Forest Prairie Edge

by Merle Massie

  Regional divisions cause tensions on many levels. The boundaries have no political basis and shift according to the needs of those doing the arguing. Imagined boundaries have created both unity and serious internal strife—mention the National Energy Policy of Trudeau in Alberta and you will immediately note a strong negative reaction. Mention the Saskatchewan Roughriders and you will find every Canadian’s second favourite football team—unless, of course, you’re in Saskatchewan, where blood runs green and the 2013 Grey Cup win at home in Regina took Rider Nation pride to dizzying heights. Historians, in attempting to chronicle, analyze, and interpret the Canadian story, are prone to extended conversations, even fights, over the “best” way to write Canadian history. Despite eloquent calls for a unifying national story, regionalism remains. In part, it comes down to the purpose of the story. Manageable chunks allow for finer detail, comparisons, and the ability to draw attention to certain areas that are underrepresented in the larger national story. From the academic perspective, historian Ramsay Cook stated that Canada’s story is already one of “limited identities” or stories told from the perspective of race, class, gender, or region. Gerald Friesen argued that, in Britain, class is the dominant national language or “framing”; in the United States, race takes precedence; in Canada, region reigns.4

  Regionalism is a useful tool if used with caution. But I think that it has become too established, to the point of myopic assumptions and narrow-minded storytelling. It is all too easy to ascribe common cultural and physical characteristics to large areas that, on closer scrutiny, are not homogeneous. What implications has regionalization had for the Canadian story, both in the ways in which it has unfolded and in the ways in which historians (of all types, from the academic to the coffee shop) have framed the story? Which decisions and policy choices have been made using regional stereotypes? Which underlying assumptions have pushed the path of history? How has regionalism shaped interpretations of characters, settings, or plots? Geographer David Wishart warned that dividing space into regions, similar to dividing time into periods (such as “the roar of the twenties”), brings about a high degree of inertia, which will “inhibit new ways of understanding.” It stops us from thinking fresh even before we start. We cannot approach a story in a new way, and we risk skewing our storylines, if we start from iconic and potentially incorrect assumptions. Wishart suggested a way out: “Reflection on what we take for granted ... can yield fresh insights, opening up new possibilities for new narratives.”5

  What have we, as Canadians, taken for granted? One thing is the iconic mental image of Saskatchewan. That image, and its scripted storyline, will come under scrutiny, even attack, in this book as I reflect on the difference between the Saskatchewan of the Canadian public imagination and my own lived experience. The prairie biome, the expanse simply of land and sky, has been appropriated as if representative of the entire province. Prairie ecology, history, and economy have become the essence of Saskatchewan. I will not simply rail against the stereotypical view of my province or regale you with northern stories. I will show that over-simplifying our understanding of Saskatchewan, reducing it to “prairie,” has limited and actually skewed historical investigation and interpretation and influenced policy and decision making from the personal level to the federal level. Two problems have arisen: non-prairie spaces, and non-prairie stories, have been virtually invisible; moreover, in approaching Saskatchewan history with a host of assumptions, certain stories have been mistold. Venerable historian G.F.G. Stanley justified static “prairie” stories by claiming that historians of western Canada should only be concerned with the treeless prairie and the adjoining parkland: “My terms of reference do not include the forest area ... because those regions have their own distinctive geographical features, their own problems and their own future.”6 Separating the history of the prairie from that of the forest as Stanley wanted, or south from north, skews the Saskatchewan—and the Canadian—story in important ways.

  The overwhelming cultural force of the prairie mystique has overshadowed the history of what historians Ken Coates and William Morrison term “the forgotten north,” the provincial Norths of the subarctic boreal forest.“Long-ignored, politically weak, economically unstable, home to substantial aboriginal populations, these areas have played a significant, if relatively unknown, role in Canada’s history,” they contend. Scholarship is divided between the agricultural South and the “true north” or “Far North,” the Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut in the arctic region “north of 60.” This division skips right over the provincial Norths, slicing the fabric of both the provincial stories and the pan-Canadian story.7 Coates and Morrison showcase the problem of regionalization: breaking Canada into geographically defined chunks, such as “the Prairies” and “the Far North,” has fractionalized Canadian history. As a result, not only can it come apart at the seams, but sometimes, those seams do not meet at all.

  Tied to the growing interest in Aboriginal history, work on the provincial norths has recovered forgotten history as a balance to the decades of scholarly work on the Prairies and the Arctic.8 One key work that focussed on Saskatchewan’s north, from a northern perspective, was historian David Quiring’s lyrically titled CCF Colonialism in Northern Saskatchewan: Battling Parish Priests, Bootleggers, and Fur Sharks. Colonialism has been an important theme in Aboriginal history, and Quiring pointed to the twenty-year reign of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) as a time of overt colonization and exploitation of northern Saskatchewan. Focussed on policy history during the CCF period in Saskatchewan (1944–64), Quiring ably followed Coates and Morrison’s suggestion that the Saskatchewan provincial north (like other provincial norths) was little more than a colony of the south, a tabula rasa where the CCF wanted to experiment with socialism.9

