TOWARDS A PRAIRIE ATONEMENT
By Trevor Herriot, U or Regina Press, $22.95.
One clear sign that things are changing out on the prairie is what is happening in my neighbourhood in the city. I live on a circa 1955 street on the east side of Saskatoon and a few years ago I never saw a Snowshoe Hare anywhere. Now my street is hopping with them. Year round. Two summers ago, on an evening walk, we encountered a badger. Huh! And, of course, there are deer and even moose sightings in our new developments. A cougar recently menaced the sensibilities of some people, fearing for their dogs and their own lives. Well folks, you reap what you sow.
Naturalist, writer, and broadcaster on CBC’s popular Birdline show, Trevor Herriot says, “We might be able to hide the truth from ourselves, but the animals know. These days cities on the Great Plains attract more birds, jackrabbits, and ground squirrels than the surrounding farmland. Poor as it is, the urban habitat is better.” Not only have we spread our cities out into the animals’ homes, but we’ve ploughed, drained, and run pipelines and oil wells into much of the rest of their diminished range. People complain about the squawking magpies in the city. Where else have they got to go?
Book Cover: TOWARDS A PRAIRIE ATONEMENT By Trevor Herriot, U or Regina Press
What really spurred Herriot’s new book, Towards a Prairie Atonement, was the announcement by the Harper government in the spring of 2012 that it, on behalf of the Canadian people, would be letting go of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Program’s (PFRA) land holdings and turning them over to private ownership. These shared lands, to Herriot’s and many other naturalists’ and environmentalists’ minds, were part of a last slender preserve of indigenous prairie and home to at risk and even endangered wildlife species. Here are some statistics from Herriot:
“[Y]ou and I share a province where 80 per cent of the natural cover on the prairie has been scraped away and more of it is disappearing every year … Only 3.5 per cent of the native grassland in Canada’s Prairie Ecozone has any form of protection. Some endangered species are now at less than 10 per cent of their populations forty years ago.” Herriot and his compatriots got angry and decided to fight for the preservation of these pastures. On the way to undertaking that mission, Herriot found another story, and hence the title of his book.
Through various connections, he found himself near the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border under the guidance of Norman Fleury, Metis elder, storyteller, and teacher. Fleury showed Herriot one of the community pastures he was keen to defend, and how lively remnants of a human community still existed there: ball diamond, picnic area, graveyard. Before the PFRA act was passed, a vibrant group of Metis people called this pasture their home, and had done so for many years. Political refugees from unrest at Red River and Batoche, they’d built the same sort of farms here that they’d had in those previous locations before the Canadian government had deemed them expendable, re-surveyed the land, and turned it over to its kind of private enterprise. In 1937 the Metis at Ste. Madeleine were told they had to go and in 1938 returned from annual working away to find their homes burned to the ground and their animals shot. This was government at work.
Herriot found himself in moral distress. In coming to the defence of public lands, he found that some of those lands had been established on the backs of a group of people who actually knew what they were doing, and loved and cared for the land as well as anyone Herriot could hope to have living there. In a lively bit of storytelling, he takes us back to the fur trade, the emergence of the Metis people, the new Canadian government’s focus on sovereignty and profit, with, it can be admitted at this remove, a distinctly racial bias, the setting up of independently owned farms — a wonderfully democratic idea — the hazards to the environment that private approach led to in the Dirty ‘30s, and the establishment of the PFRA pastures to help quell land erosion. Interspersed with these details are landmarks of Metis history, provided by Fleury and by Herriot’s research.
Herriot is unsparing in his criticism of government policy toward the land and its peoples: “Cheap food to fuel economic growth, a chance to improve value for investors, and managing Indigenous peoples — to this day these are the pillars of federal public policy in Canada’s hinterlands.” In opposition to such policy, he says, “The Metis, I believe, were helping to bring a balance to land-use practices, but their experiment was cut down before it had a chance to mature further and inform western Canada’s agricultural community.” Their practice was a combination of private and public use, in which the private owner had first option on the pasture adjacent to his land, but if that option was not exercised, others could use it. This communal system flew in the face of the free enterprise-minded government.
Late in the book Herriot declares, “You can parcel out blame any way you like,” but, in his view, corporate greed and collusion among governments in London, Ottawa, and Washington drove the pemmican and buffalo robe market that killed off the buffalo and ended a way of life for several groups of people. “That we did not take that fork in the road and instead dispossessed the ancient prairie of its native peoples, buffalo, and grass stands as one of the great tragedies of the modern era.”
“If Canada had found a way to respect and retain Metis title to portions of the prairie, then there would be more Indigenous families tending our native rangelands in their own ways, operating alongside white settlers. Together, applying a diverse set of land practices and models of tenure, might they have found a way to hold back the tide of cultivation, development, and resource extraction that continues to lap at the edges of the remaining archipelagos of grassland on the northern Great Plains?”
And while you’re contemplating these possibilities, take a look at Manny’s Memories, a picture book by Ken Caron and his daughter Angela Caron, with illustrations by Donna Lee Dumont. Here’s a look at life in a healthy Metis community in the 1940s, this one Round Prairie just south of Saskatoon — now with a branch of the Saskatoon Public Library named after it. The colourful book provides pictures of a rich cultural heritage, complete with Michif translations by Norman Fleury. Part of the atonement Herriot speaks of is simply paying attention.