A Wilder West: Rodeo in Western Canada

In the North American imagination, the rodeo cowboy is one of the
most evocative images of the Wild West. A frontier master, he is
renowned for his masculinity, toughness, and skill. A Wilder
West returns to rodeo's small-town roots to explore how,
beneath its showman's surface, rodeo represents a way of life that
simultaneously embodies and subverts our traditional understandings of
power relations between man and nature, women and men, settlers and
Aboriginal peoples.

Historian Mary-Ellen Kelm demonstrates that rodeo has been an
important contact zone - a chaotic and unpredictable place of
encounter - that challenged expected social hierarchies. Rodeo
has brought people together across racial divides, creating
friendships, rivalries, and unexpected intimacies. It was a place where
competency was celebrated as much in the victories of cowgirls as
cowboys. At the rodeo, if nowhere else, Aboriginal riders became local
heroes, and rodeo queens spoke their minds.

A Wilder West complicates the idea of western Canada as a
"white man's country" and shows how rural rodeos have
carved out communities where different rules applied. Lavishly
illustrated, this creative history will change the way we think about
the West's most controversial sport.

Mary-Ellen Kelm is a Canada Research Chair in the Department of History
at Simon Fraser University. Her previous books include Colonizing
Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia. She is
an avid animal trainer, competing in agility and obedience with her
dog, Rusty. She lives in North Vancouver with her husband, Don, and
spends her summers outdoors, hiking and paddling in British Columbia.