The deadline for applications for the Roger Soderstrom scholarship is fast approaching!
The Roger Soderstrom Scholarship honours the late Roger Soderstrom’s work and career with the Government of Alberta in encouraging preservation and interpretation of Alberta’s heritage.
The applicant must be a permanent Alberta resident enrolled in a graduate or extended study program with a proposed research project at that level, in the following fields, but not limited to:
architectural preservation
urban or area planning and conservation
historic resource management
archaeology
history
palaeontology
The research project must have significant Alberta content and will help with the preservation or understanding of Alberta’s heritage.
Guidelines for the scholarship, along with instructions on how to apply, are available on Alberta.ca.
The volume is dedicated to archaeology in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains, Foothills and their margins. The initial three articles were released in Spring; below are summaries for the remaining six articles. They explore projectile points, caches, plant residues and more.
The fourth paper in the volume explores Oxbow and McKean stone tool assemblages at a site northeast of Hinton, Alberta. Taylor Graham applies statistical analyses to tease apart reduction events among the 6,000 artifacts recovered.
Projectile points recovered from FlQg-8. Source: Graham, 2024.
Editor’s note: The banner image above is of Áísínai’pi/Writing-on-Stone. Source: Laura Golebiowski.
Blair First Rider is a Kainai (Blood Tribe) Elder and Horn Society grandparent, and an Indigenous Consultation Adviser with the Historic Resources Management Branch. Thank you Blair for sharing your grandfather’s stories. Suukapi!
Written by: Blair First Rider and Laura Golebiowski, Indigenous Consultation Advisers
In a previous RETROactive blog post, we discussed the seasonal round: the Niitsitapi (“the real people,” how the Blackfoot refer to themselves) concept that structures the year and our relationship to the land and one another. In this post, we learn some of the ways the Niitsitapi spent time during the hot summer months at the turn of the century.
This knowledge was shared by George First Rider, Blair’s paternal grandfather. George was born in 1904 on the Kainaiwa (Blood Tribe) reserve. His father was Dog Child and his mother was The Only Handsome Woman, also known as Catching Another Horse.
George First Rider was a kipita-poka: a grandparent’s child. Deeply loved and cared for by his family, he was afforded a lifestyle of traditional knowledges and practices. He was also a member of the Horn Society and other age-grade Societies (the complex social and ceremonial system that Niitsitapi men participate in from the age of seven or eight to adulthood. Niitsitapi women participate in the Motokis Society). Through ceremonial transfers, George learned many songs and earned the ability to conduct many ceremonies.
Dog Child, a North West Mounted Police scout, and his wife, The Only Handsome Woman, members of the Blackfoot Nation.” [ca 1890]. Credit: Trueman and Caple / Library and Archives Canada / PA-195224.“George First Rider, Blood.” [1925-02-21] (CU 187940) by Atterton. Courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, Library and Cultural Resources Digital Collections, University of Calgary.Read more →
Editor’s note: Alberta’s heritage sector and the Heritage Division of Arts Culture and Status of Women recently lost two dedicated and long-serving colleagues – former Historic Conservation Advisor Rino Basso and former historian and provincial archivist David Leonard.
Written by: Ronald Kelland, Geographical Names Program Coordinator and Fraser Shaw, Heritage Conservation Advisor
Rino Basso
Rino Basso was born at Nordegg, Alberta on July 22, 1946, to Pietro “Pete” Basso, a coal miner with significant carpentry skills and Barbara Basso (nee Sieben), who was a notable volunteer in her community and church and had some nursing training. The Basso family moved to Red Deer in 1947 where Pete Basso started Basso Construction and built houses. Being born in the historic mining community of Nordegg and having a carpenter and a homebuilder as a father may have set Rino on a career path in historic resources management from an early age.
