First Year Winner: Batoche National Historic Site

HIST 1040, The Presence of the Past: Commemoration, Memorials, and Popular Uses of History. CD: Jennifer Bonnell.

Abstract

Robert Gibbs’s essay offers an elegant and witty written analysis of Parks Canada’s representation of the Batoche National Historical Site on the organization’s web-site. The essay is a delight to read and to learn from. Making deft use of the Wayback Machine internet archive, Mr. Gibbs describes and suggests persuasive understandings of the changes that Parks Canada has made to the website since it was launched in 2010. His paper analyzes how these changes reflect Parks Canada’s response to declining attendance, to transforming museological practice, and to an evolving understanding of how and what Batoche means as a representation of Métis culture.

Perhaps most notable about the essay is the tact with which it treats aspects of the Batoche site that offer tremendous temptations to easy ironies. Not that Mr. Gibbs’s prose is innocent of irony, but his irony is a measured, often understated but always precise instrument, that polished the prose and deepens the essay’s insights. Consider the essay’s mention of a new attraction at Batoche: “a red Muskoka chair placed somewhere in the historic site that visitors are invited to find using the supplied GPS co-ordinates, the reward being a secluded, beautiful view.” Too many of us would have felt compelled to comment further, would not have trusted their readers, primed by the context, to see the Muskoka chair for what it is, in all its colonialist aggression, absurdity and pathos. This is writing of a very high order and very much merits award and recognition.