by Merle Massie
The northern push of settlement left a lasting mark on the Saskatchewan landscape. As of the 2006 census, settlement in the north Prince Albert region—despite the inclusion of a large amount of uninhabited forest reserve within the census region—averaged over 2.4 people per square kilometre. Corollary rural municipalities in the prairie south, such as Swift Current, supported half that population base, while municipalities that have seen significant depopulation since the 1920s, such as Happyland, support one-tenth the number of people.
For Aboriginal inhabitants of the forest edge, general agricultural retreat and rural depopulation after the Second World War eased pressure on traditional forest resources. In 1947, the borders of Prince Albert National Park were changed. The section east of the third meridian, which effectively enclosed the Montreal Lake Reserve, was eliminated and reverted to Crown land. Aboriginal inhabitants at Montreal Lake and Little Red River could once again access the large area for fishing, hunting, and trapping purposes. In 1948, Little Red once more fought off a petition to have the agricultural reserve released and its inhabitants sent back north. The land was officially divided between the Lac La Ronge and Montreal Lake bands, facilitating band governance.3 Through treaty land entitlement settlements, Little Red has continued to grow.
Along the forest fringe, vestiges of the mixed, ecologically pluralistic lifestyle remained. Some subsistence mixed farms were targeted as “marginal” and purchased for conversion to provincial pasture during the 1960s. During the 1970s and 1980s, a renewed back-to-the-land movement brought a new wave of migrants to the region, looking to develop a “dream of people living in harmony with nature.”4 Forest edge farms, with timber for building and fuel, were once again popular. In the 1990s and after the turn of the twenty-first century, the cycle turned again. “Marginal” forest fringe farms were targeted by government researchers as expendable, their “best use” once again as forests to preserve and strengthen Canada’s carbon-trading footprint. Climate change scientists forecast, however, that the open plains will undergo increasingly severe swings between droughts and floods as the earth warms. Decreased agricultural potential on the prairie might mean another Great Trek into the forest to develop the podzolic soil and take advantage of the comparatively wetter and potentially warmer climate of northern Saskatchewan. Cultural explanations of the forest edge economy will continue to swing on a pendulum between marginal and poor to flourishing and attractive.
Interpretations of Saskatchewan’s northern history—and northern future—have reinforced a deep cultural contrast and divide between the boreal north and the prairie south. The north has been a place of resource exploitation, colonialism, and southern metropolitan control. Northern Saskatchewan is known for its “otherness,” as “another country altogether.” Although these interpretations bear validity and need to be folded into the Saskatchewan identity, they leave the provincial past deeply divided, as if there has been no point of contact or exchange. The north as the colonial fiefdom of the south has also consistently been a story of the recent past, a post–Second World War storyline that emphasizes overt public control, transportation innovation, and resource exploitation. Prior to that time, historians have asserted, the north was ignored.5
This book has shown that the north has consistently been an integral aspect of successful human adaptation in the region that became Saskatchewan. In fact, the biomes of prairie south and boreal north worked in concert to provide resources (whether natural or manipulated) for human adaptation, refuge, and resilience. Economic and cultural development has often used the tension and interplay of Saskatchewan’s two solitudes, where the attributes and resources of one offset and complement the deficiencies of the other. When historical interpretation rests solely on one region or the other, however, the connections and sense of interchange between the two are lost.
The cultural ramifications of forest edge settlement, particularly drought migrations from the 1920s to the end of the Great Depression, created and reinforced a Saskatchewan identity that was neither wholly prairie nor wholly northern. Communities along the forest edge became places that were defiantly not the prairie, though large-scale agricultural practices would transform the landscape. Resonances of the non-prairie identity can be found in Meadow Lake, Big River, Paddockwood, Choiceland, White Fox, Nipawin, and Hudson Bay, all places that share similar economies and histories built on a mix of farm and forest resources. A deep-time place history of the north Prince Albert region replaces the split narrative of Saskatchewan with an inclusive perspective. From traditional First Nations use of the forest edge landscape through to that of the Depression migrants, resilience and longevity could best be found when northern and southern landscapes, economies, and cultures were folded together.
