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  • Forest Prairie Edge: Place History in Saskatchewan by Merle Massie
  • Shannon Stunden Bower
Forest Prairie Edge: Place History in Saskatchewan. By Merle Massie. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2014. ix + 329 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, index. us$31.95, c$27.95 paper.

Merle Massie’s Forest Prairie Edge: Place History in Saskatchewan examines the landscapes and cultures that have existed within the transitional area between the southerly Canadian prairies and the more northerly boreal forest. Primarily by comparing and contrasting how different groups exploited the area’s environment from precontact to the end of the Great Depression, Massie documents human and environmental adaptations in a landscape that has remained peripheral to the dominant narratives in prairie historiography.

These dominant narratives, Massie maintains, have been oriented to the story of King Wheat as it played out in the southerly prairies. Looking further north means turning attention to other staples such as lumber and the industry it spawned, which Massie makes clear was fundamental to the historical trajectory of Saskatchewan’s forest prairie edge. It also means focusing on the practices of mixed farming. The strategy of putting together a living by drawing on a diversity of economic and subsistence activities not only allowed practitioners to achieve greater resilience in the face of inevitable setbacks but also offered a model for agricultural success that differed from that prevailing in places more reliant on cash crops.

In analyzing the history of newcomers to the forest prairie edge, Massie emphasizes the “pull” factors that drew people to the region over the “push” factors that prompted them to leave their former locations. Even as the dust bowl of the 1930s began to drive would- be wheat farmers away from the prairies, the forest prairie edge remained, in all but the worst years of the 1930s, a landscape of possibility. Massie also explores how the forest prairie edge attracted people looking not for a fresh start but for a period of respite, with tourism promoters striving to capitalize on the environmental contrast between the edge landscape and the prairie further south.

As this book examines an area that straddles the Canadian prairies and the boreal forest, so it speaks to the divide between academic and popular history. Authored by a historian both profoundly rooted in place and committed to popular history, the work suggests challenging questions for historians who may be oriented to disciplinary debates or theoretical perspectives more than local significance.

Case in point: Massie explains that while her academic contacts worried that her geographical “research area was far too small,” people living in the area felt it was “far too large.” While it might be tempting to brush aside the discrepancy by asserting that it reflects the difference between detached professional analyst and invested community member, Massie’s success in engaging head- on with academic debates while operating at a scale closer to that desired by area residents illustrates the possibilities inherent in a practice Massie calls “edge theory”: deliberately staking out what may seem a marginal position (whether from a geographical or a disciplinary perspective) and then fully exploring the perspective it affords.

Forest Prairie Edge offers a compelling environmental history of a distinctive geographical area, a perspective on the prairie past that expands the standard regional narrative, and an illustration of how to do history rooted in a local landscape and community.

Shannon Stunden Bower
Parkland Institute
University of Alberta
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