Having married Peter, I came to the southwest as a wife in the spring of 1976. The world I moved into was purely rural and nearly completely agricultural. This was long before the social mobility of thoroughly urban people who, believing in the possibility of some pastoral idyll, and often retired or prosperous enough not to need jobs, began to move in surprisingly large numbers to remote rural villages and towns where a liveable house was breathtakingly cheap and the cost of living much lower. An urban person in the community then was a rarity, aside from the current local doctor, maybe, or some of the teachers. I had not lived in such an environment since the day we left the last small town for the metropolis of Saskatoon when I was thirteen, and although both my parents came from farms, and I had visited my grandparents on their farm, I had never lived on one. In contrast, Peter had spent part of two winters in Saskatoon at agricultural school when he was about sixteen and seventeen, living in a dorm with a lot of other rural boys, and that was the sum total of his experience of urban life. As his mother once said of herself and her family, “We are as rural as you can be. Nobody is more rural than we are.”
The whole area was more rural than it is today, and a good deal more insular, with little population drift in or out, except, as Peter told me, usually the “best” having left because there has been nowhere to go here, no way to get ahead visibly and quickly, farming being too slow and always uncertain. Others said, “Anybody with any get-up-and-go got up and went,” but I always found that interesting, because the speaker, not a failure, had stayed and didn’t seem rancorous about it. So I felt they must have meant a particular personality type, someone eager for a faster-paced, more exciting, more peopled world, and with more sure money, maybe even a little glamour. It would be explained to me that in families where one person left for the city, that person always did better financially through his life than had the siblings who stayed behind to work at jobs in the villages or out on the land as farmers or ranchers. Young men might find it necessary for a few years to go off north to work in construction or in the oil fields or as ranch hands on one of the storied ranches in British Columbia, while they waited to take over the family land, but the younger generation rarely went away to get a higher education then. And a girl who didn’t marry a local boy soon went away, and usually didn’t come back, having no land to come back to.
There was thus a kind of purity about the place and the people in those days, whose culture depended utterly on land ownership, the handling of cattle herds, riding and managing horses, looking after grazing fields and farms with their crops to be marketed, with the weather and the seasons (then both perfectly predictable) and everyone knowing everyone else or related to one another. Everything was ordained by the land itself, and the community was a tight network of intense relationships. Here the best possible thing a woman could be was a nurse. A nurse was respected in that physical society because she knew what to do if someone lost an arm in a baler, or rolled a truck, or smashed a leg under a horse out in the field or at the rodeo, or if a baby ran a high fever, or a child got hit on the head and wouldn’t wake up. This, of course, was because either there was no doctor at all nearby, or in the earliest days he might well be a little mad, an incompetent, an alcoholic or drug addict, or on the run from a bad mistake elsewhere, or else (if not both) trying to serve offices in a couple of villages and thus overly busy, and hard to catch up with. Not to mention the bad roads and the paucity or complete absence of ambulances. My college education, then, was fairly useless.
So I spent the first year almost constantly with Peter, in the field, in small towns waiting while he got parts, at elevators, in the café, on horseback, in the corrals, in cattle buyers’ offices or at the sale ring, or crossing the land in a truck. Now and then, when there was a long stretch between holidays or long weekends, and I was missing Sean too much, I would drive to the city to see him, staying with my widowed mother and spending whatever time with him we could manage between his soccer games or his swim meets or other activities in his busy teenager’s life. Often I would drive to the city to bring him “home” for a long weekend or Christmas or Easter vacations. Then we would have five hours together each way without anyone else, and our bond, never broken but sometimes stretched thinner through absence than I would have wished, would be renewed. And yet, although I wrestled with the worry every day, I couldn’t bring myself to give up my marriage. How many women have gone through this pain? How many women never get over their guilt? I can say, however, that as might be expected, it got easier for both of us as Sean grew older and more independent.
By my new marriage, though, I had entered what was then in Saskatchewan the magical kingdom of the farm from which both of my parents had been displaced. I was learning also that I was a woman living within the great myth of the cowboy West. Both of these fascinated me, and I wanted to know all about them. But the second couldn’t be asked about, could only be observed and considered. About the first, I never stopped asking questions, and Peter got great pleasure out of teaching me. Once we even took a cattle oiler apart: We sat on the truck’s tailgate, parked out in a field miles from anywhere, and as the oiler has two arms, he took one of them apart piece by piece and I sat beside him imitating each step with the second arm. I don’t remember what the problem was, but I know we fixed it. I felt immeasurably competent after that. I went with him in the half-ton to chase the horses into the corrals, a rough, exciting ride that was better than anything at the fair, and in the winter more than once on his dilapidated snowmobile when the road into the ranch was closed by snow and we had to get in to feed and check the horses and make sure that the house was all right. When the horses were elsewhere or in use or we were in a hurry, I rode with him on his motorcycle to check fields and cattle. I was often in the cab with him while he cut hay or baled it. When he moved loads from one place to another, I followed him in the truck. During this early period he was teaching me about the business of ranching, the daily chores, the seasonal rounds, the weather, the earth, the grass, the habits of horses and cattle, even of the wild animals and birds of the fields. I started to understand that the birds and the animals were the rural person’s daily newspaper: the weather report, the news of seasonal changes, or news alerts when something went wrong.
The day finally arrived when Peter came from where he had been tinkering in the shop to the house to tell me he was going somewhere on an errand, assuming I would get my jacket and go with him, and I, thinking it was time I tried to map a world of my own as well as the one we had together, said, “Thanks, but I think I’ll stay here this time.” He was surprised, but if he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. I think I just spoke first, that he was already thinking this way of operating, unusual as it was, couldn’t go on forever.
