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

The sixteen essays in Place and Replace were first presented at a regional studies conference held at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 2010. The Place and Replace Conference merged two previously established scholarly meetings, the St. John’s College Prairies Conference and the Western Canadian Studies Conference. The St. John’s Prairies Conferences, of which this was the third, were interdisciplinary but tended to emphasize literature; the Western Canadian Studies Conferences, of which this was the second, represented the revival of an earlier tradition of historically focused regional conferences that now sought to reflect recent interdisciplinary research into western Canada. Authors from several disciplines contributed to the volume, which is organized thematically around four kinds of literal and metaphorical places, of which “farms” and “trains” stand out.

The primary function of regional studies conferences is to provide a forum for revisiting established themes in, and exploring new approaches to, the cultures, past, and politics of a geographically defined “place.” Place and Replace offers excellent examples of both. For instance, Sarah Carter’s essay on the property and homestead rights of First Nations farmers of Manitoba and the Northwest from the 1870s to the 1910s makes an outstanding contribution to the literature on colonialism in the Prairie West. She illustrates convincingly that even though Indigenous people had practised agriculture long before Europeans arrived, federal bureaucrats resorted to a complex array of twists and turns to ensure that First Nations “had no land to call their own, and no ability to expand their land base.” First Nations were to be erased “from the landscape outside of reserves,” confined to reserves, and replaced by “an army of outsiders.” Pernille Jakobsen’s essay on the politics surrounding the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in 1973 to deny Irene Murdoch’s case that spouses should share equally in “marital property,” in this circumstance a farm in Alberta, adds to literature on the Murdoch case by noting the active role of conservative women in supporting the feminist goal of gender equality. In so doing Jakobsen makes the important point that the social foundation of second-wave feminism was more inclusive than existing literature would indicate. Heather Stanley also shows how rural women challenged the prescriptive discourse articulated by the primary national medical journal of the post–Second World War period about what constituted normative sexual behaviour and, like Jakobsen, adds a uniquely western Canadian perspective to dominant national narratives about women’s bodies. Sterling Evans offers an insightful environmental-history approach to our understanding of Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, and Lisa Chilton focuses on the role of trains as sites of conflict for immigrants, who faced state and railway-company attempts to regulate their cross-Canada destinations. Several essays explore the cultural lens through which we understand the Prairie West: Emma Laroque discusses Métis fiction; Elspeth Tulloch examines how National Film Board films have interpreted the presence of francophones in the West; and Amanda Nettlebeck and Robert Foster show that popular memory of the historic North West Mounted Police march across the West in 1874 continues to emphasize the coming of law and order while providing little sign of a Native perspective or an alternative to national mythology.

Conferences organized by region usually generate discussion about the interpretive value of “place.” For instance, at the Place and Replace Conference, literary critic and poet Alison Calder asked why the once-vibrant field of prairie literary studies appears to be fading away. The answer, she suggests, is to be found in the racial and gendered meaning of “prairie literature,” a field that has centred on settlement and agriculture – symbolized by the European settler colonizer – to the exclusion of racial minorities and women. This construction of West also ignores the modern West, which is substantially urban and far more complex economically than in the period before the Second World War. Jared Wesley’s scholarly exploration...