What does this mean for Canadian historians? Is this book anything more than a mere peek at the pre–Second World War history of one particular place? I say yes. Edge theory asks where are the artificial, internal boundaries that Canadian historians have created? What implications have those regional boundaries created? Which assumptions do we Canadians hold on to most dearly when it comes to telling the Canadian story? Which traditional plots, characteristics, regional stereotypes, and storylines do we cleave to when we think about our nation? Is the divide between east and west, for example, a construction or a constant? Is a road really heading nowhere, or is it—from the lens of those at the end of that road—a gateway to the world? What would a history of Canada look like, let’s imagine, if it was told from the perspective of Churchill, Manitoba, or Thunder Bay, Ontario? Which Canadian places, events, or timelines considered foundational to the Canadian story would be tossed and lost in the stormy waters of Hudson Bay or Lake Superior? I could name hundreds of other points on the map, from Newfoundland to Nunavut to the Salish Sea, and ask what would Canada’s past look, sound, and taste like from those perspectives? It’s about viewpoint rather than weight in a mystical balance scale of importance. In the end, what matters is not that I have told some new stories about a place that you might never see. What matters is that I have now (I sincerely hope) upended some of your perspectives on Saskatchewan. Let this new view of Saskatchewan’s past provide a roadmap or blueprint for those of us looking to shake up the way in which we tell Canada’s story.
Notes
Introduction: Edge, Place, and History
1 See http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/learningresources/theme_modules/borealforest/index.html (accessed 20 March 2008).
2 McGowan, “Under the Raven’s Nest.” McGowan wrote another manuscript, entitled “The Key is in the Horse,” c. 2001–2002. Both manuscripts are in possession of author.
3 Friesen, “Defining the Prairies.”
4 For an overview of the inherent problems of creating a national narrative, see Granatstein, Who Killed Canadian History?; Owram, “Narrow Circles.” Recent essay collections that are regionally based and present some criticism on the concept include Wrobel and Steiner, eds., Many Wests; and Friesen, River Road.
5 Wishart, “Preliminary Thoughts on Region and Period.”
6 Stanley, “The Western Canadian Mystique,” 6–27.
7 Coates and Morrison, Forgotten North, 1. An important companion book is Abel and Coates, eds., Northern Visions. An excellent overview of recent writing on the Canadian north, including intriguing suggestions for further study which include a call for more investigation of the provincial norths and their “ties of corporations, governments, families, political parties and others between northern areas and southern regions,” is from Coates and Morrison, “The New North in Canadian History and Historiography.” Kerry Abel followed up her co-editing with the prize-winning Changing Places. See also Abel, “History and the Provincial Norths.” The best example from northern Manitoba is Frank Tough’s ‘As Their Natural Resources Fail’. For northern Alberta, see Wetherell and Kmet, Alberta’s North.
8 Work on the Peace River region of Alberta and British Col
umbia made the physical connection between the west and the Far North (north of the sixtieth parallel) through the Peace and Athabasca River systems and the opening of highways to Alaska, the North West Territories and the Yukon. See Bowes, ed., Peace River Chronicles; Leonard and Lemieux, Fostered Dream. Others have pushed the western Canadian boundary south with comparative work on the American Great Plains and Canadian Prairies. See Higham and Thacker, eds., One West, Two Myths and Higham and Thacker, eds., One West, Two Myths II. These were complemented by another important reader, Felske and Rasporich, eds., Challenging Frontiers.
9 Quiring, CCF Colonialism, x.
10 Ibid., xi; Bone, “Saskatchewan’s Forgotten North,” 13.
11 The classic interpretations of northern development remain Zaslow, Opening of the Canadian North; Northward Expansion of Canada.
12 Piper, Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada.
13 See Sandwell, “Rural Reconstruction”; see also Sandwell, Contesting Rural Space; Sandwell, “Notes toward a history of rural Canada.”