That was when my wanderings began. That was when I began to explore my new environment, by myself, without Peter there to lead, show, and interpret. Like most twentieth-century North American adults, I’d spent most of my days indoors. The last office at the university I’d shared with one or two others had painted concrete-block walls and not even a window; to be free to go outside and sit or walk, staying as long as was agreeable, was then a small miracle to me, and I used that freedom to get to know my new home. Every day now I would go out into the fields on foot, choosing a direction I hadn’t been before and where there were no cattle.
The Butalas owned both the ranch and the hay farm, which, as I have noted, were about forty miles apart. They had bought the hay farm in 1949 because they could not grow enough hay on the ranch itself because the climate was too dry, and relying on purchased hay was risky — there would be years when scarcity made it impossible to buy — and too expensive. The cattle were mostly kept at the ranch, where they wandered the 13,000 acres, grazing and giving birth to their calves and nurturing them. When the worst of winter came, Peter, his family, and fellow ranchers or hired cowboys trailed the herd north and east to the hay farm, where there was shelter in the valley hills and water for them to drink in the river, and where the winter’s supply of feed for them was grown, harvested, and stored in bales. When spring came, the herd was trailed back to the ranch. It was such a commonplace annual routine that about the time of the winter move, already the few oldest cows would be waiting patiently at the northeast gate, ready and eager to get to the shelter of the “valley place,” which was the hay farm. Thus, we spent part of each year in each place and, once we built the new modern house on the hay farm, often drove back and forth each day. As well, each summer we spent a few weeks in the valley while Peter did the haying, although the cattle remained to graze at the ranch.
At the hay farm, sometimes with Sean, I wandered in the hills to the south across the Frenchman River and to the north climbing up to the cropped fields that belonged to the neighbours above the valley, roving through coulees and draws, picking up interesting small stones and — wonder of wonders — tiny seashells from hills a hundred feet above where the river now ran. I didn’t know land like this; whatever might be found in it or on it was of great interest to me, and the place seemed full of surprises that I assumed it was up to me to understand, as if I couldn’t belong there if I didn’t comprehend the ground under my feet.
I was initially more interested in the lay of the land, in the plants, the animals, the birds flying overhead, the schools of fish I began to spot from a high bank as they made their way down the river. But soon the subject of dinosaur bones came up, and by asking questions and turning to books when no one knew the answers to my questions, I learned that the Eastend area had many places where the earth had been eroded down through the Ravenscrag, Cypress Hills, and Wood Mountain formations — that is, through the Tertiary period right down to the Cretaceous period, from about 150 million years ago to about 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth. All of us were, in a sense, walking on dinosaurs. In the Eastend area, where I now lived, no mile-deep layer of rock and soil, no high-rises, no mountains or tonnes of desert sand or ocean water lay over the dinosaurs; here they were only a few feet deep, if not right on the surface. Thus, I might conceivably trip over a fossilized bone, or find a giant tooth or piece of bone eroded out of the pale, wet clay. It was — extraordinary thought — more as if here we were walking among dinosaurs.
Early one spring as I walked in a particular field, skirting wet spots and places where patches of snow still lingered, I entered a wide-mouthed coulee, a place where the high valley wall had been eroded by rain, snow, and wind to form a winding V heading slightly uphill to the north off the east–west trajectory of the valley. There was little vegetation other than some sage and greasewood, though later in the year stands of prickly pear and pincushion cactus would open their brilliant, delicate, fuchsia or yellow flowers. In my meanderings I came to a place where I noticed an unusual formation that seemed to be sticking out of the earth at the base of the high wall. I went closer and examined it from all directions. Its colour was that dull ochre of the thin, poor soil of the area. It looked to me to be a hip bone of an animal, but one much bigger than a cow or a horse. Much, much bigger. I hardly dared to think it might be a dinosaur bone, but it was hard, rock-like; it hadn’t been there before, and I knew that melting snow in the spring and summer rains had been for many years dripping down the wall behind and washing away dirt that would end up on the valley floor. I knew that this was one of the ways in which dinosaurs were revealed.
I nabbed an expert — this took weeks — he came out to see it, examined it, and then, hesitating, maybe saying a silent prayer, he struck it with his light hammer, breaking off a small piece and holding it up as he gazed carefully at it, and finally declared, “What you have here is a concretion.” He went on to say that if it had been bone, he would have seen fossilized marrow in the piece he had broken off. But sadly, the inside of the piece looked no different from the outside — all rock, through and through. That was the end of my dream that I had found a dinosaur, but in my disappointment, now more than ever aware of the possibility, I got myself a dinosaur by writing a short story called “The Prize,” in which the main character, who is a writer, finds one. (In fact, as far as I can remember, eventually “The Prize” won a prize itself.)
Some years later, on August 16, 1991, when Peter and I had been married for fifteen years, and Sean was — I can’t believe it — in his late twenties and married, two paleontologists and the high school principal found the real thing: a T. rex skeleton, or most of one. Such a skeleton had never been found in Saskatchewan before — it was then only the twelfth such found in the world, and at the time, it was the most nearly complete. Because of the shortage of resources in the province to carry out the dig immediately, it was three years before it was announced to the world. So amazing a find was it that people came from as far away as China to take the bus trip out to the quarry and watch it being excavated in the intense summer heat and dryness, in an area that, although well-known to the scientific community, had been previously overlooked not just by Canadians, but by other Saskatchewan people as well.
