Download or read book Toward Defining the Prairies written by Robert Wardhaugh and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2001-04-30 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New ways of thinking about literature and history have radically changed how we think about or even "define" a region like the Prairie West. In fact, the very concept of "defining" has come into question by new theoretical approaches and it may now seem a hopeless endeavour. But the process of defining can be just as important as the actual production of a definition.Toward Defining the Prairies highlights recent approaches to thinking about the Prairie West. Bounded by pieces from well-known historian Gerald Friesen and Governor-General's Award-winning writer Robert Kroetsch, these 13 essays are as diverse as the region itself. In their examination of different aspects of Prairie history, literature, climate, society, culture, and identity, they help to provide a new understanding of this place and of the complexities of its definition.
Download or read book The Prairie West as Promised Land written by R. Douglas Francis and published by University of Calgary Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Millions of immigrants were attracted to the Canadian West by promotional literature from the government in the late 19th century to the First World War bringing with them visions of opportunity to create a Utopian society or a chance to take control of their own destinies.
Download or read book Place and Replace written by Esyllt W. Jones and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A multidisciplinary analysis of the Canadian West.
Download or read book Writing in Dust written by Jenny Kerber and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing in Dust is the first sustained study of prairie Canadian literature from an ecocritical perspective. Drawing on recent scholarship in environmental theory and criticism, Jenny Kerber considers the ways in which prairie writers have negotiated processes of ecological and cultural change in the region from the early twentieth century to the present. The book begins by proposing that current environmental problems in the prairie region can be understood by examining the longstanding tendency to describe its diverse terrain in dualistic terms—either as an idyllic natural space or as an irredeemable wasteland. It inquires into the sources of stories that naturalize ecological prosperity and hardship and investigates how such narratives have been deployed from the period of colonial settlement to the present. It then considers the ways in which works by both canonical and more recent writers ranging from Robert Stead, W.O. Mitchell, and Margaret Laurence to Tim Lilburn, Louise Halfe, and Thomas King consistently challenge these dualistic landscape myths, proposing alternatives for the development of more ecologically just and sustainable relationships among people and between humans and their physical environments. Writing in Dust asserts that “reading environmentally” can help us to better understand a host of issues facing prairie inhabitants today, including the environmental impacts of industrial agriculture, resource extraction, climate change, shifting urban–rural demographics, the significance of Indigenous understandings of human–nature relationships, and the complex, often contradictory meanings of eco-cultural metaphors of alien/invasiveness, hybridity, and wildness.
Download or read book History Literature and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies written by Alison Calder and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2005-05-16 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Canadian Prairie has long been represented as a timeless and unchanging location, defined by settlement and landscape. Now, a new generation of writers and historians challenge that perception and argue, instead, that it is a region with an evolving culture and history. This collection of ten essays explores a more contemporary prairie identity, and reconfigures "the prairie" as a construct that is non-linear and diverse, responding to the impact of geographical, historical, and political currents. These writers explore the connections between document and imagination, between history and culture, and between geography and time.The subjects of the essays range widely: the non-linear structure of Carol Shield's The Stone Diaries; the impact of Aberhart's Social Credit, Marshall McLuhan, and Mesopotamian myth on Robert Kroetsch's prairie postmodernism; the role of document in long prairie poems; the connection between cultural tourism and heritage; the theme of regeneration in Margaret Laurence's Manawaka writing; the influence of imagination on geography in Thomas Wharton's Icefields; and the effects on an alpine climber of pre-WWII ideological concepts of time and individualism.
Download or read book Transforming the Prairies written by Shannon Stunden Bower and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2024-11-01 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Transforming the Prairies proposes a new understanding of Canada’s Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), complicating common views of the agency as a model of effective government environmental management. Between 1935 and 2009, the PFRA promoted agricultural rehabilitation in and beyond the Canadian Prairies with mixed and equivocal results. The promotion of strip farming as a soil conservation technique, for example, left crops susceptible to sawfly infestations. The PFRA’s involvement in irrigation development in Ghana increased the local population’s vulnerability to various illnesses. And PFRA infrastructure construction intended to serve the public good failed to account for the interests of affected Indigenous peoples. The PFRA is revealed as being a high modernist state agency that produced varied environmental outcomes and that contributed to consolidating colonialism and racism. This investigation affirms the importance of engaging historical perspectives to help ensure that contemporary environmental management efforts support more just and sustainable futures.
