Historical site investigation: The Rideau Canal with history in mind

As part of the assignment in which this blog is my offering, we were asked to visit our historical 'site' with some questions in mind relating to the history and experience of history in mind. Specifically, my partner Colleen and I were asked to visit the map of the canal that appears at the end of the walkway from the University of Ottawa campus, walking under the Transitway, Nicholas Street and Colonel By Drive to the portion of the canal with a map for visitors. (Check the link in "My location" at the bottom of the post to see exactly where we went.)
When we got there, it felt almost anticlimactic: The map seemed so 'ordinary' so factual and detached from the expereiences we were asked to think about - like what it was like to be there as the canal was being built. Everything was so perfectly manicured around us, even the people who walked, ran and biked on the smooth sidewalks seemed so pleasant and perfectly placed. The sun was setting when we looked around so the water in the canal shimmered with the sun and the trees across the canal on the other shore were aglow with the fading light. It felt almost impossible to conceive of the canal in the organized chaos of its fabrication for this moment of sereneness in the city.

First picture of the map I took.

We decided it would be wise to take a photo of the map for later reference so I used my IPad to take a photo. The map itself was a drawing of the streets and walkways, with the winding waterway of the canal in the centre, and the satellite image of the 'geography' underneath. There were several 'points of interest' scattered on the map in little flag-like signs in relation to the canal and Ottawa in general. I realized quickly, through a variety of means, that the map was not for 'citizens' but tourists. The points of interest were largely those that would interest people wanting to explore Ottawa and its surrounding areas - those places of significance (more on this later). Also, we had several different people, as Colleen and I studied the map intently, ask us if we were looking for something, or needed help. The map was there for people unfamiliar with the sense of place in this area. It created this strange feeling of foreignness that we both had to dispel through admissions of our interrogation of the map was part of school projects.
Consequently the sense of place made by the map itself creates unfamiliarity and a positioning of space as organized largely for the person who is unfamiliar and unattached to the space they are in through this unfamiliarity. I asked myself what was 'historical' about this map? What 'stories' was it telling me; how was I making meaning with this space and this text?
My antiracist education background kicked in and I was immediately reminded of the commonsense understanding of colonialism within the map and the place. As I had felt before I started to dismantle and understand my own historical narrative of the Rideau Canal, I realized its very normalcy to me covers over the legacy of colonial initiatives and racisms it engendered and continues to engender (Stanley, 2009; Rarack, 2002). The name 'Rideau' is French for curtain, which references the shape of the falls, named  by the French colonizers themselves, to the river after the same name (also named in colonial expansion). Do we remember this part of the historical 'story' when we talk about the 'Rideau Canal'? (Looking at my own narrative in the previous post, the answer is: from one perspective at least, not really). It is the colonizing of geography that I came to concentrate on. The map itself, and the pictures I took of it, speak volumes about the colonizing enterprise in relation to geography in this region we call Ottawa and the Rideau Canal.
The map was 'innocently' showing how 'Ottawa' and the Rideau Canal was when the map was created, it does show the violence that was needed for this serene autumn day to look so polished. I am reminded of Montgomery's (2005) work, which I had read before, about the insidiousness of discourses of racism, that readers, viewers and consumers of the discourses do not recognize. I looked at the map again, the roads and names (which were almost all colonial in reference in their origins) were literally written over the greenery and the satellite image of the region. The water was controlled and coloured a single colour of blue (even though when you look at it, the water is more greenish in colour) The larger words "Gatineau" and "Ottawa" were written to demarcate the spaces of belonging of each space. All of the land is a patchwork of ownership and naming. It all allows for that sense of comfort I felt in the order of the space around the canal itself that lay beyond the map itself.
I left the map with a strange sense of wonder at my own thoughts. I have often endeavoured to try and flesh out a way of engaging this normalcy of colonial history in Canada from an antiracist perspective. So much of our everyday surroundings are infused with the violence of colonialism that we take it as normal, as eternal as unquestioned, and it takes a lot of work to uncover the colonial histories of those that are excluded from the story and to find and expose their 'side of things'. (I am thinking here of Stanley's (2009) article about the street signs in Vancouver, BC and the effort he goes through to meticulously flesh out the historical racailized exclusions that the street names so casually exhibit). I found then, that history as stories of place are infused, by definition, I suppose, with stories of geography as well. To understand the history of place, I must understand the geography of place, how history has interacted with that geography. This is apparently a delicate balance, one that historians and geographers walk all the time (Harris, 2012). Being neither a historian or a geographer, it is an interesting endeavor indeed for me to engage this type of historical thinking.

References
Harris, C. (2012). A life in history: A life between history and geography. The Canadian Historical Review, 93(3), 436-462. doi: 10.3138/chr.9332

Montgomery, K. (2005). Imagining the anti-racist state: Representations of racism in Canadian history textbooks. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 26(4), 427-442.

Razack, S. H. (2002). Race, space and the law: Unmapping a white settler society. Toronto: Between the lines.

Stanley, T. J. (2009). The banality of colonialism: Encountering artifacts of genocide and white supremacy in Vancouver today. In S. R. Steinberg (Ed.)., Diversity and multiculturalism: A reader (pp. 143-159). New York: Peter Lang