We all struggled with the truth that the land we stood on every day was the home of dinosaurs, but the unimaginable depth of time between when they had existed and 1994 was just too great for our minds to truly grasp. The paleontologist John Storer tried to explain to people what the world was like in the Cretaceous period by saying, “There was no there there then,” meaning you couldn’t superimpose today’s world map onto one of the world then and find anything that matched. The continents 65 million years ago had different shapes; some hadn’t yet come into existence, and they were all pretty much somewhere else on the globe from where they are today. When we gazed at the bullet holes in the church at Batoche, a result of the Riel Resistance in 1885, or fingered our dead grandmother’s locket on its broken chain, we had a sense of history, but the dinosaurs underfoot defied explanation.
To attempt to deal with the fact of the dinosaurs, most of the community infantilized the creature, who was called Scotty, by marketing it in the form of cute cake pans, on coffee mugs with the picture of a plump, non-reptilian-looking dinosaur on the side, or in the form of cuddly stuffed toys, or candies, where it grinned with childish glee, square-dancing or diving into the swimming pool. Some, perhaps more conscious of what a true wonder the creature actually was, and adhering to Christian fundamentalist beliefs, invented a more manageable provenance for the creature than the one the scientists were proclaiming — that he couldn’t be older than 10,000 years, that there was no way to prove that it was 65 million years old. The scientists (nobody said this to me but what other conclusion could you reach?), therefore, must be liars, fools, godless, or all three. Further, they went on to argue, dinosaurs were smaller in the time of Noah’s Ark and were able to escape on it, although they died shortly afterward, the food supply having changed, and were fossilized by the weight of the floodwaters. This fairy tale was designed to remove the burden of incomprehensible wonders from the shoulders of its believers; the existence of dinosaurs shattered the myth of the personal, intimate God who speaks every day to the pastor and his friends. I hid my incredulity, knowing these people to be polite, mild, and as decent as the next person.
One of the men working in paleontology who made the find actually said in conversation, much more gratifyingly, that he had been having dreams about “evolution and wonderful things happening.” An acquaintance who was a poet and, at the time, the United Church minister gave the matter some serious thought — no doubt he gave a sermon on the subject — and, after pointing out that the dragon is an ancient image in our literature occurring in the Book of Revelation, in Beowulf, the first poem extant in English, and in Spenser’s The Faerie Queen, observed that “the dragon is an image of who we are in the negative sense. It represents the reptilian in us, the dark side we tend to repress. But there’s also a nobility, something to respect about it. It’s ancient, alien, and dangerous, but it has a power that’s beyond us. It threatens our comfortable perspectives and throws us into a kind of chaos.” The minister went on to point out that in our struggle to grasp this creature and his or her world, we seem unable to avoid thinking about the T. rex as living among us, and this evokes such dread and terror that we can’t cope with it.
Was there another community where everybody was contemplating the great mystery of Creation, not as a myth only, but as a myth come alive? (The 1912 Piltdown hoax in Britain, to name one, must have had, briefly, such an effect.) It seemed to me an extraordinary moment in the life of a village far from the great world capitals, and from the centres of learning: the Sorbonne, Oxford, Florence, or even those earlier vanished ones such as the ancient library at Alexandria. The great gap of time between the building of the pyramids in Egypt (begun in 2560 BC) and the cave paintings at Lascaux, France (at least 20,000 years ago), collapsed into a more manageable period. But in trying to imagine the time of the dinosaurs, we faced an impenetrable shroud of nothingness. It was as if we needed a new way to measure time, a new map of time. This was, indeed, a kind of chaos, as each of us struggled to integrate this new-found creature in our midst into his or her map of the world.
From then on, even though I never found even another concretion, never mind an actual dinosaur fossil, I was always conscious of the unimaginably vast length of time visibly represented in the mere hay field in which I strolled, hands in my jacket pockets, thinking. Somehow I had wound up in a place where from the settler’s shack I lived in I not only walked by the sunken cellar holes of missing pioneer houses, the rusted, abandoned implements, I also walked on the bones of animals that had died 65 million years ago. In the end, unless you were a scientist, the discovery of the dinosaur, the reality of it, raised more questions than it could ever answer.
I had moved from a tight, foreordained world with clear boundaries and rules, governed by procedures, clocks, calendars, and ringing bells, with daily demands nobody could properly meet and so had to fudge or fail or obfuscate over, with constant tension and guilt the result, where simple successes were so rare as to cause disproportionate exultation. I had gone from that unhappy, tightly wound urban world to one governed by the seasons, by natural forces such as wind, rain, storms, blizzards, and weeks of dry relentless sunshine. In earlier days, the pioneers had planted and harvested and even butchered according to the phases of the moon. In the southwest, you could not ignore the moon and its phases. In so vast a physical space, with measured time retreating into the distance, as I slowly shed my urban, working, single-mother tensions, my brain began to open again. I began to dream the most wonderful dreams, primarily taking place outdoors in some unearthly light and containing the most astounding creatures. These creatures, as I would eventually understand, were insights about the nature of being. Then I remembered my beginnings in the deep forest, with water everywhere, streams, pools, ponds, lakes, rushing wide rivers, and I remembered other visions or dreams. Eventually, parts of my life would begin to link up, to point toward a coherent whole.
I was always striving to know intimately my small world miles from friends and family, to understand the tiniest blossom, the early minute white flower of the moss phlox, the exquisite scent of the gumbo primrose, the way a wild deer gazed at me from across a field or a coyote paused on his meandering trail to nose a flea and consider me as I considered him, the way that I surmised by evidence left behind the unseen paths of the long-dead First Nations people who had camped and worked and prayed and carried out their ceremonies there. They also had lived among the bones of the dinosaurs. I thought initially that if I could know these things thoroughly, some larger, possibly deeper, calamitous understanding of the world would come to me (calamitous because too much for any human to endure). I strained to put all these pieces, these layers of time, together, as if this could be done, as if I could do it, as if it needed doing. I thought there was a place where such purely human responses of wonder, of knowledge of this kind of history, became trivial, fell away entirely if only for a brief period, that brief period being enough time for me to grasp the enormity of the true world.
