Imagining Difference: Legend, Curse and Spectacle in a Canadian Mining Town.
Burke, Myka
Imagining difference. Legend, curse, and spectacle in a Canadian
mining town. Leslie A. Robertson. Toronto/Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.
xlv, 300 pp, $85.00 hc; 29.95 sc.
In the tight-knit community of Fernie, the residents will tell you:
"You know who your neighbours are here!" (p. xiv). Still, the
deceptively similar houses are resplendent with diverse "languages,
aromas, and objects bearing the symbols of complex journeys" (p.
xvi). Leslie A. Robertson's ethnography Imagining difference:
Legend, curse, and spectacle in a Canadian mining town is a study of
narratives from different contextual viewpoints and the transformations
of these narratives. In particular, she explores various expressions of
difference from the compound locations of age, ethnicity, gender, class,
and religion; her volume reveals the shifting historical, political, and
social contexts of representations from within these very different
homes.
In this volume Robertson has, in a sense, created a sort of path
model for the local social imagination by examining the often
conflicting versions of the legend of a curse cast on residents of
Fernie, British Columbia, in the nineteenth century by indigenous
people. The legend of the curse serves as a starting point and
"barometer to trace the way story flows through a community"
(p. xxix). The curse and the jagged contours of Hosmer Mountain (that
make the shadow of the Ghostrider on the rock face visible in the early
evening) are the constant variables along which she traces the
representations of the successive interpretations of the ubiquitous
local history: A postcard is inscribed with one version of the legend
(p. xxix): "Old legends tell of Captain William Fernie courting an
Indian Princess ... to learn the source of her necklace's
'sacred black stones.' Upon learning the location of the
Morrissey coal seams, Fernie jilted his Indian bride. Her angry mother
then placed a curse on Elk Valley." The Ghostrider, in this
telling, is considered to be the ghost of William Fernie fleeing the
Indian Chief and his daughter.
Robertson further reveals how the personal memories of Fernie
residents' are integrated with legend. For example: "What is
so unbelievable about the fact that maybe this man was unscrupulous and
that he did come here and he did make a promise ... Men still do that
today. Not for a coal seam, but for other things, right? ... I mean,
Italians will do that--they put curses, they send curses ... I've
heard stuff like that growing up over the years" (p. 74).
Imagining difference is a meditation of several "systems of
knowledge" that, in this case, are made available to its readers in
the form of edited and unedited field notes from a three-year residence
in Fernie, interviews with local residents, regional newspaper articles
spanning over a century, illustrations, postcards, photographs, and
Robertson's memories, observations, thoughts, and conclusions. One
is continually aware of, and intrigued by, the ethnographic process. The
subject matter under investigation, however, delves deeper into the
realm of stories and storytelling as vehicles for articulating
perceptions of human difference. The legend of the curse--and its many
different versions--often led to discussions of curse beliefs, religion,
class, race, sexuality, gender, age, history, and geography. These
various strands of text are ably woven together by Robertson; in the end
she suggests that "ideas about human difference remain intact
across generations" (p. 246). Though the volume looks at an old
coalmining town/now international ski destination in southern British
Columbia, the study will be of interest to anthropologists, historians,
and Canadianists as well as those interested in Native Studies,
Women's Studies, Cultural and Ethnic Studies.
Myka Burke
Faculty of Philology
University of Leipzig
Email: mykaburke@t-online.de
