Towards a Prairie Atonement Read online

  The first thing to sacrifice in coming together is our own agendas and designs, our knowing just what the world needs. I almost always stumble over my own purposes and preconceptions when I work with Indigenous people on a project. No matter how hard I try not to trip, I often do, and I look back later at the work and realize I might have committed that “greatest treason—to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” For a time I lose my courage. Afraid of being clumsy, of being someone who takes and uses without proper respect and with too much desire in my heart, I swear off all attempts.

  At the memorial someone said that Michele was never afraid of failing, and sometimes she did it spectacularly. We all laughed and knew it was true, part of what made her so easy to love. Returning home from the service, I knew it was fear of failure that had kept me from pursuing the friendship with Narcisse—fear of my own motives spoiling the effort.

  I decided I would try again. I would make mistakes—my desire to save native grassland and its creatures would get in the way and make it hard to listen—but I would try anyway, and in the trying maybe some small good thing would happen.

  God knows, the prairie world beyond the green shade of the longspur nest is waiting for atonement of one kind or another. The choices we make as the upright primates who put the “anthro” in the Anthropocene will determine whether we are here to be part of that coming together, but it will happen with or without us. Such thoughts are born of sitting in rooms. Out on the Sand Plains, with a nest to crouch beside, all theories and apprehensions fade as the genius of the place conjures up memories of being at home in the world. It happens whenever I come to this part of the prairie where the back and forth between upland and bottomland spreads fingers of grassland around bowls of forest—aspen bluff and speargrass above, sweeping coulees of bur oak and bluestem below—all of it woven together in contrapuntal melodies that carry notes from the continent’s boreal crown to the grassland at its heart.

  The angle of light and the signature of landform in a place may stir our deepest dreams of home, but for the descendants of settlers notions of belonging are tangled with family claims to the prairie. In the 1880s, letters describing the Qu’Appelle River country went east and drew my Scottish ancestors to homestead north of the valley. My mother, eighty-nine and the last surviving member of her generation, can’t recall what she had for lunch or who visited her yesterday, but she remembers the Métis families stopping to camp beneath the maples next to their yard where the Kaposvar Creek empties into the Qu’Appelle.

  At this latitude, changes in the weather generally come from the west, but changes caused by people have tended to come from the east. The marks of all that has transformed the prairie in the past two centuries are oldest here on the eastern rim, where grass and forest interdigitate. Ghosts of abandoned frontiers, they surround this island of grass with the scars of extraction, transportation, and displacement: the remains of a pemmican depot from the 1780s, a Hudson’s Bay Company fort that closed a century later, a Red River cart trail heading northwest, a First Nations reserve, an abandoned rail line, a potash mine, a Métis settlement, and farmyards displaying old plowshares and the names of early homesteaders.

  Beneath each of those wounds is a midden of stories bearing layers of loss and suffering that settlers too quickly lacquered over with tales of butter down the well and hogs in the horseradish. Colonialism, we have learned too late, is an utterly unreliable narrator.

  The work of decolonizing, of atonement, begins with the act of recognizing and honouring what was and is native but has been evicted from the land—native plants and animals but the original peoples, cultures, and languages too.

  In Kluane National Park or the Great Bear Rainforest, this kind of loss is harder to see. Degradation and suffering are there too, but the traces are disguised beneath the magnitude of nature and the fantasy of “the pristine.” We all need to protect and experience our remaining wild lands, today more than ever, but parks and reserves represent a small portion of our planet. Most of us live in landscapes that have been greatly altered by human agency—agricultural, industrial, or urban. Nature struggles to survive at the edges of a corn field or in a creek running through the city, but it is still there and just as worthy of our attention and defence.

  Good things happen when we go to such places. It is not hard to find a piece of land degraded but not yet annihilated by human activity. Walk through a place isolated or damaged by the extractive impulses of our species, and, if you are quiet enough, attentive enough, you will be able to read its narrative of loss. The gift of any place, in soil and leaf and limb, remains remote until you expose your soft human belly to its brokenness. You may worry that, if you let down your guard and acknowledge what is missing, the sadness will overtake you. And it may for a spell, but if you stay your thoughts will soon enough turn to the survivors. A kind of intimacy settles in, dissolving the sorrow in gratitude for what remains and hope for what could yet be restored, reconciled. Canada’s prairie landscapes—still rowdy with the old life, still sanctuaries of wildness, but clearly in decline and need of more compassion and attention—give themselves readily to such a practice.

  Pieces of grassland cut off from the main are suffering all over this continent, and there are people letting these places move them. Some live and work there in a tradition of stewardship that runs back to their great-grandparents; others come from away, take the risk of getting to know an ecology in crisis, and then see what can be done to help. If they get cranky when reflecting on what has happened in the passing of two centuries here, it is partly because they know that, like most who live on the prairie, they owe at least some of their privilege and comfort to sodbusting settlers and the agricultural economy they founded on stolen land.

