Rodeo exhibit planned for Ottawa

Page R6

The quiet man standing near the gates at Canadian Finals Rodeo XX isn't known to many of the cowboys.

But he has quite a title: he's a curator of plains ethnology at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec. By 1997, Morgan Baillargeon should be better known to all in the rodeo industry. He'll be bringing a rodeo to the Ottawa area as part of a huge exhibit on the culture of the Plains Native people.

Baillargeon is a Metis from southern Ontario. His interest in rodeo and ranching grew out of years living and studying in various Native communities in western Ontario. He worked for a while at the Panee Memorial Agriplex in Hobbema, Alta. and saw rodeo, including the popular Christmas rodeo, up close. He saw smaller rodeos in stints at the Alexander Reserve west of Edmonton and other spots in northern Alberta. He acquired his impressive job title, along with the attendant responsibilities, in February 1992.

Baillargeon made a proposal for the exhibit which grew out of his interest in Native peoples' involvement in rodeo and ranching. It has developed into a three-phase exhibit dealing first with the men and women's relationship to dogs, horses and buffalo, both the practical day-to-day working relationship and the harder to quantify and record spiritual relationship which grew up around the first.

The second phase is the Plains peoples' involvement in ranching and rodeo, or what have become rodeo activities. The third is an acknowledgment of the artistic and entrepreneurial talents of those involved in the western culture, from saddle makers to stock contractors to fashion designers to farriers to cowboy poets.

Plains ethnology originally embraced the Plateaux peoples, as well, which includes those in the American Southwest, for example. The two cultures are closely related and share rodeo and ranching and their associated arts. Baillargeon, and his committee, scheduled a symposium for Carleton University in Ottawa for 1995 for academic papers on aspects of these areas.

The papers presented would then form the core of the publication to accompany the exhibit in 1997. He hopes that there will be input from other areas in the world where Aboriginal people work in ranching and take part in recreation based on their ranching activities. Input may come from South America, especially Argentina and Chile, Australia and New Zealand, may be elsewhere. But the core will be the North American Plains and Plateaux peoples.

But what was Baillargeon doing at the Canadian Finals Rodeo? He was gathering information for the exhibit, or more precisely, he was gathering artifacts: recordings, both sounds and video, of the Native cowboys participating in the event; photographs of those and others involved with them. He has attended the Calgary Stampede for the last two years and made clips of many experiences of Native participants and others. He will be attending rodeos next year in Cheyenne and Cody, Wyoming, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, or so he hopes.

Baillargeon has concerns about the historical record of the Natives peoples of North America, and those concerns will drive this exhibit and rodeo. There are those in museums who focus solely on the culture up to the late 19th Century to the exclusion of all else. Artifacts from Native culture in the 1850s are easier to come by for a museum operator than are those from decades later. Items from the 1920s, for example, simply weren't kept.

Baillargeon's collection, built by his European predecessor, who was interested in teepees, ends for all intents and purposes, he says, in the 1940s. This kind of a positive exhibit, which will try to avoid dealing with sensitive issues such as sacred materials, will be a big step in rectifying the illegitimate portrayal of Native cultures as if it disappeared in the 1940s.

Jim Dunn, the Canadian Professional Rodeo Association president, recalled many "great Indian champions and great men" in rodeo. Kenny McLean, for example, nowretired and inducted into the Canadian Rodeo Hall of Fame, and Jimmy Gladstone, appear in champion lists from the 1950s to the 1970s. So do dozens of other Native cowboys, who don't appear in museums but represent a vibrant strain of Native culture in the West.

All that aside, there may be other difficulties to be faced by Baillargeon's project,

which he describes as "completely positive and contemporary." A rodeo in Ontario may run a foul of animal rights activists, something Baillargeon doesn't want, and he readily admits that not everyone on the committees overseeing the various aspects of the exhibit are interested in rodeo. But for him, it is essential as a living "exhibit," part of Plains and Plateaux Native culture today.