Download or read book Forest Prairie Edge written by Merle Massie and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2014-04-26 with total page 547 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Saskatchewan is the anchor and epitome of the ‘prairie’ provinces, even though half of the province is covered by boreal forest. The Canadian penchant for dividing this vast country into easily-understood ‘regions’ has reduced the Saskatchewan identity to its southern prairie denominator and has distorted cultural and historical interpretations to favor the prairie south. Forest Prairie Edge is a deep-time investigation of the edge land, or ecotone, between the open prairies and boreal forest region of Saskatchewan. Ecotones are transitions from one landscape to another, where social, economic, and cultural practices of different landscapes are blended. Using place history and edge theory, Massie considers the role and importance of the edge ecotone in building a diverse social and economic past that contradicts traditional “prairie” narratives around settlement, economic development, and culture. She offers a refreshing new perspective that overturns long-held assumptions of the prairies and the Canadian west.
Download or read book Unsettled Pasts written by Sarah Carter and published by University of Calgary Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The traditional mythology of the West is dominated by male images: the fur trader, the Mountie, the missionary, the miner, the cowboy, the politician, the Chief. Unsettled Pasts: Reconceiving the West claims to re-examine the West through women's eyes. It draws together contributions from researchers, scholars, and academic and community activists, and seeks to create dialogue across geographic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. Ranging from scholarly essays to poetry, these pieces offer the reader a sample of some of today's most innovative approaches to western Canadian women's history; several of the themes that run throughout the volume have only recently been critically addressed. By rewriting the West from the perspective of women, the contributors complicate traditional narratives of the region's past by contesting historical generalizations, thus transcending the myths and "frontier" legacies that emerged out of imperial and masculine priorities and perspectives. With Contributions by: Kristin Burnett Cristine Georgina Bye Sarah Carter Mary Leah De Zwart Lesley A. Erickson Cheryl Foggo Nadine I. Kozak Siri Louie Graham A. Macdonald Florence Melchior Patricia A. Roome Eliane Leslau Silverman Olive Stickney Aritha Van Herk Muriel Stanley Venne Cora J. Voyageur
Download or read book Westward Bound written by Lesley Erickson and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late nineteenth century, European expansionism found one of its last homes in North America. While the American West was renowned for its lawlessness, the Canadian Prairies enjoyed a tamer reputation symbolized by the Mounties’ legendary triumph over chaos. Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada’s peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940. Lesley Erickson reveals that judges’ and juries’ responses to the most intimate or violent acts reflected a desire to shore up the liberal order by maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native peoples and newcomers, and capital and labour. Victims and accused could only hope to harness entrenched ideas about masculinity, femininity, race, and class in their favour. The results, Erickson shows, were predictable but never certain. This fascinating exploration of hegemony and resistance in key contact zones draws prairie Canada into larger debates about law, colonialism, and nation building.
Download or read book Grasslands Grown written by Molly P. Rozum and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2021-08 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of modern regionalism and senses of place developing among generations of settler colonial society on North America’s northern grasslands.
Download or read book From Left to Right written by Brian T. Thorn and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2016-07-22 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In From Left to Right, Brian Thorn explores what motivated Canadian women to become politically engaged in the 1940s and ’50s. Although women in these decades are often depicted as being trapped in the suburbs – caring for children, baking pies, and leaving politics to men – they joined diverse political parties, including the Social Credit Party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, and the Communist Party of Canada. Thorn argues, controversially, that while women on the left and right had different goals, their activism continued to be informed by maternalism. They used their roles as wives and mothers to influence their parties’ positions on war and unions, to break down barriers between the private and public spheres, and to push for a new world order. Along the way, they laid the foundations for the 1960s feminist movement.
Download or read book A Dry Oasis written by Gregory P. Marchildon and published by University of Regina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientists have been issuing increasingly direct warnings about the impact that climate change is having on the planet. These interdisciplinary studies break new ground in terms of our understanding of the climate experience in the Great Plains before and after agriculture was introduced, the current array of institutions surrounding water governance, and the strengths and weaknesses of rural and Aboriginal communities. Four chapters focus on the present attributes of, as well as future scenarios for, the South Saskatchewan River Basin in southern Alberta and southwestern Saskatchewan. The final group of chapters present case studies of rural communities, Cabri and Stewart Valley Saskatchewan, and Hanna as well as a First Nation reserve in Alberta, as well as a major conflict over water rights in Alberta. Book jacket.
