Good Lands: A Meditation and History on the Great Plains by Frances W. Kaye (review)

Frances Kaye describes Good Lands as “a meditation about what happened when a mass of people hit a geographical and cultural region that they felt entitled to reclaim from deficiency.” (5) It is also about the intellectual resistance of First Nations and Métis “who, unlike the settlers, began from the premise of sufficiency.” (5) The contrasting paradigms have shaped human experience on the Great Plains, and Kaye explores aspects of each in alternating chapters. Her conclusion brings the two strands together as she looks to contemporary First Nations thinkers for a “21st-century solution” for the region. (319) While the themes of deficiency and sufficiency provide the conceptual framework for her study, Kaye is also interested in the history of ideas about the Great Plains. She thus includes chapters addressing such diverse topics as “The Women’s West” and “Arts, Justice and Hope on the Great Plains.”

Good Lands is essentially a literature review that brings together material from history, literature, journalism, and the fine arts. The approach is at once holistic and very general. Kaye makes sparse use of primary source materials, working instead with texts published by other scholars. The Great Plains encompass parts of both Canada and the US, and most chapters provide equal treatment of Canadian and US materials. This choice enables readers to delineate differences in ideology and policy between the two countries.

Kaye locates the origins of the deficiency paradigm in the era of Euro-North American exploration. Her chapter “Exploring the Explorers” examines explorers’ narratives as documents of “covert conquest.” Under the guise of scientific discovery, Kaye argues, explorers like Anthony Henday, David Thompson, and Lewis and Clark laid the groundwork for imperial expansion. A later generation took the process further. Surveyors Henry Youle Hind in Canada and Ferdinand Hayden in the US promoted a vision of the Great Plains as “empty” territory of untapped economic potential. In this formulation, deficiency lay not in the land itself but in the Indigenous population’s failure to put it to optimal use.

Subsequent chapters trace the deployment of the deficiency paradigm in academic studies and government policies. “Intellectual Justification for Conquest” argues that Harold Innis, who posited the Great Plains as “hinterland” to eastern Canada’s “metropolis,” and Frederick Turner, who conceptualized the American West as a series of receding frontiers, articulated “the formulas for their respective Wests.” (131) Neither placed the Great Plains at the centre of the story, and both believed that First Nations’ ways of life could not survive sustained contact with European settlers. Unlike Turner, however, Innis recognized First Nations as a founding people, and his work contributed to the narrative of Canada as a multicultural society.

“Homesteading as Capital Formation on the Great Plains” finds the premise of deficiency shaping Euro-American settlement on the Plains, where immigrants had to “improve the land” to make it commercially productive. In “Mitigating but Not Rethinking,” Kaye considers the careers of Saskatchewan Premier Tommy Douglas and Nebraska Senator George Norris, progressive politicians who implemented measures designed to alleviate the hardships of Dust Bowl farmers. While accepting their efforts as well intentioned, Kaye considers them doomed to fail because they did not question the fundamental premise of the Great Plains as deficient. “It seems a waste,” she writes, “that, since they were challenging the status quo anyway, these leaders did not have access to a frame of reference that would have allowed them to plan reforms that started out with the great fact of the land and the thousands of years of history of its use.” (241) Later chapters addressing growth pole economic theory and the “boom and bust” cycles of a regional economy based on resource extraction bring the story of flawed ideology and failed policy up to the present.

A First Nations perspective that values the Great Plains as a place of sufficiency, as heartland rather than hinterland, forms a running counterpoint to the narrative of deficiency. It comes across with particular...