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Reviewed by:
  • Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada ed. by Adele Perry, Esylit W. Jones, and Leah Morton
  • Molly P. Rozum
Adele Perry, Esylit W. Jones, and Leah Morton, eds., Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press 2013)

Scholars who study western Canada have long used “place” as a primary category of analysis, although without a strict definition of boundaries (should British Columbia be included?) or clear sense of a coherent West beyond the imagined. The “replace” in this collection’s title serves to signal the changeability of regional definitions and senses of place over time and according to ethnic, religious, racial, political, and gender perspectives. This collection joins an informal series of similar interdisciplinary volumes issued periodically from 1969 to the present connected to conferences aimed at broadcasting and inspiring work on the Canadian West. The authors of the sixteen articles included first presented at a joint meeting of the Western Canadian Studies and St. John’s College (University of Manitoba) Prairies Conferences. A valuable contribution of the editorial introduction is a mini-history of these conferences and their ensuing publications. Four sections awkwardly organize topics [End Page 295] around agriculture, migration, ideas, and politics. The Canadian National Film Board, Ukrainian and French literature, Indigenous agriculture, prairie town architecture, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Heritage Centre, Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, and Prairie political codes suggest the collection’s topical breadth.

Finding place on the prairies of Canada has frequently meant rooting studies in the settler colonial agricultural transformation of the grasslands. Several articles engage with this classic topic in new ways. Sarah Carter explores Indigenous agriculture and land ownership, from the decade before Confederation through the early 20th century. Dominion of Canada founders welcomed the evidence of “many generations-old Aboriginal agricultural sites” (16) reported by explorers, such as H.Y. Hind in 1857, because it helped make the case for a settler colonialism that could hold the western territories for Canada. The settler colonial project, however, soon required a shift from acknowledging Indigenous agriculture to stressing an economy of hunting. Nevertheless, Carter found numerous records of Indigenous land ownership based on agricultural production and ongoing individual Indigenous requests for land and homesteading rights off reserves. The legacy of the attempted erasure of Indigenous agriculture from the northern grasslands can be seen 50 years later in the rise and fall from 1975 to 1993 of the Manitoba Indian Agricultural Program (miap), described by Bret Nickels. An early 1970s inventory found only 52 “self-supporting” Indigenous farmers, using “little modern equipment,” earning less than 25 per cent of the average Manitoba farmer. (60) The miap increased the number of Indigenous farmers and their access to credit, until funding waned. Emma Laroque contributes a thoughtful piece aimed to counter the myth of the landless Métis. She argues Métis have always embraced the grasslands as homelands without necessary regard to property ownership. These articles emphasize the persistence of Indigenous culture, including agriculture and wider perceptions of space, despite colonial processes designed to erase their presence.

Several articles in the collection are more conversant with rural and urban spaces rather than regional places. Lisa Chilton illuminates the coercive tactics of Canadian immigration officials often assigned to railways to oversee new immigrants to their final rural destinations. Urban employers resented programs designed to promote agricultural labour immigration and newly arrived immigrants, regardless of why they had been recruited, sometimes desired to find work in urban ethnic communities. Pernille Jakobsen contributes an essay on matrimonial property rights that highlights the contributions of urban and rural, conservative, middle-class Alberta women to the Canadian women’s movement of the 1970s. Using oral histories and articles in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Heather Stanley analyzes baby-boom era heterosexuality through the intersection of women, rural medicine, and farm life. Joyce M. Chadya examines the 1990s Zimbabwean diaspora to urban Canada, with a focus on Winnipeg, in the context of changing funeral customs. These articles suggest an interesting avenue of further study where insight may be found at the intersection of rural and urban networks and regional space.

Distinctly an advantage of conference collections, they frequently include thought...

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