Perspectives of Saskatchewan (review)

If Perspectives of Saskatchewan is a vaguely non-descriptive title, it may be because the contents range across a host of disciplines from political studies and history to literature and the plastic arts, from geography, sociology, and economics, to law and religion. This collection of eighteen essays by twenty-two authors avoids any single focus and adds weight to the already relatively weighty bookshelf devoted to Saskatchewan. Most of the essays are nuanced and well documented, although Eli Bornstein's review of abstract art on the prairies (he casts his net beyond Saskatchewan with references to Russia, Europe, and the United States) refers to his own work in six of a meagre eight endnotes. The book was apparently intended to appear nearer to Saskatchewan's centenary; one of the essays is dated 2004. For a province with the smallest population outside the Atlantic region, it has received a disproportionate share of academic attention including, we learn here, more books written about the history of the University of Saskatchewan than of any other Canadian university. Nevertheless, this tome is published in neighbouring Manitoba rather than at Saskatchewan's sole university press at the Canadian Plains Research Centre in Regina.

The rise, demise, and resurgence of Saskatchewan over the past century – it was the third most populous province as late as midcentury – speaks to both discontinuity and persistence, to cycles of despair and achievement. James Pitsula notes a 1920s boast of Saskatchewan leading Canada in per capita wealth. Yet it is the only province to have exceeded the milestone of a million in population and then to have fallen back below that mark. And it has done so twice! Agricultural economists Jack Stabler and Rose Olfert provide a panoramic 100-year view of the rural economy's evolution, drawing on the works of, among others, Vernon Fowke and George Britnell of the Saskatchewan School of political economy. Wheat, once 'king,' was devastated by drought and depression, its place taken by potash, uranium, and heavy oil as the staples driving the economy. Where grain elevators once dotted the flat landscape, research centres have sprouted; where life was paradigmatically rural, it is now largely urban. Where Aboriginals were once ignored and concentrated on northern reserves, many now dwell, labour, and struggle in the cities and have contributed to reshaping public policy and the legal system.

The book, which could have benefited from an index and a sharper division into discrete sections, chronicles such political and demographic transformations. Chapters dealing broadly with political history are followed by chapters on economic and social issues, including labour, higher education, and the harder sciences. Considerations of literature, women's political participation, and the church follow surveys of the visual arts, and the book contains thirteen photographs of paintings, sculptures, other constructions, and a Sioux parfleche. Poet Mark Abley's deft concluding chapter addresses 'Saskatchewan's Diaspora' – people having been the province's major export crop – and explores how the experience of having lived in the province has influenced those who have left it for greener pastures.

Virtually every chapter points to the ruptures that have characterized Saskatchewan's history. Bill Waiser, for example, reviews the province's original white, Protestant, and Anglo-Canadian design and its redefinition as a multicultural mosaic. Aboriginal references appear in most chapters but the essay devoted to them, by Judge Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, is disappointing in its overly narrow focus on one of the province's seventy-four First Nations. The chapters on medicare and the co-operative principle offer such innovations and ideas identified with Saskatchewan their due, although Brett Fairbairn provocatively sets out to debunk the myth that Saskatchewanians (referred to as 'Saskatchewan people' by all the authors) are especially cooperative. He argues that the province's co-operative tradition owes more to pragmatism and trial and error than idealism and conscious design. Beth Bilson's synopsis of provincial labour history, however, reminds us that the CCF government imported eastern intellectuals and lawyers in the 1940s to write its showpiece collective-bargaining...