Frontier Town

Administering a vast export agriculture territory and a great dam-studded hydro energy production territory, as well as a colonial Canadian gateway outpost to aboriginal land and communities, Winnipeg, Manitoba is a frontier town.

Instead of wallowing and pickling in a clueless, pathetic, assimilationist, LA commercial culture-envious, hard-bitten, hard-living 18-year-old's/Chamber of Commerce "culture" and "aesthetic," Winnipeg's denizens need to recognize and valorize the interesting, unique things and people they've got in their natural history, their history, their politics, their unique populace mix, and their socioeconomic location.

They need to wrap their utilitarian reflexes around a pillar of romanticism or two: Winnipeggers need to play up confluence-of-cultures frontier romanticism in their cultural life.

St. Boniface's Fort Gibraltar is a babystep disney version of what I'm talking about. I mean valorizing the aboriginal and metis and specific immigrant cultures in institutionalized public life, and incorporating a consciousness of Winnipeg as a frontier town now as well as in the past. I mean reinterpreting, redeploying and diffusing the heroic, grand or humane elements from the Fort Gilbraltar schtick.

The town's aesthetics need to reflect such a frontier romanticism, as well as play up the beauties of the unique environment. People need to collectively situate themselves, to be here now, and to remind themselves what's cool (unique) about it.