Max Foran Icon, Brand, Myth, The Calgary Stampede (2008)

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.Annie Oakley is a case in point.Similar-ly, as we have noted above, in the early days of the Calgary Stampede, womentook part in a variety of contests, such as bucking horse riding, wild steer66roping, relay race, trick and fancy riding.Bertha Blanchett, Flores LaDue,Lucille Mulhall, and Goldie St.Clair made names for themselves as cham-pions in these events.By 1952, however, the venues for female competitorshad been reduced to barrel racing only.In this regard, then, one is temptedto ask the following question: Where in this (western Canadian) landscapeare the women? We might answer: This Wild West has been re-constructed asmasculine, virile, in large part via the image of the cowboy.ROBERT M.SEILER AND TAMARA P.SEILER 313Second, we notice that Native peoples have been portrayed in ways legiti-mating Euro-Canadian dominance.The exception is the 1918 poster, whichoffers us a satirical view of life on the foothills of southern Alberta.We see,against a view of the mountains, a big Native person and a small, child-likecowboy standing in front of a huge tipi; the former is painting a messageby the entrance that reads: AWAY ALL WEK.GON BEEG FAIR.In thiscase, we get the impression that nature (the Indian and the land) can co-existwith civilization (the cowboy and industrial technology, indicated elsewhereon the poster).The posters invite us to see the Native peoples before theydisappear all together, thereby reinforcing the belief, which was widely heldfrom the mid-nineteenth century to virtually the mid-twentieth century, that67Native peoples were disappearing.We develop this notion further when wetalk about specific posters.Again and again, words and images evoke subsets of the binary oppositionswe mentioned above, such as progress/nostalgia: man/animal, individual/community, Native/white, real/artificial, and centre/margin.We could nothelp but notice the ambiguity of the relationship between these mutuallyexclusive discourses.We could see that, ironically, they are inextricably linked.Some analysts, interestingly enough, explain the enormous and growingpopularity of the cowboy hero over the course of the twentieth centuryin terms of this opposition.Weston, for example, argues that [The] onlyforce strong enough to explain such a powerful appetite for the Western is aprofound sense of deprivation and loss by the American people and a mass68longing for a better world, a loss engendered by the industrialization ofAmerica during the late nineteenth century.The situation in Canada also generated nostalgia, apparent in the songs69written by cowboys, as well as, perhaps most obviously, in Weadick s desireto celebrate the cowboy just as his world was being transformed by the forcesof agrarian and urban settlement.We try to throw some light on the rolenostalgia plays in the construction of the cowboy via the posters we examine.ConclusionThe discursive practices that have been employed in the posters we studiedbear a strong resemblance to the practices employed by socio-political insti-tutions generally.We see in the harmonization of the discourses of progressand nostalgia via the process of commodification new representations ofthe master discourse of Euro-centric patriarchal capitalism, which valorize314 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE CANADIAN COWBOY: CALGARY EXHIBITIONS ANDSTAMPEDE POSTERS, 1952 1972two impulses: to look forward and to look back in the interest of progress,thereby legitimating the European dominance of the North American conti-nent.Along the way, these signs of the historical and the mythical Americanand Canadian Wests in large part have been emptied of specific meanings,thereby allowing Canadian viewers to insert their own mythic meanings.Moreover, a paradox lies at the heart of nostalgia, in the sense that nostal-gia involves a fantasy that never materializes, one that maintains itself as itwere by not being fulfilled.No one can say that the fantasy of reviving theWild West is an idle dream.Every July, it presses toward indirect fulfilmentvia the art of spectacle.We detect sufficient ambiguity in our data to suggesta more polysemous discourse than we had anticipated, one in which ordinarypeople (to paraphrase Fiske) may indeed valorize the dominant discourse,but at the same time insert meanings that subvert it as well.The CalgaryStampede posters we examined are indeed sites of a complex struggle overthe meaning of western Canadian experience, and the image of the cowboythat evolves via these popular cultural artifacts is as central to this struggle asit is ambiguous.ROBERT M.SEILER AND TAMARA P.SEILER 3151 2345316 THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE CANADIAN COWBOY: CALGARY EXHIBITIONS ANDSTAMPEDE POSTERS, 1952 1972678910ROBERT M.SEILER AND TAMARA P.SEILER 317NotesWe presented a shorter version of this paper at the Boundaries Conference, held at theUniversity of Edinburgh on 4 May 1996, and the conference on the Canadian Cowboy:New Perspectives on Ranching History, held at the Glenbow Museum on 28 September1997.We wish to thank the archivists at the Glenbow Archives and at the CalgaryStampede Board for their help in accessing primary materials, and our colleagues at theuniversity, Donald B [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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