defend himself in court for abandoning his soldiers during an attack that took place during the Fenian raids. Early in the establishment of the DLS system, after ignoring the demands of a Métis farmer to stop surveying his land, Dennis set off the Red River Rebellion in a series of missteps that culminated in a Métis party symbolically stepping on a survey chain. 

Dennis’ greatest contributions were to create absence. To measure emptiness. He prided himself on never having cast a single vote in his time as a government employee or soldier, and, in reflection on his contributions, was comforted that he helped create land policy at a time “when the country was as a white sheet.”[7]

Professor Challenger

There was another who drove a metal stake into the earth, just to hear it scream.

Gunter’s Chain

As Europe’s economy shifted its land-use focus from a productive agricultural economy that supported people to a flexible and abstract surface for generating profit by charging rent, a method for simple but accurate area calculations was needed. In 1581, Welsh mathematician, geometer, astronomer, and clergy member Edmund Gunter invented the Gunter’s chain - a metal measuring device 22 feet (6.7 meters) long. With this device, area calculations were as simple as measuring the length and width of a plot, and multiplying them together.

The DLS adopted a modified Gunter’s chain, which measured 66 feet (20 meters) in length and was comprised of 100 links. Eighty chain lengths are equivalent to 1 mile (1.6 kilometers), allowing effortless area calculations; 1 mile x 1 mile = 1 square mile, the basic unit of both the DLS and the Public Land Survey System. Survey teams measured large areas by travelling between an origin and a destination point, measuring the distance one chain length at a time, through a process called ranging; a stake is driven into the earth at the end of each chain measurement, which becomes the starting point for the subsequent measurement until the destination point is reached. Topographical accidents were managed by cutting swaths through forests, measuring around the perimeter of water bodies to locate their edges, and measuring both length and height at topographical features such as hills and mountains.

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels exclaimed, “The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains,”[8] it is widely assumed that they were referring to the oppositional relation between slave owner and slave. However, is it possible that they were referring to a different form of oppression, and advocating for the casting off, by the tenant, of the Gunter’s chain of the rentier? What might Marx and Engels have thought of the measurement of North America with a rent calculation device?

Map

The consolidated DLS map from January 1, 1929, measures 881 mm by 611 mm, and is reproduced at a scale of 1:2,534,400. A kilometer at this scale is represented by a distance of approximately 0.4 mm. Although a continent may be recognized by its external profile, the map here is filled with a shapeless interior. National and provincial borders, rivers and water bodies, and place names (more on that later) shrink behind a relentless grid. 

Michel de Certeau describes the pleasure of “seeing the whole”[9] of Manhattan from the World Trade Center towers; a form of distancing that allows the voyeur to read the text of the city as a god. Is there a better way to orient yourself, upon arriving to a new city, than to climb up to a high point and look around? Roland Barthes further defines a bird’s eye view as one that transcends sensation; the advent of the intellectualist mode of perception. The DLS map pushes the location of the voyeur further still, to (at least at the time of the DLS) an uninhabitable position beyond the atmosphere of the earth. This Apollonian gaze requires an abstraction which, through the curation of information, can be compared with the construction of a perspective - selecting any individual point of view requires the non-selection of another point of view. Once any point of view is widely accepted to be true, other points of view are excluded.

Here the contradiction of the DLS map is laid bare - it is not a tool for representation or understanding, but a tool for erasure. It is no coincidence that many surveyors, including John Stoughton Dennis, were also soldiers. Making a map is an act of great spatial violence. Existing inhabitations, networks, and places were excluded unless they were formalized through negotiations and treaties - Indigenous settlements, for example, were absent from the content of the DLS, except for those that were located on reserves. An aura of scientificity and accuracy, which surrounded the map and its making, conjured a myth of knowledge that reduced existing space while ‘superceding’ other ways of knowing and understanding.

According to de Certeau, the map is a fiction, and any knowledge gained from reading it is an illusion. Both de Certeau and Nietzsche differentiate the walker from the voyeur, and situate the walker within the world as participant.

The surveyor, liberated from the need to choose, walked in one world, and offered it to others as a gift beautifully wrapped in a map.

Grid

The grid was first and foremost a tool for understanding the world. Coinciding with the inception of the speculative free market, the emergence of Cartesian space hybridized the skeptical gaze of the scientific method with a new mathematical understanding of space. Viewed through this mechanical lens, the world was reduced to those aspects that could be proven and understood through mathematical, rational, and economic terms. The continuous and perfect order of the grid formed an object which in turn transformed everything else into a subject. Unbound by limits, it is free to expand in all directions to infinity.

