clockwise from top left:
The Athabasca River from Drift-Pile Camp. Photos taken by George M. Dawson on September 25, 1879. Dawson's survey team camp, dated September 20, 1879, four days before they arrived at Drift-Pile Camp. It gives an impression of what life was like for the Dawson entourage on their travels. A portion of G.M. Dawson’s 1879-80 map showing the dates and duration he spent at his camps, including Drift-pile Camp inside the red circle.
Library and Archives Canada
David Murray
Library and Archives Canada
locating the Drift-pile Camp Drift-pile Cree Nation is a Treaty 8 First Nation with Reserve lands on the south shore of Lesser Slave Lake and is one of five contemporary First Nations with reserve land bordering the lake. Dawson’s diaries and maps have been used by current members of the Drift-pile Cree Nation to search for and potentially locate the 1879 Drift-pile Camp, which Dawson described and noted its coordinates in his notes. In 2010 and again in 2020, Drift-pile Elders and staff from the Archaeological Survey of Alberta set out to find Dawson's Drift-Pile Camp. Their search was not conclusive in determining the exact location, but the effort was critical to the understanding the area as a significant cultural landscape in the context of Canada’s search for reconciliation. Drift-Pile Camp has now been afforded protections under the Alberta Historical Resources Act. 5
the maps and the Pendennis Hotel It is not known who left these maps in the Pendennis Hotel, or how they were intended to be used. They tell an evolving story of the European occupation of western Canada. What they do not contain, from today’s perspective of today's post-Truth and Reconciliation Commission era, is perhaps more telling than what they do contain. The strong cooperative relationship with Indigenous Peoples gradually became less important as the west was colonised and settled. But the treaty maps, such as Treaty 8 territory in which the Drift-pile Camp is located, provide ongoing identification and documentation of historical Indigenous populations in western Canada. The story of searching for the location of the Drift-Pile Camp brings together the reclaiming of this land by Indigenous Peoples in the twenty-first century with the colonising efforts of the nineteen century, depicted in the early maps. Dawson’s 1879-80 map, as a historic document, has a value that could not have been predicted at the time of its making. p
David Murray is an architect in Edmonton, Alberta, who specialises in the evaluation, protection and conservation of historic building resources. He has a keen interest in the human stories that are embedded in his projects.
5 Reverting Colonial Cartography: Searching for Drift-Pile Camp, Retroactive , Historic Resources Management Branch of Alberta, Culture and Status of Women. https://albertashistoricplaces.com/2020/08/26/reverting-colonial-cartography-searching-for-drift-pile-camp/
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on site review 42: atlas :: being in place
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