In my wanderings in the fields belonging to my husband, both at the ranch and at the hay farm, in my intense looking I began to locate items I couldn’t quite name. I knew that the stone circles were tipi rings, or so folklore said, and everyone knew, or thought they knew, that the piles of stones were so placed to keep wild animals away from the bones buried beneath, that they were placed over graves, and of course, everybody knew an arrowhead when he or she found one, or a stone hammer. Many were the households, including ours, where a stone hammer was being used as a doorstop, or that had an arrowhead collection (twice I saw Clovis points!) on display as some kind of mark of — what? I’m not sure. Probably that this was a measure of how well you knew your land, of how long you and your father and grandfather had been in the country. It was a kind of boast of your prowess and your authenticity in this place. But most people who displayed their collections and pointed them out to the visitor did so in a mildly puzzled way, as if by finding and collecting these artifacts they had still not managed to join themselves with them. These relics of the past were still, in some indefinable sense, a mystery. Long after Peter was gone, I visited a modern house out on the land that had on its front lawn two actual iron-bound wooden barrels full of such artifacts as I’ve listed, all washed and polished and sitting there, serving no purpose whatsoever.
I think that digging out the past and preserving it is not merely an avocation for a few, whimsical and time-filling, but an authentic drive to know who we are. It also represents an authentic drive to honour and respect in particular the people who, whether they knew it or not, or meant to do it or not, contributed in some degree — small or great — to who we are today. Thus, when I hear of farmers or ranchers refusing to allow archaeologists on their land, who remove ancient stone features such as cairns and tipi rings in order to use the stones for other purposes, or in order to plow the land under the features, I am always angered. Even the fact of the precious Clovis points sitting in private houses when they should be in museum collections where all of us can see them seems to me selfish (not to mention illegal). Memory plays an enormous part in our ability to function each day, even to get dressed in the morning — think of a person with advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s disease who without memory is no longer the individual we knew and loved — but it also is a collective power. It magnifies us, gives us meaning in the scheme of things. This was, in part, what drove me to study the past of the southwest.
One day during my first year as a resident it finally crystallized that I hadn’t seen any Indigenous people around on the streets or in the stores, and that none lived in the village or on the land surrounding it. In Saskatchewan, Aboriginal people were a part of daily life, even if there was a hard although unspoken boundary between us and them. In the bush where I was born they had sometimes worked for my father in the sawmill and pitched their tipis in the field behind our log house, where the women’s lives sometimes — rarely — crossed with ours; after that, in villages, they would come through in the summer, mostly in horse-drawn wagons, and the women would sell wild berries they had picked or rag rugs they had made. In Saskatoon, it was probably not until the sixties that they became a familiar part of city life, and in the years that followed, they began to be lawyers, doctors, teachers, social workers, and full-time artists and, occasionally, legislators and politicians.
In a province where, according to the 2011 census, 10 percent of the population was First Nations (having grown from a lower number, perhaps 6 to 7 percent) and in which 11.3 percent of the total Canadian population of Aboriginal people (1.4 million) lived, to suddenly find myself in an area where there was almost never a single Aboriginal person anywhere I went seemed ominous. When I asked, I was told that they could be found in Maple Creek, to the north on the far side of the Cypress Hills, and then, that they had a small reserve up in the hills, which did not answer my question as to why they weren’t a part of our daily lives as they were in the places in the province from where I had come.
In my 2005 non-fiction book, Lilac Moon: Dreaming of the Real West, I wrote about the long, sorrowful, and savage story of what we Euro-Canadians did to the First Peoples of this land, a story that ought by law to be taught in all schools. Earlier, in doing research for The Perfection of the Morning, I had located and drawn on a shocking article by Western historian John Tobias (1942–2009) of Red Deer College in Red Deer, Alberta, called “Canada’s Subjugation of the Plains Cree, 1879–1885” (first published in Canadian Historical Review in 1983). It tells the painful story of how the government of Canada rid itself of the Plains Cree, or did its best to do so, by starving them into submission. This deliberate government policy was carried out by the North-West Mounted Police, now the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
The plains peoples were weakened by the demise of the bison, but for thousands of years, until the contact era, the number of people was small enough and the habitual round of hunting such that the numbers of bison grew, rather than decreased. Once contact was established and the bison hide became valuable to whites as well as to Indigenous people, hunting was stepped up, until those millions of bison shrank to a handful. From the late 1870s up to about 1885, people began to starve, and searched in vain for herds, and when they were desperate enough, they turned to the usurpers of their lands for food, to be told they would be given rations only if they “took treaty.” Most of them did so, and any chiefs who held out, in their wisdom knowing well what lay ahead, were so pressured by their hungry band members that eventually they acquiesced. “Taking treaty” meant that (although this was negotiated doggedly by the Native leaders) they would leave southwest Saskatchewan and the Cypress Hills area, where at the height of the crisis thousands had congregated, and go to reserves to the north or to the east. According to historian Blair Stonechild, “Between 1880 and 1885 the Indian population dropped from 32,549 to 20,170.” As I have noted, only a small group of stubborn people refused to leave, led by a Cree man named Nekaneet. They survived in the Cypress Hills, where eventually they were given a reserve called Nekaneet. The First Nations leaders, not being fools, had done their best to be granted contiguous reserves, which would have meant that almost all of southwest Saskatchewan would have been one vast Indian land, but this the authorities would never allow. That explains why in 1975 or 1976 one could travel through southwest Saskatchewan, aside from Maple Creek, without seeing an Indigenous face. And yet, as terrible as this story is, that is also how I was able to find scrapers and flakes, circles and cairns everywhere on unplowed land. If I was starting to understand that we were walking on dinosaurs, I was also starting to comprehend that we were all living on First Nations land.
