It can be said that Canada, as a nation, is world famous for its many places of natural beauty. In fact, one of the lesser-known perks to becoming a Canadian citizen is one full year of free admission to the country’s nearly forty national parks. Regarding this benefit, the Parks Canada website reads: “Celebrate your arrival in Canada or your citizenship with great Canadian experiences.¹ Check out some of the most awesome places in Canada. We look forward to welcoming you!”² Clearly, to be Canadian is to spend time in the great outdoors. As far as I could tell, this offer applies immediately—unlike some other citizenship privileges such as public health insurance, which can have a 2–3 month waiting period in some provinces.³ This scheme is a partnership between Parks Canada and Immigration and Citizenship Canada and has been in place for well over a decade. It stands out as a not-so-subtle remark on the significance of national parks as a part of national identity in Canada.

Today, the heavy importance Canadians place on the country’s national parks is a deeply entrenched characteristic of national identity. However, there is nothing intrinsic about this relationship. The connection between Canadian national identity and the national parks system has emerged as a result of more than a century of carefully crafted narratives about the country’s natural landscapes. These narratives are a cultural force reflecting Canada’s history as a settler-colonial country and have had an important role in hiding the many troubled histories of displacement and exploitation that have occurred as a result of creating and maintaining the national parks. This text will elucidate some of these hidden histories by focusing on the nation’s first national park: Banff National Park.

The history of national parks in Canada begins in the mid-1880s, when Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) workers discovered a series of hot springs in the area known today as Banff National Park. In part from suggestion by the railway’s managers (who foresaw an opportunity to boost ridership of the soon to be completed transcontinental railway line), Prime Minister John A. Macdonald reserved through an order-in-council the area surrounding the springs, leading to the creation of Canada’s first national park in 1886. During the earliest decades of the park’s existence, the CPR played a significant role in developing the Banff area for visitors. The company’s contributions to the growth of tourism in the region included both physical development within the park itself as well as significant marketing and promotion of Banff across Canada and overseas. The guidebooks and pamphlets promoting the CPR transcontinental rail service across Canada at the end of the nineteenth century heavily featured written descriptions and illustrations of the national parks in the Rocky Mountains. These materials were designed to encourage riders to make stops on their journeys across Canada and presented the Rocky Mountains as a highlight of the Canadian nation. For instance, a CPR Guidebook from 1888 describes the Banff area, praising it for its natural beauty: “The district for many miles about has been reserved by the Canadian government as a national park, and much has already been done to add to its natural beauty, or rather, to make its beauties accessible.”¹ Continuing on, the text explains how the springs at Banff possess “wonderful curative powers […] which have already attracted thousands of people, many from great distances.”² In other pamphlets, the CPR espouse the springs as “medicinal,” going so far as to provide numerical breakdowns of the various chemicals (including chlorine, sulfur, and lithium) present in the water as justification for its healing properties.³

Beyond providing rail access to the area and instigating the reservation of the region as a national park, the CPR built and maintained hotels which served to attract and house tourists. In 1888 and 1890 respectively, the Banff Springs Hotel and Chateau Lake Louise were opened. These high-end accommodations were among the first of the CPR’s network of Grand Railway Hotels, built across the country along the company’s transcontinental line at the turn of the twentieth century to provide tourists travelling by rail with places to stay. The Banff Springs Hotel was nicknamed the “Castle in the Rockies” and warm water from the hot springs was piped into the property’s luxurious bathing pools.

In addition to the infrastructure provided by the CPR, the town of Banff was also developed during this period by the Dominion government, led by the park’s superintendent, a land surveyor, and a landscape architect by the name of George Stewart. Stewart oversaw the design and construction of a range of projects to facilitate tourism, including roads, walking paths, bridges, dams, town planning, and ornamental planting schemes. These projects were undertaken in the Banff area with the goal of establishing it as an important tourist destination—based to a certain extent on the aesthetic ideals of picturesque and wilderness landscapes. In particular, Stewart’s descriptions of his new walking paths were designed using strategies common to picturesque landscape design popular in eighteenth-century England. For example, he wrote of the design of a path up Tunnel Mountain:

Stewart designed a number of paths in the new national park with this same approach—winding through the landscape to reveal different views of the scenery at every turn. According to eighteenth century aesthetic theorists like William Hogarth and William Gilpin, a key element of picturesque landscapes is the serpentine path—it was thought that landscapes were most beautiful when viewed and experienced in motion, where specific landscape scenes are hidden and revealed over time as a viewer progresses through the landscape.¹ Today, the 2.4-kilometre path up Tunnel Mountain from the town site remains one of Banff’s most popular hikes.

