Did you know that Elk Island National Park used to have a bison abattoir? Have you ever heard of the national parks in Alberta that were dissolved? In this live podcast recording, we explore the wild history of making national parks in our area, and what it can teach us about the current plans to build a new urban national park in Edmonton’s river valley.

Ever see wardens feeding the animals in Buffalo National Park near Wainwright, or see the pronghorn in Nemiskam and Wawaskey National Parks near Medicine Hat? Probably not, because they were all dissolved in the 20th century! Listen in as public historian Lauren Markewicz reveals how national parks have been made and unmade in Alberta.

Then hear as Taproot’s Mack Male and Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations’ Miranda Jimmy give us the inside scoop on building a new national urban park here in Edmonton. What are the Confederacy’s hopes and dreams for a potential new park? Will you have to pay to get in, and will you be able to pick saskatoon berries?

We dive into all that and more, and questions from listeners like you.

This episode was recorded on September 21, 2023 at the Alfred H. Savage Centre in Edmonton, or Amiskwaciwâskahikan. It is the culmination of our season driven by listener questions about the history of parks and natural areas in Edmonton.

Kathryn Gwun-Yeen 君妍 Lennon asks: what is the best playground in Edmonton? We crawl and swing through the past and present of playgrounds in our city to help her and her toddler on their quest.

Kathryn and her family find themselves easily visiting 4 playgrounds in a weekend lately, and she estimates she visited around 30 different playgrounds last summer. So she’s been curious about finding the best one in town. She’s been thinking about how much shade and gathering space that playgrounds have, how close they are to other amenities, and how much her kid Yassin can challenge himself on equipment designed for a variety of ages.

First, we spoke to Vancouver Island University professor Laura Suski, who’s been exploring the possibilities and limits of seeing playgrounds as heritage spaces. She’s been exploring questions like whether it’s more important to protect specific equipment or a space itself. Playgrounds, she points out, are one of the only public spaces where children are universally accepted as belonging in North America.

Next, we met up with local playground afficionado Jill Footz, who runs the Edmonton Playgrounds website and social media accounts with her kids. During the pandemic, she started cataloguing their experiences, and they’ve now written about 380 playgrounds in and around the city. Jill told us about modern efforts to make playgrounds more accessible to all kids, from rethinking surfaces to building low-sensory spaces. We met at the Inglewood Rocketship Park (which she has reviewed, of course).

Jill highlighted the Clareview Inclusive Playground and Borden Park. Listeners chimed in to recommend spots like Meadowlark Park and Gold Bar Playground, and we talked about Chris’ mom’s work on the committee rebuilding the Westbrook Elementary School’s playground.

Finally, we met Sierra Club Edmonton & Area Wild Child Project Coordinator Paulina Retamales. Her master’s research at the University of Alberta looked at the history of the Gyro Club playgrounds in Edmonton between 1922 and 1950. Some of Edmonton’s very first playgrounds were built by this club, including Tipton Park and Kitchener Park. She told us about the very structured activities and informal river valley play opportunities kids had there, the men who supervised play at the parks, and the parades. Tipton Park still has information panels about its origins as a Gyro Club playground.

We had a lot of kids to help us playtest Dermott District Park.

This episode is brought to you in part by the Edmonton Community Foundation. Every year, Edmonton Community Foundation produces a report called Vital Signs to measure how the community is doing, in partnership with Edmonton Social Planning Council. This year’s report focuses on food security, how it’s changed over the last 10 years, and where we are today. You can see the latest report at ecfoundation.org/initiatives/vital-signs.

Did you know that Elk Island National Park used to have a bison abattoir? Have you ever heard of the national parks in Alberta that were dissolved? Join us for a live podcast on September 21 recording exploring the wild history of making national parks in our area, and what it can teach us about the current plans to build a new urban national park in Edmonton’s river valley.

The evening will be hosted by Chris Chang-Yen Phillips, with special guests including Lauren Markewicz – a public historian, member of the IUCN Bison Specialist Group, and author of Like Distant Thunder: Canada’s Bison Conservation Story.

Let’s Find Out is an award-winning local history podcast, published by Taproot Edmonton. We take questions from curious Edmontonians about local history, and find out the answers together.

This event caps our season exploring the history of parks and natural areas in Edmonton.

When: Thursday, September 21, 2023
Doors open at 7 PM, event begins at 7:30 PM. 
Where: Alfred H. Savage Centre (13909 Fox Drive, Edmonton AB)

Tickets are $17 in advance, $20 at the door, or free for Taproot Members with a discount code (check your Taproot newsletter!)
Buy now: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/lets-find-out-how-to-make-a-national-park-tickets-706945792897

This venue has barrier-free access.