Under the relentless continuity of the DLS, the grid mutated from a tool of understanding to a tool of preparation. Land became a measurable and exchangeable resource for extraction and development. Plants and animals became productive elements of colonial capitalism. Life was separated by parallel scientific analyses into the categories of ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous.’

The grid was deployed with hyperactive enthusiasm in service of the free market. In Olafur Eliasson’s Ventilator, a fan swings hypnotically, erratically overhead. Suspended by its own power cable, it wavers unpredictably between ovalesque and oscillatory motions. Like Eliasson’s fan, the “market has no plan, no program, no manifesto, no story.”[10] The flexibility of the grid is its ideological promiscuity; its ability to host any purpose, any meaning, within its totalizing and mathematically precise framework. 

But while Eliasson’s fan is benign in effect, the virtual grid is a weapon of supreme violence: unrolled over an existing surface the Cartesian program “rendered life mechanical, erased traditional meaning of place, [and] instrumentalized nature”[11] in order to prepare a new blank space for the future to unfold.

Canadian identity has been described as a multicultural mosaic—a framework of difference as well as unity that also resembles a patchwork grid of prairie fields. The metaphor works, as long as you don’t lift up the blanket and peer underneath…

Myth

The central truth within the great mythologies of the DLS, and its ultimate contradiction, is that it is a hyper-artificial, violent, strategically deployed (re)ordering device that is designed to transform everything into a verdant natural landscape, ripe with possibility, open to subdivision, ownership, inhabitation, development, extraction, exploitation. Existing inhabitants and traditional caretakers of the land are definitively erased and separated from this new ‘natural’ condition in a coup de grâce that, through the concept of the ‘noble savage,’ recast the existing inhabitants, who have always been there, as closer to animals than other human beings. 

Mythologies of the DLS orbit around this central theme—the creation of a new natural paradise on earth. The New World offers a blank slate of possibility, untouched wilderness, promised land. The (North) American Dream presents an empty land full of possibility as an escape from the complex conditions and history of the European continent. The heroic Explorer sets out on a voyage to discover places for the very first time. The Pioneer builds a new life, a new society, a new community, out of nothing but her individual ingenuity, dedication, and hard work. 

Roland Barthes outlined the process through which history is transformed into nature when he wrote that “What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a while, by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what myth gives in return is a natural image of this reality.”[12]

Scientific progress, applied using precisely accurate techniques, was used to make the world abstract, ruled by indifferent natural laws, usurping other ways of seeing and knowing the world. 

According to Viktor Shklovsky, “What we are familiar with we cease to see.”[13] As we became accustomed to the new normal condition, familiarity bred a void in our perceptions, rendering the myth simultaneously invisible and omnipresent. Uncontested and incontestable, the myth attained immortality.

Plot

Although the virtual survey extended over most of the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and parts of British Columbia, physical survey work, including the installation of survey markers, was concentrated in the Palliser Triangle, an arid prairie zone identified for its agricultural potential. Land grants were included in each township (comprised of 36 x 1 square mile sections) for schools, as well as for the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian Pacific Railway company, as partial payment for land purchase and the installation of railway services. But the vast majority of the land was designated for homesteads—eligible and eager settlers were gifted a quarter-section (160 acres / 65 hectares) of free and fertile land, as long as they paid a small registration fee, inhabited the land for six months of the year, built a permanent house within three years, and cultivated at least 40 acres (16 hectares) per year. Once the land was given to a private company or individual, it became an individual pixel for extracting value that could be inhabited, improved, exploited, and exchanged. Any consequences and effects were circumscribed within the boundaries of the plot, measured by productive capacity and increasing property values; the pixel was alone in an atomized landscape.

Property

John Locke rationalized the concept of private property by extending the ownership by individuals over their own bodies to ownership of the products of their physical labor. In the course of improving a plot of land by making it agriculturally productive, for example, individuals earn the right to self-preservation through the ownership of that plot. Although Locke also reasoned that no one can take possession of any thing, if in so doing it harms another, and that no one could take ownership of more than they could use, to prevent speculation, his arguments on private property were used to separate the previous inhabitants from their land and way of life. Viewed through a Euro-centric definition of agricultural and industrial productivity, Indigenous peoples were not in the process of ‘improving’ the land and thereby ‘surrendered’ their rights to it.

The definition of ‘improvement’ is open to debate. Colonial definitions are a reverse form of socio-economic phrenology. For example, who would define as an improvement the transformation of land traditionally stewarded by Indigenous peoples into an anonymous pixelated surface for extraction and exploitation?

