The Prairie West as Promised Land (review)

The media report new hope for Prairie renewal. In May 2008, Saskatchewan boasted the highest consumer spending and wholesale trade rate in Canada. Energized, in part, by the demand for bio-fuel, Saskatchewan farmers, it seems, have new opportunities. But the sidebar stories indicate that some farmers, faced with the expense of adapting to bio-fuel production, are selling off their heavily mortgaged farm equipment and renting out their land, too undercapitalized to make the shift themselves. As always, the Prairie West is both the land of promise and of promises unfulfilled.

This new volume, Prairie West as Promised Land, probes the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the view of the Prairies as a land of opportunity. The eighteen essays are organized along five themes: Visions of the Promised Land, Settling the Promised Land, The Prairie West as the Perfect Society, The Construction of a Promised Land for a 'Chosen People,' and Readjusting the Vision of the Promised Land in the Modern Era. At the core of the volume is the shifting, dialectical relationship between vision and reality. Almost all of the essays, however, deal more with ideas about the Prairies and less with the material conditions and the structural forces that helped construct life in the various regions within the Prairies.

The first section returns to familiar ground by examining the changing views of the Prairie West held by expansionists in Canada (both before and after Confederation) and Great Britain. Mentally transforming the region from wilderness to agrarian hinterland in the minds of would-be developers, promoters, and settlers overlay a deeper process by which Euro-Canadian visions displaced Aboriginal connections to the land.

First Nations relationship with agricultural modernity begins the next section with a reprise of Sarah Carter's work on Aboriginal farmers. This section deals with the struggle to turn Prairie dreams into reality. While First Nations were subject to what Carter calls a 'policy of deliberate arrested development,' others too, including utopian communities and individual settlers, found the process of bringing their ideals to fruition fraught with difficulty. The processes by which individuals and families struggled to keep the dream alive and came to interpret their own histories in the light of their hopes attest to the power of the image of the Promised Land.

Taking that reality and refashioning it into new sanguinity occupied the subjects of the third and fourth sections. Whether it was dealing with the contradictory impulses associated with the Prairie city, or the disheartening effects of the First World War, social reformers of the Prairie West worked tirelessly to remake the place in the image of their ideals. While much of this was intellectual labour and political work, emotions played a special role, a point that Randi Warne makes in her skilful analysis of Nellie McClung. That the visions of some meant hardships and restrictions for others is the subject of the fourth section. Land-holding law and settlement patterns made the Prairie West 'no place for a woman,' but so did the ways that many people thought about the West, ways that had more in common with imperial outposts than with Canadian farming. Chris Kitzan's chapter on Bishop Lloyd offers a timely corrective to any lingering view that Sifton's policies were embraced universally. In a chapter reminiscent of recent events, Steve Hewitt makes plain the restrictive power of the state in determining who was and who was not to partake of the promise of the West.

The volume returns to the process of visioning the Prairie West in the latter half of the twentieth century through art, commemoration, consumption, and the search for new myths. Returning ultimately to the realm of ideas is fitting in a book that is, in many ways, an intellectual history, though not only of intellectuals, political leaders, or social reformers. Given the unifying theme of the Promised Land and the use of material already published, this volume is at times repetitious and covers familiar topics...