In 1994, the Minister of Canadian Heritage approved a set of new policies entitled Guiding Principles and Operational Policies for various programmes administered by Parks Canada. One of the most significant new policy initiatives contained in this document deals with ensuring the commemorative integrity of designated national historic sites.
Commemorative integrity is a term used to describe the health or wholeness of a national historic site. As defined in the National Historic Sites Policy (of Canada), a state of commemorative integrity can be said to exist:
The origins of the concept are potentially interesting to anyone concerned with monitoring, if for no other reason than the fact that the concept was developed in response to the need for a systematic framework to monitor (and report on) the state of the national historic sites for which Parks Canada is responsible. But early on it was discovered that commemorative integrity provided far more than a framework for monitoring. It also provided:
What had begun as a tool to deal with monitoring developed into a practical framework to guide the management of historic places. In some respects this can be seen as a confirmation of the aphorism that "what gets measured, gets done," or perhaps more accurately, "what does not get measured, does not get managed."
Monitoring has long been a feature of cultural resource management. So when work began in 1989 on Parks Canada's first State of the Parks Report, those charged with preparing the historic sites' component of the report were reasonably optimistic. (The Assistant Deputy Minister had directed that the report deal with national historic sites as well as with national parks).
State of the Parks Reporting was pioneered in the United States (the first report on the State of the U.S.'s national parks was issued in 1980). Part of a larger body of international literature on environmental reporting, State of ... Reports, including various State of the World reports, became very popular in the 1980's. Canada produced its first State of the Environment Report in 1986, and first State of the Parks Report in 1990.
Faced with the challenge of reporting on the state of the national historic sites administered by Parks Canada (at that time numbering about 110, or approximately 1/7 of the total number of national historic sites in Canada), it quickly became apparent that we could only report on those things for which we had information, and that much of that information, needless to say, would be drawn from existing monitoring systems.
Not surprisingly, it was quickly confirmed that we were in a relatively good position to report on the physical condition of various types of cultural resources (e.g., buildings and works, in situ archaeological remains, artifacts, etc.); facilities (e.g., exhibits;, the state of various processes (for example, which historic sites had a management plan). But a number of major gaps in monitoring soon became apparent, the most important of which was that we had a lot of information on the parts but not on the whole. In other words, various components were monitored, but not the overall site. And it quickly became obvious that one could not simply aggregate the parts and equate the resulting sum with the state of the site (the whole). Nor could it be argued that what got monitored was chosen as a surrogate for something larger, as is often the case in environmental monitoring, when an indicator species may serve as an "indicator" of the state of an ecosystem. This was not because cultural resource managers were less scientific or systematic than their natural resource management counterparts; rather, it resulted from the two systems not being comparable at this level of monitoring.
When one considers that the legislation governing national historic sites in Canada deals first and foremost with the historic place, not the parts thereof, our inability to address effectively the state of the place was a major deficiency. Another deficiency was that we did not have an adequate grasp of what constituted historic value, which is indispensable to meaningful monitoring. To use a phrase that has become indelibly associated with ICOMOS President Herb Stovel, we had difficulty answering the question "where does value lie?", not because there were no values, or because various disciplines and individuals did not have many views on what those values were, but because there was no framework within which toidentify and manage multiple values. And lastly (but certainly not finally), we did not really know if we were effectively communicating national historic significance. Indeed, some "visitor activities specialists" suggested that this was not very important.
Notwithstanding the above, monitoring deficiencies should not be overstated. Over the years a number of good techniques had been developed for monitoring the physical condition of cultural resources, including a monitoring system based on "risk to resource." (Significantly, this evaluation system was developed after the 1990 SOP Report, when it became apparent that the system use in 1990 contained criteria such as "health and safety", which are not necessarily sensitive to heritage). A major oversight was that certain systems did not always take the associative or symbolic qualities of cultural resources into account. We all can cite examples where "engineering" or "physical" solutions failed to take into account values that would now be "protected" under the rubric of commemorative integrity. A good example of how commemorative integrity works is provided by the recent case of the St. Andrew Blockhouse, in New Brunswick, which was badly damaged by fire in 1993. Before commemorative integrity, the blockhouse would probably have been dismantled as a prelude to "restoration". In this case it was recognized that any action that further diminished the integrity of the sole surviving example of a War of 1812 blockhouse in Canada would compromise its commemorative integrity because it would no longer be a War of 1812 structure.
Conservation disciplines (such as archaeology, artifact and buildings conservation), which have traditionally self-defined as resource management activities, have developed resource-monitoring systems that can be expanded and adapted to enable us to monitor commemorative integrity. More work is required on the interpretation side, which has tended to focus on measuring visitor satisfaction and facility use rather than on the effectiveness of communicating national significance.
All specialist disciplines, including research and planning, as well as conservation and interpretation, tend to view things through a functional prism that puts the function first and the site second not necessarily the proper order or the most relevant perspective when one is interested in the state of a national historic site.
Commemorative integrity provides a different perspective by identifying what should be monitored and why, and by relating the what and why to the overall site.
The 1995 publication of the second State of the Parks Report prepared by Parks Canada provides a continuing indication of the challenges to be met if we are to report accurately and credibly on the state of national historic sites. Many of the deficiencies (1) of the first report were contained in the second, thus reinforcing the need to move ahead. But a lot more progress has been made than that report indicates.
Over the last 12 months the department has embraced the concept of commemorative integrity, not only as a policy objective, but as a fundamental "accountability" under the Parks Canada Business Plan. National historic sites across the country are currently involved in preparing Commemorative Integrity Statements (not, it should be emphasized, having statements prepared for them). These statements will serve as the benchmarks against which organizational objectives, performance and accountability will be measured and reported upon, and for identifying and allocating funding. Guidelines have been developed to assist those involved in preparing the statements, which, in addition to focussing on the three elements of commemorative integrity, provide guidance on drafting statements of commemorative intent, (reasons for national significance) for the site, on describing historic values (associative as well as physical) and on devising an accountability framework based on the Parks Canada Cultural Resource Management Policy.
Notwithstanding some initial scepticism about the concept, field units that have been involved in developing commemorative integrity statements have reported considerable enthusiasm. I think there are several reasons for this.
The concept of commemorative integrity was developed to meet a real problem that did not become apparent until we were forced to report on the state of national historic sites. There can be few better examples of the benefits of monitoring and of making the commitment to report the results of monitoring than the development of a new management framework for some of the nation's most significant heritage properties.
Gordon Bennett , Chief, Policy and Strategic Planning, National Historic Sites, Canadian Heritage.
1. Several reasons can be cited for this: (1) commemorative integrity is a relatively new concept; (2) effective implementation across an organization as large and complex as the Parks Canada component of the Department of Canadian Heritage takes time; and (3) the recent report understates the progress made.