Pop 89: Reading Saskatchewan
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
In 2022, I saved over $17,000.00 by using the public library. (And you could too!) Over the holidays, as temperatures dropped and the snow piled up outside my door, I was content to lay on my couch under the light of a disco Christmas star I have no intention of removing until Valentine’s and tackle the remains stack of my library haul while sipping cups of Banff-All-Day -Breakfast tea. Now, as I sink into the cushions and we sink into 2023, I want to acknowledge a few stellar works of fiction and nonfiction that came from this part of the world and were released in 2022, some of which I was anxiously sent by publishers.
I have mentioned, in earlier columns, the powerful last book by Harold R. Johnson, “The Power of Story.” Johnson, who passed over last February, was a Cree writer, and I was fortunate enough to meet him and review his work. I am struck by his balanced way of seeing and expressing himself in a no-nonsense manner, a gift no doubt coming from his balanced and varied way of life, being both trapper and Crown Prosecutor, as well as having worked as a sailor, a miner and a logger.
“The Power of Story” addresses what happens to humans when we lose track of our own stories or when we get careless with the stories we tell. Johnson sets the book around a fire, addressing an ecumenical group eager to learn from a teacher made of many stories. I am story. And you are story”, he writes. “We become the stories we are told and the stories we tell ourselves. The important story is our own story.”
I heard someone say the other day that getting your news from Twitter is like getting your news from the bathroom wall. The antidote is to just focus on your own story, advises Johnson. When so-called news pops up on social media, suspect and unverifiable, Johnson comes across as unfazed. He senses change in the air before most of us do. “This is the most potent opportunity, this time,” he writes, “ when the dominant story is changing.” We can really make a difference, he assures us, “if each of us has control over our own life story.”
Another author who takes pains to tell her own story is Dawn Morgan. Her book “Unsettled, Reckoning on the Great Plains.” is a combination memoir, prairie history, travelogue and commentary on the damages colonialism has wrought. Morgan worked painstakingly on this book for decades, and I could sense - and appreciate - her consideration over every phrase, every line, every word. She needed to get the story right so she could liberate herself from it.
In his book, Johnson reminds us that a victim is a character in someone else’s story. Reading Morgan’s book, you get the sense she does not want to be that kind of character. And yet there are wounds aplenty in her story. It begins with a rancher named Johnny with a bull bison named King. Johnny needs to load King into a truck, and Morgan’s father is hired to help with the job. When her dad, on a bender, doesn’t show up, Johnny tries to do it himself and is gored to death. A week later, Morgan’s dad commits suicide by putting a gun to his head. Morgan is not notified of her father’s funeral; in fact, she only learns of his death in a casual, long-distance conversation with one of her sisters.
Morgan is a deft handler of the English language and can weave disparate sources together to create meaning where there never was before. In her heart-wrenching, sometimes comic, mostly conciliatory search for release from her haunting past, she introduces us to the poetry of Andrew Suknaski, examines the papers of the Palliser Expedition, dips into the diaries of Metis guide Peter Erasmus, detours into country-western lyrics, then veers into the writings of German philosopher Theodor Adorno, Hemingway’s take on bullfighting, the life of Spanish gauchos and Kafka’s novel “Amerika.” She’ll grab at anything to replace her lost anchors: Johnny, King the bison, her father, the Assiniboine themselves.
Both these books touch on Saskatchewan’s history of treatment of Indigenous people, and land and both do in a way that asks us to skip the vituperative and, as Morgan calls it, “imperial nostalgia.” Morgan, looking at both her personal and provincial history, asks: “Who does not long to redress the crimes of the past, resurrect the dead and return the land to its original inhabitants.” But, she says, settlers, whether her parents or our grandparents, would never see themselves as guilty, “given what they were fleeing and the hardships endured in getting here.” “As private landowners, many of the people who settled Saskatchewan had come escaping the collectivism and government control of Eastern Europe,” echoes Dale Eisler in his book “From Left to Right: Saskatchewan’s Political and Economic Transformation.” Eisler helps us take a clear-eyed look at the province as the world economy shifted from post-industrial to global and the province’s population moved from farms to cities. Case in point: In 1971, 47%percent of Saskatchewan’s population lived on farms. By 2016, the number was down to 16%.
In engaging language, Eisler describes the many faces of “populism” and how, over the decades, its meaning has changed to embrace both liberal and conservative voices. He is also quick to point to papa Trudeau’s cavalier disregard of the prairies when he asked, in the sixties, “Why should I sell your wheat?” The off-handed comment aimed at a people who were losing their farms as wheat spoiled in granaries has not gone forgotten.
Land has always been a central focus for prairie people where “place” matters. The country can be divided between two kinds of people, Eisler suggests, “The Anywheres- educated, mobile, political people” and “The Somewheres - people who are “rooted, attached to place,” and who, in my case, nestled away from cities, value immediate community, especially community libraries!