One day Peter told me to draw my eye along the top line of the hills until I came to the place where the valley wall turned north, and there, at the very top of that point, was a bump. Eventually we went to see what the “bump” actually was. It was an Indigenous cairn, a large one, in the highest corner of a farmer’s field, with a long view out over the valley in three directions. We did not know ourselves what the cairn represented, but we did know that one just like it on the same side of the valley, but twenty or more miles away, had been excavated by a couple of kids, I think in the thirties, and that eventually archaeologists had come and done a proper job and had found the arranged bones of five individuals beneath it that they dated to about twenty-five hundred years ago. We thus could assume that this cairn was actually a grave.
These strange hillsides dotted with rocks of all kinds and sizes — not really hills for the most part, but the sloping valley walls — had once been covered with as much as a two-mile-thick coating of glacial ice. The melting back of glaciers in this area had begun as long as ten to fourteen thousand years ago. Thus, the artifacts and features couldn’t be any older than when the land was first bared after the retreat of the glaciers. As everybody knows, glaciers scrape and gouge in one place while dropping deposits in another, and they carry material from one place and may well drop it a thousand miles or more away. The field I walked in contained a surprising, almost amusing mixture of all kinds of rocks side by side or on top of each other and from sometimes faraway places, resting beside rocks formed on the very place they sat. I remembered: igneous, metamorphic, sedimentary. I knew granite when I saw it (or I thought I did), and many of the rocks in the field looked as if they were made of compressed mud or earth; I was sure they had to be sedimentary. I bought an elementary-level book on rocks, but once I had mastered the most rudimentary information, I gave up, never having developed a deep interest in the subject.
A lot more interesting to me were the tracks, trails, and evidence of Indigenous life in the field. If I could not fully grasp the distance between my current self and the dinosaurs, and found rocks themselves barely interesting, it was much more within my comprehension to accept the lives of Indigenous peoples, on the land around us.
I walked the field, year after year, for thirty years. I even wrote a book, Wild Stone Heart: An Apprentice in the Fields, about it. I began learning things about the more recent past, the past since the retreat of the glaciers. I bolstered what I saw with my own eyes by a search for books that would answer questions such as one of my first pressing queries: Who were the people who left these traces of their civilization behind? And Why are there no First Nations people in the area where I live when it is covered with the features and artifacts of their ancestors? Toward the last of my years on the land, I was appointed to the arm’s-length board that manages money the provincial government provides to support professional people as well as civic-minded amateur committees working in the heritage area. Not only did I learn a multitude of things about my province both pre- and post-contact, but I began to be acquainted with archaeologists, some of them specializing in the area where I lived.
Whether they meant to or not, they began to teach me. They pointed me to books I might read, or even sent me fascinating papers they had written: I remember in particular David Meyer’s The Red Earth Crees, 1860–1960, which concerns the Indigenous people in the area where I was born and spent my early childhood. One of the archaeologists, Margaret Hanna, after visiting with an elder and a First Nations man who acted as liaison in such matters between First Nations interests and (I presume) government and private interests, would later bring a crew who set to work photographing and mapping one of the most fascinating features in the field.
Besides the most obvious features, which were the cairns and the stone circles we thought might be tipi rings, there were rocks from which it was clear chunks had been broken off to make tools. The flakes lay scattered below them. As well, there was a possible bison drive line, and a circle not more than a foot in diameter at another high point with a flat stone buried in its centre. Other clearly man-made features, including the largest circle that on examination I, at least, believed to be a turtle effigy, were harder to name. This was the one mapped one hot summer afternoon by Dr. Hanna’s crew. I owe the archaeologists a debt too large to ever be repaid.
One day I thought that it would be possibly informative to pretend that I was a First Nations woman from pre-contact times and that the season was not winter, and that we were not at war. What if I came into this field planning to stay a few days? Suppose I entered from the east? I went to the east edge of the field, considered, and decided that I would not walk at the top of the field, where my silhouette could be seen from a long distance; that, travelling on foot and quite likely with a child on my back, I wouldn’t be climbing each hill but would negotiate the easiest path — that is, the middling-height draws between the hills. I set out, picking my way carefully, and at the first draw — I could hardly believe it — I saw a couple of small tipi rings, off to one side of the invisible path I’d chosen. They were the size my reading had told me “the People” used when they were travelling. This was a past that I could grasp, and I felt in some way that I had connected to the people of the past.
After I had begun to try to see patterns in the things I was finding and where I was finding them, I understood that the women, who were the ones who prepared the hides and also the foods and the sage and sweetgrass for ceremonies, liked to sit on these low hills to work. This was where I found scrapers. I knew very soon that to pick these artifacts up and take them home was not only against the law but pointless. Out of their milieu they lost their story, became more and more meaningless. Sometimes I even wondered if, when I took them home, I was committing a crime against those ancestors who had passed through, lived for brief periods, fought and died there and whose remains were buried all around me. So I left them where they were.
My research told me the complex story of people who had crossed this country and camped in it long before there were any national or international boundaries on the continent, had stayed to hunt and fish and gather the edible plants with which they were so familiar. First Nations groups each had, of course, their own territory and their own agreements about who could go in safety on the other’s land and under what circumstances. External factors post-contact were very important. Smallpox epidemics were devastating to a people who lived far from the crowded, unsanitary cities of Europe and North America. One had so weakened the Gros Ventre and the Shoshone as to drive them farther south into the United States. But the major factor was the slaughter of the bison. It is reported that the last bison was seen in the Cypress Hills area in the late 1870s, but prior to that, the bulk of the remaining animals had escaped farther and farther west out of Cree territory and into Blackfoot lands. When the Cree had run out of them in their own lands for food (and the dozens of other purposes for which they were used), they began to make dangerous forays farther west into Blackfoot territory.