  Although Quiring’s work, and others like it, has provided important pieces of the Saskatchewan and northern story, it reinforced Stanley’s arbitrary dividing line. Splitting the province in two allows a better view of certain stories, such as southern colonialism over northern inhabitants and landscape. To achieve this richly detailed and well-documented history, however, Quiring argued that the CCF was the first government to include the “previously ignored” north as a major priority suggesting that, from a policy and political perspective, there was little government interest in the Saskatchewan north prior to 1944. In an even more damning, and incorrect, assertion, northern specialist R.M. Bone claims that, “indeed, the North was ignored by Euro-Canadians until its forest and mineral wealth caught their attention in the post-World War II period.”10 Both statements, when measured against the historical record, are clearly misleading, even wrong. The northern boundary was a moving line, drawn more in the imagination than on geographical, or administrative space. It was an arbitrary division that loosely gathered up spaces with trees as “northern” and spaces without trees as “southern.” The “north” of Bone and Quiring was not the same in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century as it became in the second half of the twentieth. Northern places, however defined, captured a large amount of energy and interest prior to 1944. To be fair, northern development on the scale and context to which Bone and Quiring referred was only possible with modern mechanization, such as airplanes and caterpillar tractors, more readily available after the Second World War.11

  The movement to write northern history, from an Aboriginal or industrial/development perspective, is laudable but still falls short: recovering the history of the provincial norths might add depth to the northern story but continues to create a false separation, reinforcing the contrasts and power imbalances but ignoring the connections. A recent book by environmental historian Liza Piper crosses provincial boundaries and redefines western Canada using the historical term “northwest.” I applaud this move. Her work reflects a unique narrative that combines environmental history and Aboriginal and development history in the large lake region of the boreal forest. It reimagines both the nort
h and the west, linking their stories in fascinating new ways.12 Despite Piper’s example, the Canadian story in both the public imagination and through books still splits along seams drawn from perceptions of landscape. Assumptions and stereotypes abound.

  A second critical assumption that has skewed western Canadian history—and Canadian and regional public policy—is the concept of an “ideal” wheat farm. Historian R.W. Sandwell argues that there is now a growing understanding that the wheat monoculture was perhaps not the norm for the majority of agricultural endeavours, at least in nineteenth-century Canada.13 That understanding, though, has not yet penetrated deeply into western Canadian history, where wheat remains king. A fascination with wheat has meant that other kinds of farms, such as subsistence and mixed, have been, to say the least, under-studied. A similar point, that “the single job, single wage norm … may come to be seen as a historical aberration,” is found in the work of researchers Rosemary E. Ommer and Nancy J. Turner. They argued that pre-industrial social exchange and trading practices have not disappeared but become the rural informal economy. Occupational pluralism, or making a living by more than one job on a seasonal, barter, or other basis, was often found at sites of ecological pluralism or landscapes with rich local diversity—like the forest fringe. Such pluralism was pragmatic and flexible, a localized response to place, landscape, and economic need.14

  Emphasizing contrasts and connections, this book investigates the artificial dividing line between the north and the south. That dividing line emerges instead as a place of contact and exchange rather than a line from which histories have diverged. In Saskatchewan, the two ecosystems and cultures have drawn from and responded to each other. Like a clamshell, the two halves form a whole. The iconic mental image of flat prairie is still much in evidence, but I will recast it through the lens of contrast. Ironically, provincial citizens used the iconic images of flat and treeless prairie to market and sell northern spaces or experiences. While keeping—even shading more clearly—the stereotypical starting points of prairie and forest, I explore the connections (instead of an arbitrary separation) between the Saskatchewan provincial north and south before the Second World War.

  Ecological and Cultural Edges

  The point of contact between the two major ecosystems of Saskatchewan is often called the “forest fringe.”15 Where two ecosystems meet is known as an ecotone, the place of transition or ecological edge. In Canada, the “fringe” is found across the continent at the boreal forest edge.

  Ecotones present high levels of biodiversity or species richness.16 They tend to display soils, plants, and animals drawn from both parent ecosystems as well as unique features or species, and as a result they are even more diverse than their parent ecosystems. The ecotone, though, is not the “parkland.” This is a common assumption, but I consider it incorrect (see Chapter 1). Forest fringe areas that have seen extensive fires, forestry, or agricultural settlement “look” more like the parkland, and some researchers have been known to confuse the two and point to parkland as a kind of transition zone between the prairie and the forest. It is not. Humans are drawn to ecotones, and a higher incidence of archaeological sites has been found in these places.17 There are three possible reasons. One, an ecotone displays “edge effect” of species richness, a diverse landscape upon which to draw. Two, humans living within and across an ecotone enjoy easier exploitation of nearby parent ecosystems. Nearby exploitation helps to access greater diversity not just within but also adjacent to the ecotone. Three, if the dominant ecosystems support unique cultures (in this case cultures adapted to the prairie or the boreal forest), then those cultures will meet and interact at the ecotone, leading to exchange among and increasing flexibility for each cultural group. Ecotones, by their nature, are rather narrow in depth, though they have exceptional linear extent. The Canadian forest fringe ecotone spreads from the mountain cordillera to Quebec. Despite its breadth, the narrow depth of the forest edge means that it is less likely to support a social system or human society solely within the transition zone. For the forest fringe region, fire, logging, and productive farming, as well as conservation and reforestation, shift and re-create the forest/prairie interface. It has moved, expanded, and contracted over time. The forest edge provided a relatively diverse base in which to live, from which to access the two main parent ecosystems of boreal forest and open plains, and to which humans would go to access different cultural, social, economic, and ecological knowledge and experience. The ecotone offered human occupants a measure of resilience and adaptive capacity, through both local diversity and nearness to other ecosystems.

