Parks Canada’s recent nation-wide reconciliation efforts to acknowledge expropriated citizens through official apologies, special access passes and commemorative memorials reflect changing Canadian attitudes toward wilderness. This has been an opportunity for environmental peace-building initiatives that integrate natural resource management with conflict prevention, mitigation, resolution, reconciliation, redress and recovery to build resilience in communities affected by loss and displacement, trauma and conflict. In 2010, Parks Canada’s national entry fee was waived for families whose land, now inside a national park, had been subject to regulatory takings and expropriations. The entry pass was an important step towards healing community relations and keeping the memory of these communities alive. In 2011, this measure was expanded to apply to all expropriated owners (including land, lumber lot and cottage owners) to give three generations the right to access cemeteries, former family house sites, expropriation monuments and memorials and to take part in commemorative events organised or supported by Parks Canada. In 2010 the federal government allocated 1.3 million dollars to Kouchibouguac National Park for the ‘enhancement of the visitor experience’, and almost a million dollars to Forillon National Park for a permanent exhibition ‘as a record of the life of the families’ who were expropriated. The House of Commons issued a formal apology to Forillon’s expropriated residents and established a Forillon Expropriated Persons Commemorative Committee in 2011 to actively shape the direction of Forillon’s strategic plan and interpretive strategies. National parks serve as a microcosm of the history of conflict and misunderstanding that has long characterised the unequal power relationships between dominant state-building legislation and more vulnerable native and local populations. To remain both truthful and relevant, national parks must reconsider changing perceptions and frame themselves within the broader canon of social, cultural, political and environmental histories. National parks have the potential to be common ground and an arena to resolve and mend broken relationships with peoples who once inhabited and tended to these lands.
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This article is a very brief summary of Desirée’s major project at McGill University: ‘Symbolic Restitution, Material Reparations and the Politics of Reconciliation: Managing the Extant Vernacular Architecture and Cultural Landscapes of Expropriated Communities in Forillon National Park, Québec’, 2015
Desirée Valadares
and less invasive management practices. It is significant though to highlight the contrast between North American and European landscape - which are two very different conditions. European being highly cultivated, and North American being more ‘wild’ for lack of a better term!
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