Is property a form of violence? Is the fence the physical manifestation of individualism?

Torrens System

All records of land titles and transfers were formalized with the Torrens System, named after its creator Sir Robert R. Torrens. Etymologically, the name Torrens originates in the Latin word ‘torrēns,’ which means scorching, burning, roasting, parching. A legal form of scorched earth, the Torrens System had at least three significant outcomes. First, it eliminated any former claim to the title of the land, permanently dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands. Second, by making land transferable and marketable, even at a great distance across the globe, it linked material and financial worlds, and allowed capital to flow into the nation, thereby transmogrifying the land into a speculative economy. Finally, the system fundamentally undermined the illusion the grid evokes of equality and democracy, by providing the opportunity for centralization and monopoly to flourish. Distant owners and investors made decisions from afar, with no conception of ecology, place, or impact.

Fence

The privatization and subsequent enclosure of property had a range of effects on existing networks. Together with the regulation of access to private land (hunting of animals, policing of trespassers), and the erasure and subsequent replacement of the surface, fences introduced barriers to continuous systems. Indigenous peoples were restricted from moving in response to “harvesting [and hunting] patterns, seasonal changes, and cultural practices.”[14] Ecological systems were carved into separate islands, a slice-and-dice form of reduction through isolation.

When Illinois farmer Joseph Glidden invented a mechanically producible barbed wire fence in 1874, homesteaders across North America went on a fencing spree. Open range and nomadic ways of life abruptly came to an end. In the United States, Indigenous peoples called the vicious flesh-rending technology the “devil’s rope”[15] because of the way it ensnared wild buffalo.

Parks

As worldwide populations exploded, the Industrial Revolution picked up momentum, and increasing areas of the surface of the earth were covered with development and industry, the reactionary desire to preserve natural areas grew stronger. Canada’s National Parks system introduced land reserves entitled ‘Parks’ (to the confusion of many people, who confused them with urban parks). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle noted, after visiting Banff National Park, Canada’s first nature reserve, that “When Canada has filled up and carried a large population, she will bless the foresight of the administrators who took possession of broad tracts of the most picturesque land and put them for ever out of the power of the speculative dealer.”[16]

Classifications of parks fell into one of three categories: ‘Scenic Parks’ provided beautiful vistas for visitors; ‘Animal Parks’ preserved flora and fauna; and ‘Historic Parks’ preserved important places. 

The first designated parks were located on the western edge of the DLS, beginning in 1885, suggesting that they also served the purpose of an attraction to draw people across the country from the east to the west. Tourism acted as both a lever (a way to conserve the land) and a program. This touristic purpose is confirmed by the campaign to popularize park tours through various campaigns. Author Mabel Williams was commissioned, for example, to explore the parks and write a series of widely circulated guidebooks, which included names such as Through the Heart of the Rockies and Selkirks, Waterton Lakes National Park, Kootenay National Park and the Banff-Windermere Highway, Jasper National Park, Prince Albert National Park, Jasper Trails, and The Kicking Horse Trail. Scenic parks were valued at almost three times as much as productive agricultural fields. In her research, Williams recounted a comment she had found in an account of an annual session of the Scenic and Historic Preservation Society of America, in which an “old chap” got up and exclaimed, “You know, when you think of it, these beautiful places are worth money. It brings tourists, it brings people in to see them.”[17]

Flora and fauna conservation efforts serve primarily to provide an image of protection. The preciousness of natural reserves makes it difficult to allow natural processes to continue, such as regular forest fires. Parks also create artificial borders that are incapable of containing or supporting large networks, such as the migration patterns of deer, moose, salmon, birds, and bison, which stretch at least hundreds of kilometers.

The definition of ‘Historic Parks’ omitted any pre-contact events and sites. Mabel Williams took care to describe the parks as places that Indigenous peoples had avoided, and the first three historic places preserved as parks were military forts: Fort Howe, Fort Anne, and Fort Prince of Wales.

The parks also served a function in the development of a puritanical subject. In the first promotional booklet of the Dominion Parks Branch, the world’s first agency responsible for the management of national reserves, Commissioner James Harkin described the benefits the parks could provide through “those means of recreation which serve best to make better men and women, physically, morally and mentally.”[18]

National Parks are open-air museums, natural spaces for amusement. Coney Islands of the DLS.

Wall-less prisons that relieve our guilt. They provide the excuse for all the rest.