  The forest fringe is a dividing line between one way of life and another. Ethnobotanist Nancy Turner, ethnoecologist Iain Davidson-Hunt, and anthropologist Michael O’Flaherty have suggested that ecological edge zones display characteristics of cultural edge zones, where separate cultures converge. Their work is based primarily on examples drawn from Indigenous peoples. At the point of convergence, the resulting cultural edge was “rich and diverse in cultural traits, exhibiting cultural and linguistic features of each of the contributing peoples. This results in an increase in cultural capital and resilience ... especially in times of stress and change.”18 In other words, at cultural edges, there was not only an exchange of material goods (trade patterns) but also the ability to learn from one another and adapt ideas from the other culture (many of which were drawn from long experience with the parent ecological system).19 I define the cultural characteristics of a forest-based society as resource exploitation: fur, fish, game, berries, timber, and medicinal products, to cite a few examples. The methods of extraction and use became embedded in the culture—firing the forest to encourage blueberry growth or trapping certain species at certain times of the year. In the prairie ecosystem, pastoral (bison husbanding/hunting and livestock) and agricultural grain-growing characteristics have defined human life. I consider cultures supported by bison as pastoral in a general sense. Such cultures did not follow the bison blindly but knew and manipulated bison patterns, building jumps and pounds and firing the prairie to encourage and control feed and pasturage. Where these two systems meet, trading and knowledge sharing were important components. Knowledge gained in these interchanges would allow a measure of success and adaptation should a culture need to cross an ecotone and enter the other.

  Plains and Woods Cree converged at the forest fringe, using the ecotone during certain times of the year and exchanging cultural knowledge and practices. Records show Aboriginal elders in times past reflecting on the cultural and embedded differences between bison hunting on the plains and tracking moose and elk in the boreal forest. A hunter good at one might not have been good at the other. The best interpretative understanding of the significance of this ecological and cultural edge comes from historical geographer Arthur J. Ray, whose book Indians in the Fur Trade showed how both boreal forest bands and plains bands used the forest edge as an integral part of yearly economic exploitation cycles. “The ability to exploit all of these zones,” Ray maintained, “gave these groups a great deal of ecological flexibility” and “permitted them to make rapid adjustments to changing economic conditions.”20 Ray used early journals and diaries written by some of the first white traders in the West to support these claims. For instance, the famous French fur trader, La Verendrye, wrote how “many of the tribal bands moved to the parklands or lived in the outer fringes of the forest [in winter]. In these settings they had access to the bison … and the relatively sizeable moose population of the forest.”21

  When Ray published Indians in the Fur Trade in 1974, it would have been hard to imagine the dynamic and ongoing importance of this work. It has been a catalyst leading generations of scholars to study First Nations history and explore a variety of research ideas, methods, and sources. This variety has included First Nations people as active participants and “middlemen” in the fur trade; research on fur-trade journals to study fur-trade life; in-depth examination and anal
ysis of trade goods and economics; First Nations environmental history; gender and mixed-blood dynamics; interdisciplinary work mixing archaeology and anthropology with history and geography; demographic and epidemic studies; and First Nations migration. Although Ray’s work has been cited as seminal by countless researchers in First Nations and fur-trade history in the past forty years, most have concentrated on how his work placed First Nations groups at centre stage in the fur trade. Few have picked up on his place-based exploration and explanation of ecological and cultural edges.22 I will pick up the dropped thread and use it to “sew” the split seam of the two ecological and cultural regions of prairie and boreal back together.

  Societies living at edge zones benefit from diversity and resilience, whether the diversity is ecological or cultural. Resilience refers to “flexibility and adaptive capacity” and is used in particular to describe what happens to a community following a disaster or setback.23 I interpret resilience at an edge ecotone as creating a society based upon several possible and intertwining pursuits. As a result, human life might look different from one year to the next—flexibility is central. Fishing might be good one year but not the next, while hunting or farming is better. Seasonality is important: the turning of the seasons presents different opportunities and problems. Resilience, as demonstrated by Aboriginal life at this particular ecotone in Saskatchewan, is an excellent viewpoint to think about successive examples of human occupation. Edge becomes a theoretical tool that allows me to consider, contrast, and compare the different cultures that have lived in and used the forest edge from pre-contact to the end of the Great Depression.

  The “Pioneer Fringe” and the “Frontier”