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

Place and Replace is a collection of papers presented at a joint meeting of the St. John’s College Prairies Conference and Western Canadian Studies in Winnipeg in 2010. All of them focus on the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, but they come from many different disciplines, including Indigenous studies, history, literature, political science, community planning, and geography. None of the authors formally specifies “region,” but all deal implicitly, usually explicitly, with place. Race, ethnicity, and gender are also central issues in eleven of the sixteen articles.

Sarah Carter’s essay on “Homestead Rights of First Nations Farmers” begins the volume on a useful, if depressing, note, describing the tortured thinking necessary to prevent Native farmers and families from taking up homesteads. The contrast between the white yeoman farmers and families turning wasteland into the breadbasket for the world and the savage Indigenous hunters and gatherers was only maintained by merciless government prevention of Native agriculture. In looking again at the Murdoch v. Murdoch case and its denial of any right to land by a wife who had invested both her own capital and her own labor directly into building up a family farm, Pernille Jakobsen undercuts the myth of the Prairies as the home of Canadian women’s rights. Although this is a Canadian collection, American Great Plains readers will also be aware of the strength and dubious authenticity of these myths in the United States.

Joyce M. Chadya’s look at the Zimbabwean diaspora in the Prairies and its response to funerals is a wonderful insight into 21st-century immigration. Far from the “emigrant cars” of the 19th and early 20th century, immigration from the Global South to Canada depends on planes, cell phones, and electronic money transfers. Cather’s Shimerda family certainly had no such ease of connection—and hence no such sense of obligation to the old country.

Alison Calder points out that much Canadian prairie literary study has not followed historians into the intellectual frameworks of decolonization, and although George Melnyk’s work with Alberta literature provides counterexamples, her questions and her directions toward a study beyond old myths are useful. Lindy Ledohowski also writes back to the critics, emphasizing the power and noncompliance of the “Baba” figures who have generally been oversimplified as rustic grandmamas.

Two of the more innovative articles are Sterling Evans’s history of Dinosaur Provincial Park and Beverly A. Sandalack’s study of prairie towns as they morph from their early mainstreet-and-railroad forms, dominated by grain elevators and their false-fronted echoes, to their current decentralized and deregionalized highway strip malls and residential cul-de-sacs.

Not an anthology with a few coherent themes, this is a more angular collection that is full of useful information both for scholars of the Great Plains in any discipline and for general readers.