Not long after I had read about this historical period, my sister brought her coastal First Nations friend, an elder and fluent speaker of her own language, with her to visit. Never one to miss an opportunity to find out anything I could about the field, I told the woman about it, and we made a foray through it where nothing much was said. That evening the three of us walked down the dirt trail that follows the river between the house yard, the hay fields, and the hills beyond. We talked about nothing much as we strolled, and darkness began to fall, and then, suddenly she turned, went into the hay field, and scrambled up to the top of a big round bale, a feat in itself, but she did it as if it had stairs attached to its side.
She called out to the field in her own language. A moment later she called to us, asking couldn’t we see the people moving fast about the field, which we could not, but both my sister and I heard the eerie, wailing call that came back to us from deep, deep in the darkness of the hillside. Later, we came to believe that the cairns must be graves. The field was more or less along the boundary between the Blackfoot and Cree territories, and we knew from historical accounts that as food dried up in Cree territory, the Cree moved west to encroach on the Blackfoot territory, and battles were fought. These battles culminated in a famous one in 1870 at the junction of the Oldman River and the St. Mary River in what is now near Lethbridge, Alberta, where many were killed, especially Cree, who lost more than two hundred warriors. After that, the Blackfoot and the Cree reached an accord that allowed all to hunt for food on Blackfoot land. I hasten to point out that this is the historians’ account of what happened. I do not know the Cree stories, nor the Blackfoot version of events.
And yet, one suspects an uneasy truce. Recently when a distant relative of mine by marriage, whose father is Cree, married a Blackfoot man and reported, laughing, that all the Blackfoot women who met her declared at once, cheerfully, to her husband-to-be, “Oh! You are marrying a Cree woman!” I could imagine their eyes — those of the husband-to-be and the women of his reserve — meeting, and in their gazes the knowledge of the old history of alliances and wars, of acrimony and death, and, finally, truce. I envision a day when our schools begin teaching history that includes what is known of the movements and belief systems of the Indigenous people of this country, accepting this as real history, and as vital as that of the nations and continents from which the settlers came.
The elder who came to the field said softly to us, gazing up to the cairns on a nearby hill, “Lot of people died here.” And another First Nations woman I met said she knew all the stories about where I lived and would come and tell them to me, but she never did, and I was not able to find her again. I accepted ruefully that it had been decided that I was not to know. Yet, with our continuing history of appalling racism toward the Indigenous peoples, I cannot blame her (or others) for this. Slowly, over the years, I came to know by these ways recounted above that the field was not just stones and hardpan, wide patches of creeping juniper, greasewood, sage, and cactus: the field was a repository of Canadian history.
I had learned about the cairns and what they probably represented; I had found scrapers and flakes and rocks where I could see the stone had been broken off to make points and other tools. One day I even found a cylindrical stick about six inches long with a diameter of about an inch (or more), carved out of white quartz, and a small white sphere beside it of the same material. As had become my practice, I left them there on the hillside. When I went back to find them again, I could not, even though I had marked mentally with great care where they were. I did eventually find both a white quartz stick and sphere, but they had been so damaged by age and the elements that I wasn’t sure they were the ones I saw the first time. This is just a mystery and it has no explanation. An archaeologist friend suggested that the stick and the sphere might have been used for gaming or in spiritual practices.
There was another layer to the field that I have touched upon in this chapter, and that is the layer where Spirit ruled, where the world of Spirit opened to allow a faithful, respectful observer in. It existed, whatever it was, for me as did the stone cairns and the rings of stones we identified as tipi rings, which some undoubtedly were.
One of these odd circles was on the top of a long, flat hill that ran east–west, at the outer edge of the field and well above the flatland, but far below the highest point. This was a large circle, much larger than the average tipi ring, and it had, at four points around it (or maybe there were five, I’ve forgotten), small gatherings of stones that might once have been outlines of circles attached to it. (In time I would realize, or come to believe, that the structure was, or had been, a depiction of a turtle, a symbol of great power and meaning in the First Nations world.) It took me a very long time to see this last, but on the short westerly end of the hill, there was a pathway marked out in stones that led to the circle above.
Once, when I knew a good deal more about the practices of the ancient peoples, on a summer solstice evening, a time I knew by then to be of utmost importance to the plains people, a cloudless evening when the light was as pure as I’ve seen it in my life so that one might feel it was palpable and filled with force, I dared to climb up into the field and to go to the base of this hill with the path leading up it to the circle on top. The sun threw glowing red light from along the western horizon behind me, across the fields to where I stood at the bottom of the hill. I was beginning to understand. I thought this was a religious site, that at the appropriate moment the sun’s rays would strike perfectly up the path toward the hill, and so I waited, moments only. The sun’s rays at the moment of the sun’s setting didn’t quite match the trajectory of the path running up the hillside, and I would learn that over the centuries those rays would have altered slightly in their direction so that one might reasonably think that maybe several hundred or more years earlier, the path had been marked so that the rays went straight up it. Up I went, slowly, with much trepidation, aware I was never alone in that place, no matter that no flesh-and-blood humans accompanied me, and when I got to the top at the place where the path ended, I stopped dead in my tracks.
