Remembering Tomorrow: Wagon Roads, Identity and the Decolonisation of a First Nations Landscape
Author(s): Erin Gibson
Year: 2014
Summary
Roads embody the experiences of those who constructed, used and maintained them through time. Using a biographical approach I explore how memory and identity are entangled in the material form of a wagon road in southwestern British Columbia, Canada. First constructed by the Royal Engineers in 1859 to enable miners to reach the Fraser River goldfields, the importance of this road transcends its initial colonial origins. Local First Nations communities continued to use and maintain this road through the 1950s. Today the preservation of this road ‘ the ‘Heritage Trail’ ‘ is part of the decolonisation process for the Stl’atl’imx First Nations people (pronounced Stat-lee-um). This presentation outlines the complex nature of memory and identity as embedded and played out along this road through drawing on examples from the roads colonial use in 1859-1863 and its more recent past.
Cite this Record
Remembering Tomorrow: Wagon Roads, Identity and the Decolonisation of a First Nations Landscape. Erin Gibson. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. 2014 ( tDAR id: 437015)
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Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): SYM-47,06