Rino attended Red Deer Catholic Separate Schools, graduating from St. Thomas Aquinas High School in 1965 then enrolling in the Architectural Technology Program at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology. In the early-1970s, Rino began working with the Government of Alberta as Senior Preservation Advisor in the Historic Sites Service and, as it is known today, Historic Resources Management. There is probably not a single Provincial Historic Resource designated between the 1970s and 2010s that has not seen his involvement. It seems like his name can be found on every file in Historic Resources Management’s records. Rino used to jovially remark that he had probably driven on every byway, stayed in every motel, eaten at every bakery and visited every city, town and village in the province from Edmonton and Calgary to the proverbial “Cucumber Corner,” his shorthand, all-inclusive term for the small communities and rural areas across the province whose history and heritage he dedicated so much of his career to preserving.
Rino was delighted to find that this structure, one of only two known extant, historic sod houses was still standing, 2013. Even after more than three decades working with historic places, he was enthralled when encountering a new site or building.
Editor’s note: The banner image above is a slanted roof, dug-out home with a four-post frame, 1913, found in Occasional Paper No. 11.
Written by: Dorothy Field, Heritage Survey Program Coordinator and Ronald Kelland, Historic Places Research Officer
The Alberta Heritage Survey Program is happy to announce that digitized versions of the first 15 Historic Sites Services Occasional Papers, published by the Historic Sites Service (HSS) between 1976 and 1985, are now available online.
Starting in 1976, the HSS produced and published an Occasional Paper Series about sites, people and historic themes in Alberta. Similar to the Archaeological Survey of Alberta’s Occasional Papers, popularly known as the “Blue Books” or the “Blue Series,” the HSS occasional papers series were produced by staff historians and contractors based on their in-house research.
Fort Victoria Clerk’s House, Provincial Historic Resource, 2014. Source: Historic Resources Management Branch.
Editor’s note: The author would like to give special thanks to Quinton Crow Shoe for his contribution to this post. As well, the banner image above features audio reels at the Provincial Archives of Alberta. Source: Provincial Archives of Alberta.
Written by: Mikaela LeBlanc, TRC Archivist Intern
The Provincial Archives of Alberta (PAA) acquires, preserves and makes records available to researchers. These includes government records, which are records created by agencies, boards and commissions as well as departments within the Government of Alberta, and private records, which are records created by individuals, families and organizations. The records come in many formats and can include letters, photographs, drawings, audio recordings, journals, newspapers and maps, among others. Within these records are also a wide variety of materials that were created by and about Indigenous people and communities.
The PAA first released an “Aboriginal Resource Guide” finding aid in 2006, which listed records identified as being about Indigenous communities in Alberta. This guide provided the building blocks for archival research to become more user-friendly when accessing Indigenous related records. The hearings and report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Calls to Action related to archives and the heritage sector identified ways in which the PAA could make improvements in access to records by Indigenous creators and about Indigenous communities. This coincided with the PAA’s move to a new collections management database webpage Access to Memory (AtoM), and saw the release of the Indigenous Resources Guide (IRG) in April 2023. The guide identifies records that relate to Indigenous people and communities in Alberta that are currently in PAA’s holdings.
This story begins with the discovery of hundreds of artifacts that were uncovered during the dismantling of the interior of the original Pendennis Hotel in Edmonton in 2006. The Pendennis Hotel, located at 9660 Jasper Avenue, dates to the late 1890s when it was formerly named the California Rooming House. The earliest photo of the building is dated 1898.
Pendennis after 1904. This building was incorporated into the 1911 hotel expansion. Source: Provincial Archives of Alberta, B4328.
Editor’s note: The banner image of Dyde House above was taken by an unknown photographer, Edmonton, 1961-1962. Source: University of Calgary, Canadian Architectural Archives, Arthur Erickson fonds, CA ACU CAA F0002.
Written by: Robb Gilbert, Archivist, Canadian Architectural Archives
Dyde House, located a short distance outside Edmonton, is one of Canadian architect Arthur Erickson’s first notable projects in residential design. The house is located southwest of Edmonton, in Parkland County, on the grounds of the beautiful University of Alberta Botanic Gardens. The project was designed by Erickson in the Spring of 1960 and completed in late 1961 after returning from travels in Japan and Southeast Asia on a Canada Council for the Arts fellowship.
