Place and Replace: Essays on Western Canada by Adele Perry, Esyllt W. Jones, and Leah Morton, eds. (review)

Place and Replace is a collection of selected papers from the second in the series of revived Western Canadian Studies conferences convened in Winnipeg in 2010. The first of the current wcs meetings, organized by Sarah Carter and Peter Fortna of the University of Alberta and Alvin Finkel of Athabasca University in 2008, generated the book The West and Beyond: New Perspectives on an Imagined Region (Athabasca University Press, 2010). In their introduction to Place and Replace, editors Adele Perry, Esyllt Jones, and Leah Morton explain that the new volume represents an effort to blend the historical emphasis of the wcs conference with the literary focus of the St John’s College Prairies Conference. Unlike The West and Beyond, this book focuses on the prairies and includes little British Columbia content. The result is a creditable interdisciplinary collection of essays on Canadian prairie history, about half of which are historical, the others generally falling under such rubrics as sociology, transnational, and literary studies.

The content of the volume is well summarized in the editors’ introduction, which refers to the “centrality of Indigenous peoples, colonization, and resistance; migration, race, ethnicity, and nation; literary and other representations; politics, both formal and informal; and the built and natural environment and interactions between them” (9). The book begins strongly with Sarah Carter’s essay on the replacement and erasure of First Nations farming traditions on the prairies. Returning to a theme pursued in her book Lost Harvests (McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990) dealing with First Nations agriculture in the period of National Policy settlement, Carter documents the systematic efforts of federal officials in the Department of Indian Affairs to thwart the aspirations of First Nations farmers to homestead and set up their own farms. This race-based policy had several major consequences: it deprived First Nations farmers of a means of livelihood, confined them to the constrained agricultural circumstances of their reserves, and generated opportunities for Euro-Canadian farmers to benefit from their deprivation. Bret Nickels’s essay on the Manitoba Indian Agricultural Program (1975-93) offers a very interesting comparison to Carter’s article in its documentation of a government program to assist First Nations farmers that had some success in more recent times. However, he observes that First Nations agriculture has since suffered with the end of the program.

The theme of dispossession continues in Pernille Jacobsen’s article on the Murdoch case of 1973, wherein the Supreme Court of Canada denied abused spouse Irene Murdoch’s claim to any portion of the ranch she had laboured for twenty-five years to build with her husband. It is a compelling account of a notorious case that captured the attention of the country but has been since largely forgotten. Jacobsen shows that the Murdoch case spurred Alberta women’s organizations to seek legislative changes represented in the Matrimonial Property Act of 1980, which specified that all property acquired during marriages is subject to equal sharing in the event of marriage breakdown.

The movement of peoples into and out of the region is developed in essays by Lisa Chilton and Alison Marshall on prairie immigration, and by Royden Loewen in an article devoted to emigration by Western Canadian Mennonites to Latin America. Loewen’s essay provides compelling reflections on the experiential aspects of train travel as informed by culture, supported by the words of the emigrating Mennonites quoted from their diaries.

Ethnocultural identity and survival are discussed in Linda Ledohowski’s “Little Ukraine on the Prairie,” which sees the potential in new imaginings of identity rather than the replication of traditional cultural models. The collection moves on to cultural geography in Beverly Sandallack’s essay on prairie towns, offering several examples of how main street projects have helped communities preserve their built heritage in a general context of rapid loss. The volume concludes with an incisive semiotic-historical essay by...