History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies (review)

History, Literature and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies is the product of a second scholarly meeting to reflect on the Canadian prairies and initiate new ways of thinking and writing about the region, its history, and its culture. In 2001, Robert Wardhaugh, now with the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario, served as editor for Toward Defining the Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, a collection emanating from a highly successful Winnipeg conference of the same name. Wardhaugh, together with Alison Calder of the University of Manitoba Department of English, then issued a second conference call, this time to answer the somewhat intriguing question, 'When is the prairie?' What they wanted scholars to do was contemplate the prairies from the dual perspective of time and space.

Those who answered the call – based on the conference papers reproduced in History, Literature and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies – were mostly literature scholars who reconsidered the work of authors like Sharon Butala, Carol Shields, and Thomas Wharton through a broader, in a few cases, geological, time frame. Frances W. Kaye, for example, used Butala's apocalyptic novel The Fourth Archangel to argue that the rural agricultural past of the popular imagination is rapidly decaying, if not effectively gone, and that people of the plains need to find new ways of living with the land. Indeed, it is these same scholars, although coming from essentially literature backgrounds and/or departments, who embrace an interdisciplinary approach in their essays and argue that the prairie West is not simply a place, frozen in time, but a process.

What is particularly instructive about the collection is who is not represented. The co-editors readily admit that no Aboriginal author took up the challenge and submitted a paper proposal. Such voices need to be heard, if only to expand the understanding of prairie history and culture.

The other disappointment is the limited representation by historians in the collection. In their introductory essay, Wardhaugh and Calder call upon prairie historians to rethink their approaches and start to push the boundaries of time and space in their work. They want them to consider how they are representing and defining the prairies, to move beyond the popular image of the region as essentially rural and agricultural. It is to be hoped that prairie historians are listening and take up the challenge.