2024 marked the centenary of the birth of Erickson so I wanted to highlight one of his most important works from his early years as an architect: a rare Erickson project located in Alberta and a work that has recently been the subject of a documentary and an ongoing preservation campaign. The Canadian Architectural Archives at the University of Calgary houses the work of Erickson from 1953 to 1973 in the Arthur Erickson fonds. His archive includes thousands of original drawings and dozens of boxes of files documenting the design process behind his revered works of architecture.
Arthur Erickson, Sketch of the Dyde Residence, Edmonton, [1960-1961]. Source: University of Calgary, Canadian Architectural Archives, Arthur Erickson fonds, CA ACU CAA F0002.
Arthur Erickson, Sketch of the interior of the Dyde Residence, Edmonton, [1960-1961]. Source: University of Calgary, Canadian Architectural Archives, Arthur Erickson fonds, CA ACU CAA F0002.
Erickson was born in Vancouver in 1924. He studied at the University of British Columbia and served overseas during World War II in India and Malaysia. Pursuing a career as an architect, he studied at McGill University and established his practice in Vancouver in the mid-1950s. In the span of the next 40 years, Erickson became Canada’s most renowned architect, nationally known but also the one of the few Canadian architects with an international reputation. His work includes icons of Canadian architecture such as Simon Fraser University, the University of Lethbridge, Robson Square and the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.
Editor’s note: Jillian Richardson is the curator of Labour and Industry at the Royal Alberta Museum (RAM) and worked on both the Doris Tanner Architecture Collection and Wallbridge & Imrie Architecture Collection there. Devon Owen Moar recently wrote his Masters thesis on Wallbridge & Imrie and worked as the cataloguer for the RAM’s Tanner Collection.
The banner image above is a composite image composed of portraits of the three architects. The portraits of Jean Wallbridge (left) and Mary Imrie (middle) are sourced from the private collection of Mary S. E. Wallbridge-Lillis. The portrait of Doris Newland Tanner (right) is sourced from Cheryl Mahaffy’s “Women Building Alberta” website.
Written by: Jillian Richardson and Devon Owen Moar
While cataloguing the Doris Newland Tanner architecture collection for the Royal Alberta Museum, we noticed something interesting. A few of Doris’s books and technical manuals were inscribed with the names of former colleagues, Mary Louise Imrie and Jean Louise Wallbridge. Finding these inscriptions made us wonder—were these books exchanged as references? Left to Doris after Jean and Mary’s passings? Or, do they hint at an ongoing professional and personal dialogue that extended far beyond the drafting table? This discovery pointed towards the deeper connection between these three architects, beyond being professional acquaintances. The presence of Wallbridge & Imrie’s names in Doris’s books offers a rare glimpse into the professional and intellectual network of Alberta’s pioneering women in architecture at a formative moment in the province’s history and urban development.
Exploring these materials raises broader questions about how museum and archival collections—including architectural tools, books, drawings and correspondence—can illuminate the network of support and influence among professional women. While this research is still in its early stages, this small but compelling kernel of evidence points toward a larger story—one of friendship, mutual mentorship, collaboration and lasting bonds.
Written by: Michael Gourlie, Government Records Archivist, Provincial Archives of Alberta
Township maps are a popular research source at the Provincial Archives of Alberta (PAA). An outcome of the Dominion Lands Surveys beginning in 1881 that captured most of what is now Alberta, the township maps document a grid system using meridians, ranges, townships and sections established by federal surveyors. Known as the Alberta Township System (ATS), this grid forms the basis of legal land descriptions used for Alberta land titles to the present day.
The original township maps were subsequently published in several editions, with the published maps used for a variety of operational purposes. They acted as a template or index for various offices to identify land uses for programs such as grazing leases, timber berths, mineral leases, land grants and homestead applicants. They also provided a standardized perspective to administer and oversee land use.
RETROactive 