Settling in and settling down: the making of a Latter-day Saint landscape in southern Alberta, 1940-1975

Abstract

This project explores the depth of connection Latter-day Saints feel to the small corner of southern Alberta they began colonizing in 1887. This dissertation explores how a relatively small group of white outsiders built a community and social landscape that has thrived for 139 years on Blackfoot land with very little interference or disruption. I contend it is through everyday practice and everyday routine, the things that establish a rhythm and schedule of life, that led to what geographer Marwyn Samuels called an authored landscape: something that is not tied specifically to physical geography but felt, made, and experienced by people interacting in spaces and places. This dissertation will focus on 1940-1975 and argues that LDS settlers’ connections to southern Alberta were built through everyday rituals and routines that develop as groups of people become settled in places and spaces. These everyday activities generated a tangible, malleable barrier between their community and the world, creating an LDS landscape that was simultaneously recognized on the inside as a place of comfort and insulation from the world and by those on the outside as being distinct from other white, settler communities. The Latter-day Saint landscape is not just about the physical geography; it is more fundamentally about the sense of belonging to Mormon region that the Saints have developed over time. Their sense of ownership and belonging is connected to how they understand their lives in relation to the daily acts of living, playing, worshiping, and working in their landscape.