Before me, a vertical wall — it has always seemed to me a translucent wall, although perhaps veil is a better word — of red light was thrown up between me and the stone circle I had come to see on the other side of it. I was disoriented, thought I must have made a mistake, wondered for a second if I was on the wrong hill. In my astonishment, I thought to look along the ground in front of me from where the red wall of light seemed to emanate and saw something that in all my trips there I had never before noticed. There was a rough line of rocks that ran north to south, half-buried by time and the blowing, dirt-filled winds, by earth and sparse grass, and that partially misaligned and misshapen line seemed indeed to be so designed that the most powerful red light coming from the sun behind it just before it sank below the horizon on the summer solstice struck it, and threw up the wall of glowing orange-red light.
I didn’t tell the story this way in Wild Stone Heart: I was afraid then to tell too much for fear that people would just write me off as an unhinged person, so I left out that wall of red light. But since I wrote that book more than fifteen years ago, I have grown braver. On that evening so many years ago I stepped through the veil of light and into the middle of the circle, where I stood in silence for only a few seconds until the light began to die, and darkness was filling the hollows and creeping up the hillsides. Then I stepped out of the circle and ran across the hay fields to where Peter was running a tractor.
He stopped for me, I climbed up the tractor’s narrow ladder, he leaning over to grasp my hand to pull me up the last step, and I leaned against him, grateful for his warmth and solidity as he drove us back into the yard. I didn’t tell him what I’d seen; he didn’t know that I was in awe, my awe tempered by fear and a powerful sense that I — we — lived in the heart of mystery, surrounded by the past of people we did not know, but who seemed to know us.
There is one more layer of history present and visible to a careful observer on that one hundred acres I have been referring to as “the field.” It also has what was surely a cellar depression, and other signs that somebody once tried to homestead, if not in that field where he built his house, then just below it on the valley bottom. Whoever he was, he couldn’t have survived more than a year there. The presence of that cellar depression is another reminder of the next layer of civilization to occupy the land of the southwest: the settlers.
In 1872 the government of Canada passed the Dominion Lands Act, whose purpose was to populate the prairie provinces by opening them for farming. This was also deemed necessary in order to secure the prairies from the American conviction called “manifest destiny,” which held that settlers were destined to claim their territory and establish institutions far and wide across the North American continent. If the land was already occupied by Canadians, the American desire to fill it would be stymied. Part of the national policy of the period was the building of a cross-country railway. This was completed in 1885, but further branch lines had to be built in order to reach into all the newly settled areas and to help settlers transport themselves and their goods. Any village not close enough to a railway branch line soon faded and died.
Under the act, for a fee of $10, and by fulfilling certain other conditions such as breaking so much land per year, building a dwelling on it, and remaining in residence for a minimum of six months of the year, any adult male could acquire 160 acres, with a provision to acquire another 160, called a pre-emption, roughly when the conditions on the first 160 acres were met. At first settlement was slow, but when Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier appointed Clifford Sifton in 1896 as the federal minster of the interior, Sifton began to vigorously promote the settlement of Western Canada in the United States, Britain, and especially in east-central Europe. Unfortunately, the agents spreading out through Europe exaggerated (or simply didn’t tell the truth about) conditions, insisting that “the rain follows the plow” (patently untrue), and that the weather on the prairies was balmy all year round and the soil miraculously fertile (these last two, for the most part, worse than not true). In some places the soil was indeed abundantly fertile, but in others it certainly was not, and as for the insistence on balmy weather — well, one forty-below winter day would clear up any misapprehensions on that score.
Over the next twenty-five or so years a quarter of a million settlers came from the United States alone, and in total over two million from Europe, Britain, the United States, as well as Ontario and Quebec, and mostly under difficult conditions and suffering considerable hardship, they began to create farms out of the native prairie and into the parklands. Everywhere small towns and villages sprang up to support them, and with the railway crawling past (some but not all of) their towns, the prairie provinces went in a few years from being “empty” (rarely were the Indigenous people counted in such a declaration) to being occupied and “civilized.” The Dominion Lands Act was closed in 1930, but by then, just about all the free land of the prairie West was taken.
Government preparations to receive this flood of people from Europe and the British Isles were inadequate. People were allowed to come in the late summer or in the fall when no gardens could be planted and no food supply was otherwise available for them. Most of these people had no money to speak of except for the basic amount needed to pay the $10 fee to secure their homestead land, and to buy farming implements and an animal or two, no “fallback” position such as staying in the city until spring and then going out to find their land. Many of them did not speak English; many were from towns and cities and had never farmed. That anybody survived at all in those days is a wonder.
It was hard for everyone, the men who never stopped working, the children who were expected to work every minute they weren’t in school or asleep, but it was especially hard on the women. Peter’s mother, Alice Graham Butala, a highly intelligent woman who had been raised in a longer-established farming community in southern Manitoba (the Graham farm there was established in 1885), often said that the rules that applied to the original settlers in order for them to maintain ownership of their 160 acres made no sense. She was referring chiefly to the strict residency requirements which meant that, with the pre-emption (another 160 acres), all farm families were isolated. But, as she would point out, it was the women who were particularly isolated. They rarely went “to town,” unlike the men, who travelled there over rough roads to get parts for their machinery, or to have things fixed, or to pick up the mail, or to buy feed. She would know about this, having married her husband in the early thirties and lived with him and their growing family on the ranch that is still remote today, into the mid-sixties. When Peter’s father, George, became ill, Peter had to take him out to the hospital on his snowmobile to the truck that in winter he kept four miles south in the village of Divide, where the road was maintained in winter.
She told me that year after year of prolonged isolation caused an immense loneliness, a yearning just to see the face of another woman; no family could fully satisfy such deep-seated human needs. As well, the roads were poor to non-existent in the early years, which made for serious difficulty in delivering the services settlers needed: medical care, schooling for the children, supplies, and building materials. She declared that it would have been more reasonable if small villages were established, with the farm owner-workers driving out each day to the land to work as is done in Europe, the very Europe from which Peter’s father had fled.
