Trevor Herriot doesn’t beat around the bush.
In his latest book, Towards a Prairie Atonement, the Saskatchewan naturalist tells it like he sees it: the stolen land, the displaced aboriginal peoples, the sins of colonialism and the annihilated grassland made to pay for it all.
But the Regina writer stops short of burning the bush down completely and evoking a leaden-hearted lament over what has been lost in the name of western expansion and capitalist farming practices.
In telling the story of current day Metis elder Norman Fleury, Herriot unearths the injustices of early Dominion governments, wealth-seeking colonialists and cut-throat trading companies who stripped Canada’s indigenous peoples of their land, rights, ecological ways of life and ultimately, dignity.
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However, Herriot leaves room for the past to be left where it is for the sake of a new approach.
“We have to start to see ourselves as sharing the wealth of the land but also sharing in the good outcomes of the process of reconciliation,” said Herriot.
Through the eye of a naturalist, Herriot brings to life Fleury’s former Metis settlement at St. Madeleine near St. Lazare, Man. The succinct storyteller takes us back to the mid-1800s when Metis settlers developed an environmentally respectful land-sharing system:
“(Louis) Riel’s provisional government was established in part to protect the Metis’ distinctive form of land tenure, recognizing three kinds of title: the private farmstead owned by a family, the open prairie owned communally by First Nations but used by all who lived on the land, and the hay privilege, with its mix of private rights for some kinds of use, communal privileges for other forms of use, and regulations governing the commonwealth of both.”
For a generation at St. Madeleine, this system effectively created a diversified and ecologically rich landscape that not only supported the people, but also allowed prairie wildlife and plants to thrive.
Grasslands surrounding farmsteads were communally used for haying and livestock grazing with the first rights of use going to the adjacent landowner. Beyond the hay privilege existed the great prairie commons used for grazing, haying and hunting according to a first-come, first-served system.
This land tenure would be violently dismantled, with the early signal coming in 1869 when the Hudson’s Bay Company sold 1.5 million sq. miles (including all Metis homelands) to Canada.
Despite years of desperate opposition by Metis settlers and resistance at Red River (1869) and Batoche (1885), the entire Metis land tenure system was eventually destroyed.
In 1937, two representatives of the Rural Municipality of St. Lazare arrived at St. Madeleine to declare that the 3,000 acres the residents called home would be reclaimed by the federal government.
Before the cries of injustice could be heard, the homes in St. Madeleine were burned, the dogs were shot and the people who called the thriving community home were permanently and forever displaced.
As Herriot and his Metis guide Fleury revisit the dismantled St. Madeleine site, we hear the birds, see the native grasses and smell the sage.
But most vividly, we feel the chill of what happens when people are displaced and their way of life is disregarded:
“Barn swallows have settled onto the arms of the white cross encircled by the Red River cart wheel. All the ingredients of peace are here — stillness descending from the sky with nightfall, quiet headstones casting long shadows, the day’s last notes of birdsong — but an uneasiness invades my thoughts. There is no peace here because there is no justice.”
It’s a little book, but the words on its pages leave a big impression, an impression that does not allow the reader to look at land the same way.
Herriot will indeed have led us all toward atonement for historical injustices if the reader will see all prairie lands as a jointly shared gift of survival to be managed respectfully and inclusively, not quartered up and ripped bare.
