In the 1920s, MB rode horseback, hiked, and drove through the national parks of Western Canada. From this research, she wrote the most distinctive and enduring series of guidebooks that the Canadian park system has ever produced.
MB’s letters between her and her family reveal her everyday life in Ottawa in the 1910s and ‘20s and in prewar London, England. And those letters from major figures in Canadian and national park history— or from her only known sweetheart— reveal much, too, including what she thought worth hanging onto.
The 1936 speaking tour of England by the famous nature writer Grey Owl brought MB Williams back into the orbit of Canada’s Parks Branch. Letters to her provide the first evidence ever seen that the Canadian park system knew Grey Owl’s secret— that he was not Indigenous, as he pretended, but an Englishman born Archie Belaney.
MB wrote the first history of the Canadian national park system in 1936, but spent much of the following decades struggling unsuccessfully to build a career as an author. It was only when writing about parks that she had the passion to see things through.
This exhibition tells the story of Mabel “MB” Williams, an extraordinary, ordinary woman who became devoted to national parks and engendered that devotion in others. Historian Alan MacEachern documents her role in shaping the philosophy of Canada’s Dominion Parks Branch (the precursor to Parks Canada) in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Digitized photographs and letters from Williams’s life, her guidebooks and other publications, and audio interviews with Williams herself reveal her influence on, and love for, Canada’s national parks.
In this chapter of the German-language version of her virtual exhibition, “Mensch und Natur in der deutschen Literatur (Human-Nature Relations in German Literature),” Sabine Wilke examines mountains and glacial environments in German-language literary descriptions. Whereas the German Romantic poets still highlighted mountainous nature as deeply ambiguous, Goethe’s Faust tried to understand mountainous nature in its materiality through scientific studies. Modernism focuses on the more often destructive results of human-nature entanglements. For the English-language version of this exhibition, click here.
In this chapter from the virtual exhibition “Global Environments: A 360º Visual Journey,” Sarah Elizabeth Yoho’s 360° video captures the process of constructing a dry stone wall in Italy’s Cinque Terre. In cooperation with community organization Tu Quoque Vernazza, it was filmed over nine days and is shown in time-lapse. The camera captures the grapevine’s point of view of Cinque Terre life.
In this exhibition, ENHANCE ITN doctoral researchers showcase short virtual reality video installations that emerged out of their own empirical and ethnographic fieldwork. The videos work by tracking, rendering, and displaying full-field visual, sonic, and tactile data in a context in which the viewer has full control and is empowered to decide what to look at, listen to, and feel—or which story to experience.