Road

The Canadian evolution of the grid used for Thomas Jefferson’s Public Land Survey System introduced a 30-meter road allowance between private plots. The date of this modification coincided exactly with Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, which demolished existing medieval urban form to make space for wide boulevards and to allow for the free flow of commerce, surveillance, and military control. Although the DLS grid was purely virtual at the outset, the gap reserved for circulation represents a pivotal symbolic and functional purpose; in the course of privatizing everything else, it maintains space for workers and soldiers to access any private plots, in order to provide labor and enforce order, as well as for the transportation of extracted materials bound for other destinations. Court battles over eminent domain to penetrate private property with roads are eliminated. The road represents the smoothing of flows in order to reduce frictions with regional and global metabolisms. 

Name

In order to complete the naturalization of the landscape, and to fill in the missing gaps in the myths of discovery and settlement of a ‘new’ world, places were renamed after events, places, and actors that were important to hegemonic colonial participants, including explorers, traders, settlers, miners, and European places, as though nothing had come before. ‘Civilized’ names replaced ‘barbarous’ ones that might otherwise challenge the new narrative, should they remain in common use. Traditional meanings, stories, histories were erased. Ownership of and colonial identification with the land were enforced through the forced application of new names. When Indigenous names were used, they were often appropriated for touristic or incongruent purposes, such as the use of Chief David Crowchild’s name for an eight-lane highway in Calgary. 

Reserve

King George III’s Royal Proclamation of 1763 simultaneously (and contradictorily) claimed ownership of North America and recognized Indigenous land title west of the Appalachian Mountains, which included the entirety of the DLS, as sui generis. As such, the Proclamation directed the Dominion of Canada to “negotiate with its Amerindians for the extinguishment of their title and the setting aside of reserves for their exclusive use.”[19]

The populations of the Plains Indigenous peoples, including the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai, Dakota, Stoney Nakota, Cree, Assiniboine, Tsuu T’ina, and Métis, had already begun to collapse; in a period of less than one hundred years prior to the DLS perhaps half had lost their lives, primarily due to the introduction of diseases and starvation caused by the overhunting and rapid decline of the buffalo. Still, the ambitious (re)settlement of the land within the DLS, as well as the introduction of the railway, required the land to be legally and physically cleared of its remaining original inhabitants.

In order to realize the design of the new natural condition, in exchange for the vast majority of ancestral lands, tiny ‘reserves’—exceptions to the continuous grid—were created with the illusion that the ways of life and relations with the land of Indigenous peoples within them would be allowed to continue. The negotiations were not undertaken fairly or in good faith, as Indigenous participants did not, for various reasons, entirely understand the terms of the written agreements. The payments and promises that formed the terms of the treaties were not entirely fulfilled or honoured as time passed, such as maintaining freedom of movement and providing help, education, money, and materials. Most chillingly, horrific, violent force, including mass starvation due to the withholding of food, was used to pressure Indigenous peoples into agreeing to the Treaties and to forcibly relocate them to the reserves. Enclosure ended previous territorially extensive ways of life integrated with the land, severing larger social, cultural, political, and economic networks.

Once the rest of the land had been successfully cleared, the original purpose of the reserves was reversed. Rather than allow for the inhabitants to continue their pre-contact ways of life, the full force of various branches of government, military police, and society at large was applied towards their assimilation within settler-colonial life. A pass system regulating movement to and from reserves fragmented larger networks, restricted gatherings, and impacted Indigenous economies by restricting the ability to seek employment, hunt, and fish.

Reserves became a form of rehabilitation camp or prison. Incorporating the regime of social engineering based on scientific principles under modernity, an intense concentration of architectural experimentation to control, surveil, and solve intractable problems were deployed on reserves. Community centres, ‘Indian Agent’s’ houses, furniture, sanitary facilities, infrastructure, and housing were designed and redesigned with the goals of individual and societal transformation. 

Social control found its apotheosis in the residential school. Students aged four to sixteen were removed from their families’ homes, and instructed in a boarding school facility. Instruction was typically provided by religious groups—spiritual conversation was central to rehabilitation tactics. The compartmentation of children in opposing wings by sex and in different rooms by age separated siblings, cousins, and other relatives. Speaking in a native language was prohibited, including within the main parlour, the only room parents were allowed to visit and which was closely monitored. Panopticonic monitor rooms were located throughout the building, in order to observe sleeping rooms, washrooms, classrooms, and other areas. Disease, forced labor, malnourishment, rape, neglect, beatings, and paedophilia were rampant. It is estimated that 4,400 residential school students died during their ‘studies.’