We're taking a summer break this month, but we have some updates:

You may be tired of parks named after dead white men. Kyla Tichkowsky? She's railing against a different kind of tyranny. We have parks named for: Elk. Wood Buffalo. Aspen Beach. Cypress Hills. Dinosaurs even! And yet, not one single lichen.

Why not? Lichen are, in fact, fantastically diverse and fascinating organisms. From a conservation standpoint, they are excellent bioindicators. So for conservation organizations, a lichen preserve would make a lot of sense.

Together with Kyla, we set out to understand more about lichens and their place in Edmonton's conservation scene. 

Why not? Lichen are, in fact, fantastically diverse and fascinating organisms. From a conservation standpoint, they are excellent bioindicators. So for conservation organizations, a lichen preserve would make a lot of sense.

Together with Kyla, we set out to understand more about lichens and their place in Edmonton's conservation scene. 

And we were guided into the Larch Sanctuary by Meghan Jacklin, a conservation coordinator with the Edmonton and Area Land Trust.

Zulima Acuña noticed that some of Edmonton's old riverlots are highly developed, and some not at all. She asked us to help her learn why some of them became parks and others didn't.

Zulima is a mom, teacher, and artist who has lived in Edmonton for the last ten years, and is eager to know as many stories about the land in Edmonton as her old hometown. It’s easy to take our spaces for granted: the way our roads are laid out, how big our parks are, where they are, the funny angles where some spaces meet. But Zulima’s question got us to peel back the layers a bit and see that many of the shapes and spaces we move through every day… are influenced by decisions made by land surveyors and farmers and land speculators almost a hundred and fifty years ago.

We met Zulima in Emily Murphy Park (on the site of the old Riverlot #3) on a bright but smoky day. We consulted two books about local river lots to begin answering her question: Tom Monto's Old Strathcona, Edmonton's Southside Roots and Jan Olson's Scona Lives: A History of Riverlots 13, 15, & 17.

Next, we spoke to two local history researchers who have looked at the overlap between the old riverlots and the map of modern-day Edmonton. Connor Thompson is a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta, focusing on Western Canadian history. He wrote an article in 2020 for the Edmonton City as Museum Project, "Edmonton’s River Lots: A Layer in Our History". Dylan Reade is a local documentary filmmaker and history researcher who has traced back many of the individual family stories and land sales on Edmonton's riverlots through archival documents and maps.

Back in 2016, the very first episode of Let’s Find Out was about a festival in Tofield, a town about 45 minutes southeast of Edmonton: The Snow Goose Festival. In that episode, we set out to find out how this big festival that started in the 90’s with thousands of bird watchers coming to Tofield to admire the geese migrating through in the spring became a convoy of school bus tours run by the Edmonton Nature Club. In that episode what we found out was that the festival was centred on Beaverhill Lake, which mostly dried up a decade later, leading the organizers wind down the festival. A die-hard group of goose admirers planned those bus tours - the Snow Goose Chase - to catch them in wet farm fields instead.

The first story was interesting to us because it demonstrated how quickly we can get used to big changes, and accept new normals – something called shifting baselines. Imagine our surprise and delight when we found out the festival was coming back for 2023.

How is that possible? What does it mean? Is Beaverhill Lake back?

In this episode, Chris took a field trip out to Tofield, because he sensed this would be kind of a good news story, of people who remembered the lake, remembered this celebration of birds, and wanted to breathe new life into it. The actual story was more complicated than we imagined.

Edmonton calls itself a winter city, which partly means we’ve got a lot of wintery festivals. This episode, our producer Trevor Chow-Fraser asks: what does that mean for our parks? How are they changing to live up to the winter city ideal?

Trevor started out by taking his daughter Eliot to Victoria Park to take advantage of its free snowshoeing and fort building. He spoke to activity leader Ryanne Osguthorpe. Victoria Park is one of a few parks in Edmonton that now feature geodesic dome warming huts in the winter.

That got us curious about warming huts in parks, so we met up with Danielle Soneff — an industrial and social designer in Edmonton who created warming huts for a pilot project to bring them into city parks. She’s now an MA student at the University of Alberta, studying winter city design and governance.

We talked about why she feels that pilot project failed, and what good winter design principles could be brought to the new Warehouse Park (final name TBD) downtown.

Finally, we spoke with Isla Tanaka, a winter city planner for the City of Edmonton. We asked her how its winter city strategy has evolved over the years, and how it might change now after the first decade of implementation.

Full show notes

Soni Dasmohapatra asks: Who is Sohan Singh Bullar? Why is there a park named after them?

Mathew Thomson asks: what’s the process for naming a park in Edmonton? We investigate: who has authority, how much do names mean, and what happens when someone goes rogue on Google Maps?