Stone Gods and Haunted Schoolhouses: Nostalgia and Vernacular Local History in Rosebud, Alberta 1960-1983

Abstract

Scholars have often characterized the vernacular local history projects that proliferated across the rural Canadian prairies in the second half of the twentieth century as a grassroots response to demographic and technological change. Most academic surveys have emphasized how rural community historians articulated a mythic heritage identity by valorizing the ‘pioneer’ experience of agricultural settlement. This case study more intimately explores nostalgic commemoration of the past undertaken by local historians in Rosebud, Alberta as their community declined between 1960 and 1983. Rosebud’s historians sentimentalized autobiographical experiences of rural life, appropriated indigenous people as ancestral origin figures, and eulogized ‘wild western’ cowboys as icons of a lost frontier. Identifying and exploring these trends, this study concludes members of this rural community did not always conform to popular convention as they assigned meaning to historical experiences defined by liminality and impermanence rather than enduring stability or success.