  The triumph of Canada’s rapid settlement of the plains was that it created tens of thousands of freehold farmers by taking a million and a half square miles of land chartered to a corporate monopoly, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), and then distributing it to grateful, hard-working peasants in 160-acre parcels. It was a bold experiment in democratizing land ownership, an important egalitarian departure from the decaying feudal systems of the Old World, and it brought prosperity to the mosaic of displaced Europeans who largely formed prairie settler culture.

  The tragedy of that undertaking was in not respecting and including the Indigenous people and their legitimate and wise ways of sharing the prairie. That foundational exclusion hurt all of us, not only First Nations and Métis people, because it decoupled land-use decisions from established and emergent forms of land tenure that would have enabled us to get beyond the usual binary between private and public ownership. A third way, found in Indigenous perspectives on land and refined in Métis concepts of land governance, offered—and could still offer—the basis of a more sophisticated regulatory model that would respect and conserve long-term community interest in the well-being of the land.

  Private land ownership on the Great Plains applied technology to spawn miracles of agricultural production and private wealth since settlement, but the exertions of public interest in the land, as represented in government policy and Crown land regulation, have failed to protect the common wealth and health that we share in nature, with its abundance of clean air, water, and fertile soil. Both sides, private and public interest, are too vulnerable to the economics of endless growth and the demands of distant markets for cheap fuel and food. When the commonwealth is bartered away to drive up GDP in a nation where almost everyone—“rural” people included—is now living a de facto urban existence, the public interest represented in government is powerless to defend the community. Having assented to the article of faith that we must feed growing populations with fewer farmers producing higher yields, traditional politics has no answer to the question of how we produce food without ruining our land and water. All ideologies founder at the farm gate, and sooner or later the private interest in land becomes concentrated again in the cor
poration.

  We live in an era when the prairie is veering back into corporate hands. Oil, gas, and potash corporations are setting the agenda for provincial land-use policy. Investment companies, pension plans, and large farmer-investor hybrids are rushing to purchase what is becoming one of the scarcest commodities on the planet—arable land. Governments are selling Crown land, farmers wanting to retire are cashing out, and financial advisers are telling their clients that prairie farmland is an “inflation-protected asset that produces income.” Even what we call the “family farm” now often involves a million-dollar corporation that seeds and harvests tens of thousands of acres.

  Meanwhile, too many prairie people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are living with industrialized, degraded landscapes and undrinkable water. Surprisingly, many farm people don’t see it that way. Not long ago I had a phone call from a farmer who raises cattle and crops in the transitional zone between Aspen Parkland and Boreal Forest. We agreed that city people and our governments do almost nothing to compensate or encourage farmers or ranchers who conserve habitat on their land. Well-spoken and philosophical, he said that our industrialized agricultural practices are not sustainable and that many species are being hurt. He worries about the bees, both tame and wild, suffering from the neo-nicotinoid seed coating on the GMO canola that he plants. He spoke at some length about how commodity agriculture drives farmers to bulldoze and plow up habitat, yet before he was finished he told me he believed that on balance we have done a fair job of keeping natural landscapes on the prairie during the past century.

  Though I have heard this seesaw of logic many times before, it caught me off guard. A man of good heart, who lives on the land and cares for it while he grows food for the rest of us, chooses to celebrate the half-full part of a glass that in fact is less than one-fifth full. Is it that we can’t take a lot of reality? Or is it some pathology in our collective regard for history and civilization—the same one that has historians declaring that ancient Britain’s greatest achievement was clearing the wildwood to make room for the social advances that come with the raising of sheep and the growing of cereal crops?

  I paused and then muttered a half-hearted response, not wanting to be disagreeable at the end of a pleasant conversation. Here is what I didn’t say.

  If the glass were merely half empty, I would be happy to raise it in a toast, but you 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 down the throat of a beast whose appetite cannot be satisfied. Only 3.5 per cent of the native grassland in Canada’s Prairie Ecozone has any form of protection.2 Some endangered species are now at less than 10 per cent of their populations forty years ago. The little that remains, our fragments of old-growth prairie, are every bit as diverse and irreplaceable as Canada’s last refuges of old-growth forest, but they are under siege from forces ranging from privatization and cultivation to resource extraction and ranchette development. And the worst of it is that damned few people seem to notice.

  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. But it is not only wild creatures we are missing.

  The private interest that founded prairie settler life has been shanghaied and thrown aboard the train of corporatized and denatured agriculture. If the public interest constituted in our governments is powerless to stop it, then what will?

