Let's Find Out

Let's Find Out treats Edmonton's history as a stack of open questions, sent in by residents and answered on air after a trip through the records. It is published by Taproot Edmonton. The standard introduction places the city on Treaty 6 territory and within the Métis homeland before any research begins. From there the show follows the evidence, and the evidence often leads well past city limits. A mini-series on Albertan environmental groups and journalists of the 1970s moves between Edmonton and the mountains. In Banff it finds the Bow Valley Naturalist Society, founded in 1967 by locals interested in natural history and in protecting Rocky Mountain wildlife and natural areas. That story grew out of a scholarship to work through a Banff museum's archive of photographs, letters and books, with one question in mind: why did the group value media coverage so highly? Not every aside is so earnest. The same conversation stops to sort out naturalists from naturists. The series ended with a live show about the Whale Society of Edmonton, recorded at the City of Edmonton Archives with city archivists in the room. It covers Canada's support for a successful vote to stop factory ships from hunting whales, with minke whales still open to hunting. It also has a fine piece of legwork. A former member, an undergraduate when he joined and now about 70, wanted a neutral meeting place to share his documents, so the conversation happened in a diner parking lot. Asked whether the group ever considered the direct action Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd was using in the late 1970s, he said that, as far as he could remember, it had not. One guest found that unsurprising, given the society's academic ties to the University of Alberta. Mountain parks keep coming back. One episode follows a part-time Herald writer whose pieces covered the Spiral Tunnels, a one-room school and getting a mountain hotel ready for summer guests, plus a 1965 article on park rules that tightly restricted home ownership. Another plays footage shot in 1919 at the Dominion government's buffalo park at Wainwright, with wardens tossing hay from a wagon and 6,000 bison in a park with a carrying capacity of 5,000. The talk around all this is relaxed, and cold opens drift into chasing an aurora east of the city or hunting down a song heard on a CBC music stream. The feed also carries two episodes of Clock In, an Ecamp podcast hosted by Jay Gilday that the Let's Find Out host helped produce, in which people talk with their parents about work; part of one is taped on a picket line. Closings credit Doug Hoyer for the original music, usually with a new superlative, and sign off by asking for more questions. For a first listen, the Whale Society episode brings the energy of a live room, while the national-park episode shows the archival side at its most vivid.