In parallel to these landscape developments (either physical or rhetorical), park regulations were also developed to control the kinds of activities which could take place in the national park—and by extension, the kinds of people who were allowed into the park. Specifically, restrictive hunting regulations resulted in members of the local Îyârhe (Stoney) First Nation being slowly pushed out of the area, which encompassed part of their traditional hunting grounds. While sport hunting was permitted in the national park, subsistence hunting was not. It was the view of park administrators that the Îyârhe be “excluded from the Park,” as “their destruction of the wild game and depredations among the ornamental trees make their too frequent visits to the Park a matter of great concern.”¹ Additionally, it was thought that discouraging Indigenous people from hunting would inspire their assimilation. In the end, the exclusion of the Îyârhe was facilitated in collaboration with the Indian Agent at the Morley reserve outside of the park, who had control over when and why members of the community were allowed to leave the reserve. The Îyârhe were signatories to Treaty 7, signed in 1877 between the Canadian Crown and a number of Indigenous nations in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains who were represented by Chief Crowfoot of the Blackfoot nation, in order for the Canadian government to obtain land to build the transcontinental railway. In this way, the development of Banff National Park supported a project of Indigenous dispossession.

It is important to point out that during this period, at the close of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the notion of wilderness was not as tightly linked to the idea of uninhabited or untouched nature as it is today. In fact, European landscape art at the time commonly included Indigenous figures as a part of depictions of the wilderness in order to emphasize its primitiveness.² Likewise, the dominant landscape art tradition in North America, represented by the work of the Hudson River School, also routinely included human figures, who served to bear witness to the sublime beauty of the American wilderness. With this nineteenth-century understanding of the idea of wilderness, the presence of Îyârhe people was not out of place in the national park—at least not from an aesthetic perspective. Their exclusion from Banff National Park was facilitated primarily through the imposition of hunting regulations which favoured sport hunting over subsistence hunting.³ This was further supplemented by the view of the Indian Department that Indigenous peoples should be discouraged from leaving the reserve to hunt with the goal of hastening their assimilation into more settled ways of life.

Following this sentiment regarding the presence of Indigenous bodies in artistic depictions of the wilderness, the guidebooks and pamphlets produced by the CPR at the turn of the twentieth century also includes mention of Indigenous people in the Canadian landscape. Within the CPR texts, the existence of Indigenous people is presented in very specific ways which reflect the racial-ordering principles of settler-colonialism. Simply put, settler-colonialism is a form of colonialism in which colonizers come to a new land to stay and establish themselves as the rightful occupants of that land. As part of this process, it is important for settler people to set up not only the physical infrastructure necessary to support their societies (such as roads, railways, and cities) but also to assert cultural hegemony, which can include the creation of national founding mythologies. The way that Indigenous people were described in texts from this period contributed to this national mythmaking by anachronistically placing Indigenous people and cultures into the far away past and reaffirming settlers as the recognized inhabitants and caretakers of the land. For example, in describing the Blackfoot nations living in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains, a CPR guidebook describes how, “We are now in the country of the once dreaded Blackfeet, the most handsome and warlike of all the Indian tribes, but now peacefully settled on a reservation near by.”¹

An important element in turning Banff National Park into a nationally significant tourism destination was to impose a colonial worldview onto the landscape. It was not enough to simply reserve the tract of land around the springs, the value of the land in the national imagination had to be crafted in order for visitors to actually come. Along with the physical development of the park and its cultural promotion, the application of European colonial aesthetic ideas (such as the picturesque) about the landscape was important. Meanwhile, the management of certain activities like hunting allowed the park to be used as a tool towards Indigenous dispossession and assimilation. Finally, although it has not been the focus of this article, I would be remiss not to mention the racialized regimes of labour indentureship and exploitation that the CPR utilized to both build and operate its transcontinental service during this period. In making the landscapes of the Rocky Mountains accessible and visitable to settler Canadians, the CPR used an indentured workforce of Chinese men in the 1860s and 1870s to build the railway in the British Columbia mountains and preferentially employed Black men as sleeping car porters on the transcontinental route until well into the middle of the twentieth century. In closing, I propose a brief consideration of the official verbiage of Canada’s Nation Parks Act. It is written in the Act that Canada’s national parks are reserved “for the benefit, advantage and enjoyment of the people of Canada.”² But as this text suggests, precisely who is included in “the people of Canada,” has had different meanings throughout time, reflecting the complex history of Canada as a settler-colonial nation.