Memento Mori, Latin for “remember thy death,” implores us to be mindful that death is both inevitable and inescapable. What of the records created during the process of dying and about death? Based upon wide-ranging archival research into primary documents, this thesis explores the rich sources of both official, public records, and personal, private ones, relating to mortality on the small-town Canadian frontier before 1950. The community of Red Lake, Ontario, which was established on the frontier as the result of the Red Lake gold rush of 1926, is the subject of a case study. Rather than merely cataloguing sources, this thesis illustrates that by adapting aspects from such archival appraisal methodologies as macroappraisal and documentation strategy, one is able to make available to researchers a wider range of sources relevant to the themes of dying and death. Specifically, by employing a documentation strategy methodology to identify and illuminate the records of human activities surrounding the functions of dying and death, archivists can offer to researchers the opportunity to locate relevant records wherever they may physically be. Since this is an Archival Studies thesis, it does not provide an historical analysis of dying and death, but is an archival study of the types of records related to the theme of mortality on the Canadian frontier: how those records were created, their character, and their capture and preservation in a small community. This thesis is organized into three chapters and a conclusion. Chapter One explores some relevant trends in the secondary literature of three fields: archival appraisal and description, small town or local development on the frontier, and dying and death as human activities. Chapter Two sets the context in which the thesis analyzes mortality on the frontier by outlining the relevant history of the Red Lake District of Northwestern Ontario and its pioneers. The focus is especially on the gold-mining boom years from the mid-1920s until shortly after the Second World War. The heart of the thesis, Chapter Three, is a case study of the various records creators, human activities, and resultant records related to mortality. It is organized according to three phases or functional categories surrounding dying, death, and memorialization. The conclusion summarizes the usefulness of the case study, in light of the literature review in Chapter One. It also suggests areas of further research, including aspects not covered herein, of the records of dying and death on the Canadian frontier. The documentation strategy, adapted from the original methods employed by archivists Helen Samuels and Richard Cox, was found to work best when deployed as a research and descriptive tool for exploring and documenting the records of mortality, more so than its original purpose as an acquisition tool. The strategy has wide-ranging usefulness discovering and then describing a “virtual” documentation universe relating to record-generating human functions and activities.

This body of work began as an exploration of the University of Manitoba’s Southwood Lands (a former eighteen-hole golf course), with the intention of proposing something new for the site. However, analysis and critical thinking led to the realization that there was a need to not only look at the Southwood Lands, but also the entire Fort Garry Campus. The work evolved through a process of discovery, using a variety of methods from walking the site, documentation through photography, visits to the archives to uncover history, and mapping from afar. One of the underlying objectives was to highlight the importance of taking additional time to understand a place prior to making decisions, revealing what makes a place unique, where the opportunities are, and what has been hidden over time. The idea of a site being a blank slate is dismissed, drawing on the importance of found conditions in decision making. Looking deeper into a place also leads to a greater respect for what is already there. It is what we already have that is so often discarded, and seen as having no value in decision making (the natural areas in a city or the trees on a former golf course for example). It is also the ecosystems that are seen as scrubby and unkept that are the most complex systems and richest spaces for life. Once complex, biologically rich systems are erased there is no going back to them. It is the existing conditions that are worth taking the extra time to investigate, a process that must occur prior to making design decisions that seek to remove or make new. It is only though looking, and looking carefully with un-objective eyes, and an open mind, that design can truly enhance what we already have. This practicum works under the premise that landscape has value in its own right. The landscape is not empty space, not just a place to put buildings, not a luxury that can easily be cut from budgets, and certainly not something that can be considered an afterthought. Instead, landscape is valued as something which is working and active, an essential part of life on this planet that is becoming increasingly important with a rapidly changing climate. The intellectual foundation for organizing ideas around approaching the site have been interpreted from Christophe Girot’s ‘Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture’. They are in this order: landing, grounding, finding, and founding. While Girot’s four trace concepts organize ideas around approaching the site, there are three underlying principles that guide the entire body of work: 1. Landscape as infrastructure and organizing system; 2. Design as a process of discovery; 3. Investigation through multiple scales of inquiry. A strategy for the Fort Garry Campus is where this work concludes, followed by reflections on the importance of context in design and the lessons learned throughout the practicum process.