Imagining the Canadian Agrarian Landscape: Prairie Settler Life Writing as Colonial Discourse

This essay discusses the power of settler life writing to replace Indigenous conceptions of the prairies with colonial visions in southern Alberta. Pioneer memoirs promote myths of the prairie as a fertile utopian environment or a hostile frontier. Both myths are founded on the georgic mode, which Virgil established circa 34 BCE and which emerges in English literature that emphasizes land and labour. By accentuating their social status and the labour they have performed to improve their ranches and farms, pioneer life writers support their claims of entitlement to colonize land.