  There is that third kind of interest—the community—that for thousands of years helped to balance the well-being of the individual and the well-being of the land. Eventually, it evolved into the sharing of grass, what the Red River Métis called le privilège de couper le foin—literally “the right to cut the hay” or “the hay privilege.” The Métis, 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 economy.

  From the outset of the fur trade in the seventeenth century, the long-term interests of local communities all over the northern plains have been sold down the river to industries serving distant markets. That barter has done great damage to entire nations of people, and the same disregard for land and community continues today to send our young men and women into industries that have found new ways to mine the prairie and destroy our human connections to each other and the land. True community governance has been missing or severely weakened for some time now, though remnants of it did thrive among settlers too for a generation or so after treaties, residential schools, and homesteading forced the Indigenous versions underground.

  In hardship and calamity, a sense of the commonwealth of the community has revived for a spell in prairie places, only to recede when the promise of individual prosperity overwhelmed the pragmatism of shared interest. Although much diminished, that third element—moderating private interest out of concern for the long-term well-being of the land and human communities—can be a strong conserving influence because it is necessarily local and tied up with local values and economies. It arose when farmers first formed dairy and grain cooperatives to get fair prices for their produce, when they established their own telephone companies connecting farmstead to farmstead with copper wire along fencelines, and when the dust bowl of the 1930s stopped every farmer in his field with a reminder that nature is in charge.

  In the first drought cycle after a couple of decades of settlement and tillage, the prairie soil was travelling on the wind in dark blizzards, sandblasting settler shacks, and piling in drifts along fencelines clotted with tumbleweeds. By 1937, the federal government decided to intervene with some soil and water conservation measures under a new government agency called the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA). It would work with local communities and the prairie provinces to preserve grasslands, return cropped land to grass cover, conserve surface water and soil, and provide irrigation systems. And it would establish community pastures run by the federal Ministry of Agriculture for decades to come, providing local farm families with affordable grazing and prairie wildlife with a network of refuges where they would survive into the twenty-first century. In this way, the Canadian government unwittingly restored a faint shadow of the grassland dispensation that had existed since the retreat of the glaciers and that colonization had rapidly erased.

  The closer you look at the islands of native grassland ecology that community pastures protect, the more you will find human stories that have the power to renew our relationships to the prairie and help us come to understand community interest. Like the nest of a small bird tucked into a circle of grass, one of those stories is hidden away in a sunlit sandy plain seven thousand years old and enclosed by the Spy Hill–Ellice community pasture straddling the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border. With the guidance of an Elder who has not only the knowledge and right to share the story but also the borne-in-the-blood connection that will not let us close our ears, the pages that follow take another look at the forces that squandered the gifts of the prairie. Along the way, the narrative re-examines Métis history and land tenure through the lens of the Red River people who retreated to this grassland remnant long before it became a community pasture.

  No story can match a walk beneath skies ringing with longspur and pipit song, but the right story might remind us why such things still matter today and how protecting them can bring prairie people and all Canadians one step closer to atonement, one step closer to a restored covenant with the land and the peoples who have known it well and long.

  Thomas Berry, Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988).

  D. A. Gauthier and E. B. Wiken, “Monitoring the Conservation of Grassland Habitats, Prairie Ecozone, Canada,” Environ Monitoring Assessment 88, 1–3 (2003): 343–64.

  — Part 2 —


  On the Sand Plains

  “How do you talk about loss? There is pain in the story, so for a long time people didn’t talk about it. But now we do.”

  As his truck rumbles south on a gravel road, Norman Fleury gestures with a hand above the steering wheel. An open palm tilts towards miles of prairie, holding all that is in his mind: stories his grandmother told him, the language of his birth, and a desire to be fair and honest in explaining what happened on the plot of land just ahead of us.

  The Spy Hill–Ellice community pasture is approximately 160 square kilometres of Aspen Parkland prairie straddling the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border, near the town of St. Lazare and the juncture of the Qu’Appelle and Assiniboine rivers. The road we are on runs parallel to the border a kilometre inside Manitoba. This tract of publicly managed grassland, along with its sister the Ellice–Archie pasture (150 square kilometres) a short distance to the south, represents the last large expanse of upland native prairie in this corner of the northern Great Plains. There are rare birds here whose breeding population is so isolated their nearest counterparts are 200 kilometres or more south and west.

  Norman agreed to take me to the pasture on this morning in late May 2015. Branimir follows in his Subaru, likely still grumbling about the light or my peanut butter sandwich smelling up the cab. Hating peanut butter is a mild handicap for an outdoor photographer, but midday light is a deal breaker. We will have to see what the evening brings, he tells me, or camp overnight to shoot at dawn.