Persistence of Place

Faro is a small town in the southwestern nook of Yukon. I have never been there, and until recently I did not know it existed. I suspect in both cases, I am firmly within the majority. Faro's story, however, is only too well known. I implore you to clear 10 minutes of your time to hear it:



As we learn in the film, history has not been kind to Faro. The mine and those who worked for it are like ghosts whose absence and loss are made only too apparent by the empty homes that Murray Hampton shows prospective buyers. Despite Mr. Hampton's poignant comments about the pain and suffering the mine closure engendered, the film does not linger very long on it nor on the fate of the mine's workers and families. What happened to those people? Where did they go? How did they cope? What culpability and responsibility does the Cyprus Anvil Mining Corporation hold beyond the generic explanation of "globalization"?

Instead, the film is more interested in the new story that Faro boosters are telling about themselves and which we see vividly at the 2004 Yukon Home Show. This new story is about the "persistence of place" and it is a narrative focused exclusively on those who stayed and those that have arrived since the closure. It is a rather hopeful narrative, which, in the context of the present, is certainly comforting. And the film captures the hopes and dreams of people like Murray Hampton by showing us happy children, houses being filled, folks giving storefronts a makeover, and even a municipal golf course (of a sort).

Storytelling is no mere epiphenomenon for Faro's boosters, a cultural byproduct of other forms of structural change. As we see in the film, and indeed through the film itself, storytelling and narrative are at the forefront of efforts to make such changes possible. When the mines closed and so many went away, Faro's landscape of abandonment must have been a cruel mocking of the words that used to be blazoned on the town's signage:



In their efforts to save Faro's place on the map, boosters have undertaken great efforts to change how the landscape of abandonment is to be seen and known. In this new form, the empty houses and the surrounding wilderness are constitutive of a landscape of opportunity ("only $60,000") and a landscape of renewal (young children and a fresh coat of paint). Faro is, Murray Hampton tells us, "a modern suburb type of installation but right in the wilderness". It is certainly not what it was, as another booster explains: "We're not a mining community anymore. We are just a really nice place to live." Both of these remarks are underlined at the town's website, in the photograph and map of Faro provided there:





Words, photographs, films, websites, and maps are all being put into the service of a new narrative, one that, for the moment, seems to be allowing Faro to maintain itself as a place. Yet I wonder what role(s) public history might play in all this. For while the persistence of place would seem to frame the past as little more than a "problem" to be solved or "challenge" to overcome, it is, like Murray Hampton, too stubborn to go away. As we see in the film, history is inscribed in the landscape and local civic culture, and it has taken residence in both private and public memory. What is not clear, though, is if history might also be part of Faro's salvation and not merely a record of its destruction. A lot, I would suggest, will depend on what kinds of stories and narratives the people of Faro choose to tell about themselves and which others, from away, tell about Faro.