This dissertation research explores the complex and often contradictory relationships between representation, community, and identity that are negotiated through the production, circulation and consumption of cultural heritage within the Town of Stony Plain, Alberta. The research is grounded within poststructural and sociological theory and relies upon discourse analysis, representational literacy, and the deconstruction of community. This dissertation is divided into three essays that complicate how Stony Plain is constructed and represented through heritage tourism. Through deconstruction, the terms and texts of community are interrogated to expose what the limits of community are, and how the limits of community are regulated and naturalized through the use of dominant/mythic language. Discourse analysis is used to examine the links between community/economic development, citizenship training and violence by disrupting the assumed naturalness associated to popular conceptions of community; and, by exposing how community as public concern, self-fulfillment within community as private concern, and the collation of public and private concern into way of life, are often the result of detailed, specific, strategic, and ethically oriented public (and private) interventions. The dissertation concludes with a pedagogic work that encourages readers to think about the context of representations, the social knowledge that heritage representations portray, and the social implications of such representations by complicating multicultural themed mural representations of First Nations people and culture.