Authorized Heritage, paperback ed. Available 14 April 2021.
In Authorized Heritage, Robert Coutts, the author, a public historian examines heritage sites across the prairies to analyse the history of commemoration at heritage sites across western Canada. Using extensive research from predominantly government records, it argues that heritage narratives are almost always based on national messages that commonly reflect colonial perceptions of the past. Yet many of the places that commemorate Indigenous, fur trade, and settler histories are contested spaces, places such as Batoche, Seven Oaks, and Upper Fort Garry being the most obvious.