This project examines whether recent changes to the relationships between museums and Aboriginal people are visible in the museum exhibits and narratives that shape public memory. It focuses on references to the fur trade found in the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s First Peoples Hall and Canada Hall and throughout the Manitoba Museum, using visitor studies, learning theory and an internal evaluation of the Canada Hall to determine how and what visitors learn in these settings. It considers whether display content and visual cues encourage visitors to understand the fur trade as an industry whose survival depended on the participation of Aboriginal people and whose impacts can be viewed from multiple perspectives.

This project examines whether recent changes to the relationships between museums and Aboriginal people are visible in the museum exhibits and narratives that shape public memory. It focuses on references to the fur trade found in the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s First Peoples Hall and Canada Hall and throughout the Manitoba Museum, using visitor studies, learning theory and an internal evaluation of the Canada Hall to determine how and what visitors learn in these settings. It considers whether display content and visual cues encourage visitors to understand the fur trade as an industry whose survival depended on the participation of Aboriginal people and whose impacts can be viewed from multiple perspectives.

Thèse (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 2008. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 1 février 2007). In ProQuest dissertations and theses. Publié aussi en version papier.

This study examines British-Indian relations in the Great Lakes and Upper Canada between 1783 and 1812 and focuses on intercultural frontier relations and Native responses to Britain's actions and imperial Indian policies as Native Americans explored ways to preserve their lands and cultures while simultaneously attempting to redefine their relationship with their former British allies. Specifically, the project compares British-Indian interaction and diplomacy in three regions throughout Upper Canada and the Old Northwest. These three locales correspond roughly to the areas served by Britain's three principal Indian agencies in Upper Canada at the time—namely Fort St. Joseph, Fort Amherstburg, and Fort George. The Natives of each of these three areas developed unique relationships with the British, and as a result, Britain could not establish a single Indian policy that applied everywhere in its North American borderlands. Government leaders and Indian agents in Canada and the Great Lakes were forced to adapt Whitehall's policies to conditions and circumstances that were prevalent in each of the sectors in which British agents and leaders dealt with indigenous peoples. Several factors affected the evolution of British-Indian relations from region to region. These included the fur trade, Indian relations and warfare with the United States, geographical position, the influence of British-Indian agents, intertribal relations between various Native groups, the degree of Indian acculturation with whites, Native cultural revitalization, and the constitutional issues of Native sovereignty and legal status. As a result, Britain was unable to preserve the unity among its confederated tribal allies that it had enjoyed during the American Revolution, and by the War of 1812, the old “Chain of Friendship” had devolved into a collection of smaller alliances.

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"How Gardening Pays" is a case study of the formation and transmission of cultural practices and interpretations of flower-gardening as profitable leisure, idealized labor, and luxury consumption in nineteenth-century transatlantic culture. Mid-nineteenth-century cant about American flower-gardening as an anti-materialistic and morally improving occupation was premised upon the multiple functions of flower gardening in British working-class culture. Methodologically, this dissertation is unlike most intellectual histories of the ideological significance of nature in American culture, or formal studies of the physical attributes of horticultural history, because it demonstrates how ideologies and material practices were interrelated.;The first half of this dissertation focuses on early-nineteenth-century British working-class flower gardening for profitable leisure and labor reform. British urban Protestant weavers, particularly the militant silk-weavers of Spitalfields, London, practiced floristry as an integral and profitable part of workshop culture. When artisanal floristry declined with the onset of industrialization, agricultural and industrial capitalists reinterpreted and revived flower-gardening as a rational recreation that prevented labor riots and the formation of trade unions. their efforts were often thwarted by surviving traditions of working-class floristry and the elite interest in flowers as fashionable luxuries.;These conflicting circumstances materially and ideologically shaped the development of commercial horticulture in the northeastern United States, thanks to the overwhelming number and influence of imported horticultural texts and immigrant horticulturists who promoted parlor gardening. When material practices crossed the boundaries of class, geography and gender, parlor gardening emerged as a bourgeois translation of both the techniques of artisan florists and the rhetoric of flower gardening as rational recreation.

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In the cultural upheaval of the 1920s, Canadians became particularly invested in looking at and debating women???s images in public. This dissertation looks at how English-Canadians debated, accepted, and challenged modernity through public images of women. In analysing the debates over cultural rituals of looking it seeks to show how the discussions about images reveal the power of vision in ordering and understanding modernity as well as social and cultural changes. Through five case studies on the flapper, the Diamond Jubilee of Confederation, two beauty contests, an art exhibition including nudes, and the relationship between film and automobiles this study reveals how important images of the body were to the cultural developments and debates on the post-World War One modern world. By the 1920s urban visual culture was dominated by various images of women and an analysis of those images and the debates around them reveal underlying tensions related to gender, class, age, social order, and race. Anxieties over changes in these areas were absorbed into the broader concerns over the pleasures and perils associated with being modern. This dissertation looks at Canadian visual culture in terms of what it can reveal about modernity and the problems, perils, and pleasures associated with it.