The goal of the reserve and its institutions was the dissolution of Indigenous identity through the fragmentation and destruction of family, culture, tribe, economy, politics, and religion. Allen G. Harper, an Indian Affairs official, described reserves as “the cradle of the Indian civilizing effort – and the means of securing the white man’s freedom to exploit the vast riches of a young dominion.”[20]

‘Indian’ reserves resisted centrifugal forces only. When pressure was introduced from the outside, the borders became malleable. Tsuu T’ina Nation 145, for example, has been inundated with a casino, hotel, army barracks, live fire ranges for ordnance including artillery, golf course, residential neighbourhood, high power electrical transmission lines, and a ring road, among other transgressions. 

Indigenous resistance took the form of large-scale rebellions, such as those lead by Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear) and Louis Riel (which were met with deadly force), as well as covert small-scale activities. Although ceremonies such as sun dances and sweat lodges were illegal, they continued to take place surreptitiously.

The title ‘reserve’ contradicts its purpose. Rather than preserving or maintaining pre-contact cultures, the reserve system concentrated and contained them before exposing them to the full power of government-initiated control, fragmentation, transformation, and long-suffering damage.

Once isolated and contained within the limits of reserves, the full concentration of state, religious, and institutional power could be brought to bear by a project that fell somewhere between assimilation and genocide.

Dispossessed Indigenous peoples were restricted to live within a tiny piece of the land they already inhabited, in exchange for relinquishing everything else.

Lebensraum

We know, of course, that Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish philosopher, committed suicide at the border between France and Spain to avoid capture by the Nazis. Hitler also had his own vision of Manifest Destiny, Lebensraum, in which he compared Nazi expansion with that of the Americans when he stated his intention to “Germanize this country [Russia] by the immigration of Germans and to look upon the natives as [R-word]s.”[21]

Last Best West

Six years after the American Frontier was declared closed in 1890, and the ‘best’ land in the United States had been taken, the Canadian prairies contained in the DLS were marketed to prospective immigrants as the ‘Last Best West.’ The marketing scheme used the scarcity principle to indicate that the window of opportunity was closing, and that good quality free homesteads were only available ‘while supplies last.’ As a slogan, Last Best West may have its beginnings in discussions on the topic of Manifest Destiny; a writer under the name Salus Populi wrote in the New-York Packet in 1776 that, “God has formed America to form the last and best plan that can possibly exist.”[22]

Epilogue - Failure

In the end, American expansionism was checked at the Canadian border. The victory was a Pyrrhic one, however—the DLS extended the same grid, the same surveying techniques and tools, and the same property system, within a spatial system based on individualism, alienation, and exploitation that led the same supercharged colonial capitalism to extend across the entire North American continent. 

References

[1] Roland Barthes. Mythologies.

[2] Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History.”

[3] David E. Shi. Seward. Attempt to Annex British Columbia, 1865-1869.

[4] Gord Olsson, Steve Rogers, & Brian Ballantyne. "Surveys, Parcels and Tenure On Canada Lands."

[5] Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History.”

[6] Gord Olsson, Steve Rogers, & Brian Ballantyne. "Surveys, Parcels and Tenure On Canada Lands."

[7] Dictionary of Canadian Biography: Dennis, John Stoughton. http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/dennis_john_stoughton_1820_85_11E.html

[8] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Communist Manifesto.

[9] Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life.

[10] Rem Koolhaas. Countryside.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Roland Barthes. Mythologies.

[13] Anaïs Nin. The Novel of the Future.

[14] Andrew Woolford and Jeff Benvenuto. Canada and Cultural Genocide.

[15] Eleanor Cummins. A brief history of barbed wire. https://www.popsci.com/barbed-wire-invention-history/

[16] Adam Shoalts. The History Behind Canada’s National Parks. https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/history-behind-canadas-national-parks

[17] Alan MacEachern. M.B. Williams and the Early Years of Parks Canada.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Olive Patricia Dickason. Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times.

[20] Tim Kitz. Timeline of Canadian Colonialism and Indigenous Resistance. https://leveller.ca/2019/09/timeline-of-canadian-colonialism-and-indigenous-resistance/

[21] The Holocaust Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/lebensraum

[22] Catherine Denial. Manifest Destiny: Creating an American Identity. https://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/25502#:~:text=The

Philip Vandermey is a Founding Partner of SPECTACLE Bureau for Architecture and Urbanism, and a sessional instructor in the Master of Architecture program at the University of Calgary. Prior to co-founding SPECTACLE, he worked for notable offices in Rotterdam, Barcelona, Montreal, and Calgary, with a focus on challenging the way we live and searching for new beautiful futures.

Guest Editor: Jessie Andjelic