14 Ommer and Turner, “Informal Rural Economies in History,” footnote 9.
15 “Forest Fringe” is a term that is well-recognized within the Saskatchewan context.
16 Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology.
17 The use of the terms ecotone and edge effect within archaeology was criticized by Rhoades, “Archaeological Use and Abuse of Ecological Concepts and Studies.” His point was that the current landscape may not reflect past landscapes; also, borrowing from another discipline without also understanding the nuances and controversies within that discipline provides shaky ground. Rhoades’s criticisms convinced few.
18 Turner, Davidson-Hunt, and O’Flaherty, “Living on the Edge,” 439.
19 Ibid., 452. Two pivotal works are relevant here: White, The Middle Ground and Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Both introduce similar concepts of a “middle ground” or a “contact zone” where two distinct cultures meet, interact, exchange ideas, engage, and generally grapple with one another.
20 Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade, 46–48.
21 Ibid., 36.
22 Ray’s work is specifically cited in Turner, et al., “Living on the Edge.”
23 Turner et al., “Living on the Edge,” 441. It is important to define the concept of resilience, as it has a different, and almost completely opposite meaning within ecology. Resilience is a somewhat negative concept, used often in reference to plant or animal species that take over an area and come back again and again, despite natural or human attempts to control or reduce. Weeds would be an excellent example.
24 Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” This paper was first presented in 1893 and continues to draw both admiration and criticism. See also Cross, “Introduction,” The Frontier Thesis and the Canadas, 1.
25 For examples, see the work of Vanderhill, “Observations on the Pioneer Fringe in Western Canada”; Vanderhill, “The Passing of the Pioneer Fringe in Western Canada.” Vanderhill directly attributes Bowman with popularizing the term.
26 For a short, but detailed analysis of Bowman, his work, and his large sphere of influence, see Smith, “Political Geographers of the Past.”
27 Bowman, The Pioneer Fringe; Bowman, et al., Pioneer Settlement. Bowman wrote and published several smaller essays that explained aspects of the project. See Bowman, “Planning in Pioneer Settlement”; “The Scientific Study of Settlement”; and “The Pioneering Process.”
28 Fitzgerald, “Pioneer Settlement in Northern Saskatchewan,” 3–4.
29 Ibid., 3.
30 Ibid., 561.
31 Wood, Places of Last Resort, 15. Astonishingly, Wood’s book makes no reference to Fitzgerald’s seminal thesis.
32 Environment Canada, Lands Directorate, working paper No. 38. “The Agriculture-Forest Interface: An Overview of Land Use Change” by Michael Fox and Sandra Macenko, 1985. For an excellent overview of Clay Belt settlement that contrasts Ontario with Quebec, see McDermott, “Frontiers of Settlement in the Great Clay Belt.”
33 Atwood, Survival; Atwood, Strange Things.
34 Examples of this technique include Cronon, Changes in the Land; White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change; Binnema, Common and Contested Ground; and Abel, Changing Places. A spectacular addition to this list is William Turkel’s study of the Chilcotin region of British Columbia, The Archive of Place.
35 Dan Flores, “Place: An Argument for Bioregional History.”
36 Stunden Bower, Wet Prairie.
37 Flores, “Place.”
38 Massie, “Scribes of Stories, Tellers of Tales.”
39 Voisey, “Rural Local History and the Prairie West,” rpt. in Francis and Palmer, Prairie West, 497–510. For an example of a local history written along Voisey’s dictates, see his own Vulcan: The Making of a Prairie Community.
40 Parr, Gender of Breadwinners.
41 For a discussion of the views for and against local history as an acceptable venture for academics and others, see Kammen, ed., Pursuit of Local History; Kammen and Prendergast, eds., Encyclopaedia of Local History. For a passionate call for writing innovative local history, see Amato, Rethinking Home.
42 Baker, “So What’s the Importance of the Lethbridge Strike of 1906?”
43 Abel, Changing Places. Published by the same press and in the same year as Wood’s Places of Last Resort, Abel’s study region (the Iroquois-Porcupine Falls area) is part of the Ontario Clay Belt zone but Abel’s work takes a much broader perspective, folding the agricultural story with that of Aboriginal, mining, and lumber settlement.
