Editorial: Learning the Western Mindscape

Abstract

This issue of The American Review of Canadian Studies is a selection of papers presented at the third biennial ACSUS in Canada Colloquium. Held in Calgary, Alberta, on 15-16 September 2000, the topic for this colloquium was Mindscapes. The first ACSUS in Canada Colloquium was organized in honor of ACSUS's twenty-fifth anniversary in 1996. In initiating the colloquia series, the ACSUS Executive Council, of which I was then a member, hoped to make a significant contribution to the development of Canadian Studies. The ACSUS Biennial conference was already well established as a multidisciplinary forum with panels and sessions that dealt with all aspects of Canada, and was preferred by many Canadianists to their disciplinary conferences because of its interdisciplinarity, its smaller size, and the increased intimacy it afforded. Many of the sessions at the ACSUS Biennial presented or generated solid scholarship on Canada, but they often raised issues that could benefit from more general and extended discus sion than the largely disciplinary panel sessions allowed. The ACSUS in Canada Colloquium series aimed to provide a forum for real inter- and multidisciplinary dialogue by being focused on a fairly narrow topic that would be, nonetheless, of real interest to all Canadianists and, by being held in Canada, these events had the additional appeal of drawing ACSUS members there. The timing for exploration of was perfect and fortuitous: planning the colloquium and choosing the topic two years before, the ACSUS Executive Council could not have foreseen that it would occur during the run-up to a Canadian federal election in which a Western-based political party, led by a Canadian, was the challenger, with an outside chance of becoming the next government of Canada. Inevitably, the media spotlight in Canada was focused on the West. That situation, which served as the backdrop for the colloquium, reflected an enormous change in Canada, which had been mirrored in Canadian Studies. The colloquium's Call for Proposals drew an overwhelming response: there were far more good proposals than the planned program time could possibly accommodate. There is a larger context for the Western Mindscapes theme that deserves some explanation. In 1986, through the leadership of Bryan Downes of the University of Oregon, the Pacific North West Canadian Studies Consortium was founded to foster and develop Canadian Studies. At that time, there was a dearth of teaching materials on the Canadian West, and Canadian Studies, like Canada itself, seemed to be exclusively absorbed with issues relating to Quebec. Canadian Studies in the United States, also like Canada itself, seemed to be centered in the East. The second meeting of the PNWCSC Board was held at the University of Washington's Marine Science Laboratory facility at Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. A field trip took the PNWCSC participants to the English Camp and the American Camp where U.S. and British North American forces were lodged during a standoff associated with the Pig War that took place on the island. Here were the relics of a nineteenth-century conflict between the U.S. and Canada, and at American Camp we saw the memorial to General Henry Martyn Robert, universally known in the U.S. for Robert's Rules of Order, which he apparently wrote on the island for conducting meetings between the forces during the standoff Here were events that could bring Canadian Studies alive for our Pacific North West students. But when we returned to our campuses and our libraries, we discovered that there were no references to these events in the Canadian Studies texts and materials that then existed. PNWCSC Board members agreed that, to achieve the institutional goal to develop Canadian Studies in the Pacific North West, we needed course materials that dealt with the Canadian West and were relevant to the lives and locations of our students. …