Whose mission accomplished? Alberta at the 2006 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

In the summer of 2006, Alberta became the first ever Canadian province to be featured at the Smithsonian Institution's Folklife Festival on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The Festival seeks to celebrate cultural diversity and promote awareness of cultural traditions, but in this case, these goals were overshadowed by the province's commercial goals. With rising gas prices and concerns about reliance on foreign oil, the timing was just right to introduce Alberta and its rich energy supply to Americans.

As a Canada-phile who has spent the better part of her academic career studying Canada, I was eager to examine the Alberta program more closely to see how an American institution conceives of a Canadian province. This article seeks to uncover the tensions at play in the representation of Alberta at the 2006 Folklife Festival by analyzing the central preoccupations of the two main institutions involved--the Smithsonian and the government of Alberta. A close analysis of the discourse surrounding this event--specifically, the collection of utterances made by these two institutions and their representatives--reveals that the central discursive preoccupation of the Alberta program was the promotion of the province's oil industry. Moreover, this goal appears to conflict with the anthropological goals of the Folklife Festival. My primary sources, in addition to the Alberta program itself, include the Smithsonian Institution's Festival website and its 2006 program book, as well as the government of Alberta's press releases before, during, and after the Festival, and its Final Mission Report, published at the conclusion of the Festival. Before examining the discourse, I provide some background on the Festival to establish a prediscursive frame for the 2006 Alberta program.

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival

The Festival began as the Festival of American Folklife in 1967. Thirty-one years later, the name was changed to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to reflect its scope as "an annual exhibition of living cultural heritage from across the United States and around the world." (1) Although its organization has changed over the years, its underlying philosophy has not. Richard Kurin, director of the Smithsonian's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which puts on the Festival, states, "The most distinctive feature of the Festival is the attempt to foreground the voices of tradition bearers as they demonstrate, discuss, and present their cultures. At the Festival, tradition bearers, scholars, and Smithsonian curators speak for themselves, with each other, and to the public." (2) The Festival is based on a "living history" model, with each featured nation, region, or program having its own outdoor museum space on the mall. Booths staffed by people from the participating regions are supplemented with stages for musical performances, a food tent, museum-quality signs and text panels, and a glossy program book.

According to folklorist Laurie Kay Summers, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival is informed by a philosophy that grew out of the New Deal's conceptions of folklife as a grassroots, bottom-up form of culture. (3) As conceived by founder Ralph Rinzler and folklorist Alan Lomax, the Festival is an attempt to support this form of culture in the face of "growing commercialism and cultural elitism." (4) The two immediate goals of the Festival are:

 
  [t]o honor the participants and the cultural groups they represent 
  through display of their traditional arts, skills, and knowledge-- 
  and thereby encourage their efforts, and to make a broader public 
  aware of the rich variety of cultural traditions, the value of 
  cultural diversity and its continuity, and the obstacles impinging 
  on traditional cultural practice. (5) 

At its birth in 1967, the festival focused on Texas; three years later it added a Native American program. Every state in the United States has been featured, including the District of Columbia. Since 1982, the Festival has included at least one international section featuring a nation, a culture, or a region. Over 80 nations, 100 American Indian groups, and 60 occupational groups have been feat tired in the Festival since its inception. (6)