44 Abel, Changing Places, preface, xxii–xxiii.
45 Flores, “Place,” 5.
46 See Cronon, “A Place for Stories.”
Chapter One: Ecotones and Ecology
1 McNeill and Winiwarter, eds., Soils and Societies, iv.
2 Canada Land Inventory, http://www.geostrategis.com/c_cli-prince-albert.htm. For example, Gerald Friesen characterized the parkland as the transition zone between prairie and boreal environments in his introduction to The Canadian Prairies, 3.
3 Coupland and Brayshaw, “The Fescue Grassland in Saskatchewan.”
4 Bird, Ecology of the Aspen Parkland, 3–4.
5 Meyer and Epp, “North-South Interaction.”
6 Ibid., 338. For a further investigation of the problems of using the term “ecotone,” see Rhoades, “Archaeological Use and Abuse of Ecological Concepts and Studies,” 608–14. The Boreal Shield and Taiga Shield ecozones are effectively incorporated as boreal.
7 Meyer, Beaudoin, and Amundsen, “Human ecology of the Canadian prairie ecozone.”
8 Strong and Hills, “Late-glacial and Holocene.”
9 For a map of Saskatchewan’s ecoregions, see Fung, ed., Atlas of Saskatchewan, 174–5.
10 Canada Land Inventory classification, http://www.geostrategis.com/c_cli-prince-albert.htm (accessed 15 January 2009).
11 The Atlas of Saskatchewan classifies the research region as “Boreal Transition” and is described as “characterized by a mix of forest and farmland, marking both the southern advance of the boreal forest and the northern limit of arable agriculture.” See Atlas of Saskatchewan, 162–3.
12 Hind, Narrative, 392.
13 Pyne, Awful Splendour, 37.
14 For an overview of the dynamics and historical context of prairie fires and the prairie/forest edge, see ibid., 38–40.
15 Campbell, et al., “Bison Extirpation,” 360–2. The existence and extent of the “parkland” region in prehistoric and early historic times is under research by archaeologist Alwynne Beaudoin in Edmonton using proxy pollen records. Early results indicate that the parkland did not exist in prehistoric times.
16 Campbell, “Bison Extirpation,” 361.
17 See Bird, Ecology of the Aspen Parkland, 3–4.
18 Pyne, Awful
Splendour, 20.
19 Johnson and Miyanishi, eds., Forest Fires, v–x.
20 Ibid., 3.
21 An excellent report, created by Jeffery Thorpe of the Plant Ecology Section of the Saskatchewan Research Council for the Prince Albert Model Forest Association, outlined the transitions that lead from one forest canopy type to another (the predominance of one kind of tree over another), the ages at which such transitions can occur, and alternatives and factors that encourage one transition path or another. Thorpe, “Models of Succession.”
22 Forest succession is drawn primarily from Thorpe, “Models of Succession.” See also Kirby, Growth and Yield of White Spruce-Aspen.
23 Thorpe, “Models of Succession.”
24 See Lewis and Ferguson, “Yards, Corridors, and Mosaics.”
25 Ibid., 68–9.
26 Ibid., 69–70.
27 Ibid., 70–72.
28 Meyer, Beaudoin, and Amundsen, “Human ecology of the Canadian prairie ecozone.”
29 For a well-written explanation of these and other typical Saskatchewan soils, see http://www.soilsofsask.ca, which is provided by the Soil Science department of the University of Saskatchewan.
30 For an overview of land and soil types relevant to this area, and a map, see Kabzems, Kosowan, and Harris, Mixedwood Section in an Ecological Perspective, 9–12.
31 Waters to the north of this research area flow north into the Churchill River system.
32 Richards, Saskatchewan.
33 See, for example, the various discussions on “north” as defined by NiCHE—The Network in Canadian History of the Environment, http://www.niche.ca.