Download or read book Canadas of the Mind written by Norman Hillmer and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2007 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited work offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the meanings, uses, and contradictions of nationalism, critical to contemporary understandings of Canada and Canadians.
Download or read book The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests written by Sterling Evans and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 423 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests is the first collection of interdisciplinary essays bringing together scholars from both sides of the forty-ninth parallel to examine life in a transboundary region. The result is a text that reveals the diversity, difficulties, and fortunes of this increasingly powerful but little-understood part of the North American West. Contributions by historians, geographers, anthropologists, and scholars of criminal justice and environmental studies provide a comprehensive picture of the history of the borderlands region of the western United States and Canada. The Borderlands of the American and Canadian Wests is divided into six parts: Defining the Region, Colonizing the Frontier, Farming and Other Labor Interactions, the Borderlands as a Refuge in the Nineteenth Century, the Borderlands as a Refuge in the Twentieth Century, and Natural Resources and Conservation along the Border. Topics include the borderlands environment; its aboriginal and gender history; frontier interactions and comparisons; agricultural and labor relations; tourism; the region as a refuge for Mormons, far-right groups, and Vietnam War resisters; and conservation and natural resources. These areas show how the history and geography of the borderlands region has been transboundary, multidimensional, and unique within North America.
Download or read book Spaces and Places for Art written by Anne Whitelaw and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2017-04-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Edmonton Museum of Arts opened in 1924 it was only the second art gallery in Canada west of Toronto. Spaces and Places for Art tells the story of the financial and ideological struggles that community groups and artist societies in booming frontier cities and towns faced in establishing spaces for the cultivation of artistic taste. Mapping the development of art institutions in western Canada from the founding of the Winnipeg Art Gallery in 1912 to the 1990s heyday of art museums in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, Anne Whitelaw provides a glimpse into the production, circulation, and consumption of art in Canada throughout the twentieth century. Initially dependent on paintings loaned from the National Gallery of Canada, art galleries across the western part of the country gradually built their own collections and exhibitions and formed organizations that made them less reliant on institutions and government agencies in Ottawa. Tracing the impact of major national arts initiatives such as the Massey Commission, the funding programs of the Canada Council, and the policies of the National Museums Corporation, Whitelaw sheds light on the complex relationships between western Canada and Ottawa surrounding art. Building on extensive archival research and in-depth analysis of government involvement, Spaces and Places for Art is an invaluable explanation of the roles of cultural institutions and cultural policy in the emergence of artistic practice in Canada.
Download or read book The Black Prairie Archives written by Karina Vernon and published by Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. This book was released on 2020-02-19 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology recovers a new regional archive of “black prairie” literature, and includes writing that ranges from work by nineteenth-century black fur traders and pioneers, all of it published here for the first time, to contemporary writing of the twenty-first century. This anthology establishes a new black prairie literary tradition and transforms inherited understandings of what prairie literature looks and sounds like. It collects varied and unique work by writers who were both conscious and unconscious of themselves as black writers or as “prairie” people. Their letters, recipes, oral literature, autobiographies, rap, and poetry- provide vivid glimpses into the reality of their lived experiences and give meaning to them. The book includes introductory notes for each writer in non-specialist language, and notes to assist readers in their engagement with the literature. This archive and its supporting text offer new scholarly and pedagogical possibilities by expanding the nation’s and the region’s archives. They enrich our understanding of black Canada by bringing to light the prairies' black histories, cultures, and presences.
Download or read book Immigrants in Prairie Cities written by Royden Loewen and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2009-11-30 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the course of the twentieth century, sequential waves of immigrants from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa settled in the cities of the Canadian Prairies. In Immigrants in Prairie Cities, Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen analyze the processes of cultural interaction and adaptation that unfolded in these urban centres and describe how this model of diversity has changed over time. The authors argue that intimate Prairie cities fostered a form of social diversity characterized by vibrant ethnic networks, continuously evolving ethnic identities, and boundary zones that facilitated intercultural contact and hybridity. Impressive in scope, Immigrants in Prairie Cities spans the entire twentieth century, and encompasses personal testimonies, government perspectives, and even fictional narratives. This engaging work will appeal to both historians of the Canadian Prairies and those with a general interest in migration, cross-cultural exchange, and urban history.
