Canada’s national parks invite walking across trails and shorelines, but also across histories, relationships, and ideas. On Shared Ground: A Walk Through Canada’s National Parks brings together books that approach these landscapes not simply as beautiful places to visit, but as spaces shaped by human decisions, ecological change, and long-standing relationships to land. Taken together, these works encourage readers to take a closer look at what national parks are, how they came to be, and what they continue to mean.
Making Parks, Making Wilderness
Discover how Canada’s national parks were created and how particular ideas of ‘wilderness’ took hold. Books such as Climber’s Paradise, Manufacturing National Park Nature, and Culturing Wilderness in Jasper National Park show how tourism, recreation, and government policy shaped iconic parks like Banff and Jasper. They frame parks as planned and managed landscapes, places carefully produced to appear natural and timeless. Natural Selections, traces the development of national parks in Atlantic Canada, while A Century of Parks Canada, 1911–2011 situates today’s parks within a longer institutional history. Together, they invite readers to consider how protection, access, and use have been defined—and redefined—over time.
Indigenous Lands, Living Histories
Books such as Spirits of the Rockies, Ukkusiksalik: The People’s Story, and Remembering Our Relations foreground Indigenous voices and enduring relationships to land. Other titles, including Ndè sìì wet’aɂà and All That We Say Is Ours, emphasize that land is inseparable from culture, community, and governance. These works challenge the notion that parks represent a beginning, instead revealing deeper histories of care, presence, and belonging.
Wildlife, Ecology, and Change
The exhibit also highlights parks as living ecosystems with long-term studies like The Wolves of Algonquin Park and The Buffalo Wolf. Books like Rewilding and The Magnificent Nahanni frame conservation as an ongoing practice rather than a finished project.
Story, Memory, and Creative Response
Alongside history and science, the exhibit features creative and personal engagements with park landscapes. Poetry collections like North of Summer and Open Wide a Wilderness, memoirs such as The Mountain Story, and visual histories including Mountain Voices offer ways of knowing place through experience, emotion, and imagination.
Walking on Shared Ground
On Shared Ground presents Canada’s national parks as spaces of coexistence where species, cultures, beauty, conflict, contestation, change, and care intersect. It invites readers to move thoughtfully through these landscapes, considering whose stories are visible, how places have been shaped over time, and what it means to engage with them attentively and responsibly. Find all the books in this exhibit here.
