Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies by Frances Swyripa (review)

In Storied Landscapes, Frances Swyripa explores ethno-religious communities on the Canadian Prairies from the early days of European settlement through to the present. She moves beyond the traditional emphasis on settlement patterns and immigrant reception to probe issues of heritage and identity among prairie newcomers and their descendants. Storied Landscapes reveals that prairie landscapes were just that—storied. Through myths, symbols, commemorative traditions, and landmarks, settler peoples told narratives of their relationships with the land, their homelands, and their histories. In the telling and retelling of such narratives, each immigrant group carved out, not only their own identity, but that of the prairie west itself. This study offers an engaging look at how ethno-religious communities shaped, and drew meaning from, the prairie region. It reveals the importance of place, both material and imagined, to the construction of ethno-religious identities, and the significance of such identities to the making and remaking of the prairie west.

Storied Landscapes focuses on European immigrants who settled, not in cities, but on the land. Ukrainians, Mennonites, Icelanders, and Doukhobors predominate in Swyripa’s analysis, but several other groups also make an appearance including Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Poles, Romanians, Jews, American Mormons, Finns, Hungarians, German Catholics, and the English. Rather than offering detailed histories of these communities, Swyripa selectively draws examples from each to illuminate broader themes. In the opening chapters, she outlines the diverse settlement experiences of ethno-religious communities on the prairies, and situates such experiences in wider context. Here, Swyripa sets the stage for several chapters on the various local, regional, national, and international factors that influenced the identities of prairie settler peoples. Through practices such as place-naming and the construction of churches, newcomers moulded the prairie landscape in ways that reflected a “delicate balance between old and new worlds” (p. 49). The immigrant generation further nurtured a sense of place and belonging by publicly acknowledging their founders and telling their settlement stories. Although not without tensions, such stories helped to make ethno-religious diversity central to the wider prairie identity. Settler peoples carved out their identities not only in relation to their local communities and the broader region, but to the nation as a whole. As Swyripa aptly reveals, at events such as centennial celebrations, many ethno-religious groups worked to fit their own stories into the national narrative. The nation, region, and local community influenced the heritage and identity of immigrant groups; such groups were also intimately connected with homelands. Newcomers made sense of themselves and their worlds in ways that reflected their membership in transnational diaspora communities. The politics, traditions, and tensions of the old world carried over into the new, informing in critical ways the identity of, not only immigrant groups, but of the wider prairie west itself. In the final chapters, Swyripa moves beyond the immigrant generation to consider the ways in which the “prairie pioneer legacy” (p. 6) took shape among the immigrants’ descendants. That legacy was perpetuated by potent symbols, including statues of homeland heroes and images of sheaves of wheat. Such symbols, together with the ongoing commemoration of pioneers and settlement sites, varied across different communities and reflected the complex mix of old and new that constituted prairie ethnicity. While certain symbols and commemorations were linked to specific ethno-religious traditions, others, such as wheat, pointed to a wider regional identity grounded in a shared attachment to the land.

Storied Landscapes makes a significant contribution to the historiography of religion, ethnicity, and region in Canada. The growing literature on the politics of collective memory, heritage, and invented pasts has, for the most part, passed over the prairie west. By foregrounding the constructed identities and imagined communities of prairie immigrants, rather than such things as numbers and settlement patterns, Swyripa offers new insights into the history of ethnicity in Western Canada. The region itself is a major actor in Swyripa’s work. More than simply a container for universal processes...