I think of my mother, married in 1935, going into the bush to live around 1937. Eventually she had her own mother living a mile to the north, for a while, and two miles to the south, one of her sisters. But when she woke in the night (on two occasions) having a miscarriage, when our father was away and she had only toddlers at home, there was no one to run up or down the grassy trail through the forest in the night to either of her female relatives for help. To the day she died she was proud of how she handled the bleeding, which fortunately eventually stopped on its own, and always said with pride that, both times, in the morning she stuffed the sheet she had wrapped around herself, now blood-soaked, into the burning barrel and burned it. “And no one even knew.” Multiply that story by a thousand-fold, or perhaps even more.
If the promised prosperity really had come in the first few years, all of this would have been bearable, but it did not come. The homesteading failure rate was about 60 percent in the worst areas (overall it is estimated to be about 50 percent; in Saskatchewan it was set at about 57 percent), and to some extent it had been predicted long before the land was opened for settlers. For the Butalas had settled in the Palliser Triangle, an area of land of about 73,000 square miles of the Great Plains of North America, extending through southern Saskatchewan and into Alberta with its apex south of Edmonton, although if you look at early maps which vary somewhat, and read the first description of it, you would find that southwestern Manitoba was originally included. For the most part, the soil in the triangle is poor and light brown in colour, and is known for its aridity. When I lived there, the average annual precipitation was surprisingly only about twelve inches. Yet the climate is extreme.
The triangle takes its name from John Palliser, an Irishman sent by the British on expeditions between 1857 and 1860 — he was preceded by the Henry Youle Hind expedition — to evaluate the suitability of these western lands for farming. Palliser declared them to be mostly unfit for it because of the too-arid climate, the poor quality of the soil, and the lack of trees for fuel and building. This too had been the conclusion of the Hind report. A further expedition in 1872 by botanist John Macoun, a report that was most optimistic and enthusiastic (as apparently was the man himself), turned the tables by declaring most of the area to be fertile and good for farming, encouraging the federal government, which was looking for just such an excuse, to open this area to settlers. It is said that Macoun must have made his expedition during an unusually wet year so that the country was flourishing, instead of in its more usual state of near desert-like conditions. Whatever the reasons, it suited the government to populate an area so close to the American border with loyal new Canadians.
When I was only eighteen in 1958, I had a part-time job in the archives then at the University of Saskatchewan, where my work was to take the stacks of files of the original settlers and gather a certain few pertinent facts — land description, names of settlers, years of ownership, correspondence with the government — and reduce it to a single filing card. Every once in a while I would come across a handwritten letter, sometimes composed by a neighbour because the settler in question was illiterate in English, telling the most indelibly sad story of why the land hadn’t been “proved up” yet, according to the requirements of the Dominion Lands Act. Such stories: Over the winter my wife and all my children died of diphtheria. . . . I walked a hundred miles to [the nearest small town] to look for work and when I didn’t find any, I walked all the way back again. . . . A neighbour brought us food when we had only frozen potatoes to eat, and saved our lives. . . . My wife died in childbirth. . . . These were not nicely typed missives on thick vellum; they were written more often on scraps of paper, scrawled, often with errors in grammar and syntax. But they brought home to me in a way the government documents or the history books I was reading in class could never capture the reality of the despair and pain of far too many of those people. That I remember them so well nearly sixty years after I saw them is evidence of that.
Where did the women out on the land find nourishment for their female souls other than in their children, and indeed, how could they hope to raise truly educated children in such an environment? It isn’t just the simple loneliness, as it is the sense of bleakness of the life for those who couldn’t fully hide from themselves the need for “something more” that their hearts yearned for, the utter lack of opportunities beyond marriage and children that slowly kills the female soul. And if you happened to come from a non-English-speaking country, how complete the alienation must have been.
This is not the story the people of the area tell you, or, if they do, they tell it to you in dribs and drabs in an almost mythic way: a single tale of a young man going white-haired overnight after he had lost another crop; of the row of babies’ graves in the cemetery who died by fire (a constant worry in frame buildings) or disease; of the boy riding his horse every day in all weather, miles to school, and one day dragged to death by it; of the relative losing his way in a blizzard and found frozen in a field or on the trail; of the women rendered mad or nearly so by overwork, too many pregnancies and children, and unending loneliness. The primary story is the one of how hard the early settlers worked so that their descendants, today’s owners, might rest in the prosperity they claim today. But such a bitter beginning extracts a toll from the generations that follow. People don’t emerge optimistic from such a history; they are more likely to be proud, careful with their money, suspicious of outsiders. Kindness can be thin and rare. Generosity is too often seen as foolishness. That original promise of free land, of salvation, hangs there in the air still.
Of course, such inherited hardship also creates kind people. The all-night schoolhouse dances in the early days, the fowl suppers, the neighbourliness, the love among family members, the devotion of mothers and fathers, the respect of young women for old and of middle-aged men for the old men who gave their lives to their small enterprises.
I was starting to understand that from the extinction of the dinosaurs to the heart-rending history of the First Nations people and then of so many people who left Europe filled with hope for the future and who met only with failure and loss, hardship and suffering, the history of this land was in many ways a tragic one.
Peter, being human (and judged by me), had his shortcomings, but he knew one thing with every fibre of his being: how precious his land was. He knew too, though, that he was very fortunate in that he could afford to keep his grass in excellent condition because he hadn’t married — deliberately, he claimed — until he was forty-one and established financially. He told me many times that by marrying young, men guaranteed that the financial pressure involved in raising a family meant that they would not be able to take any of their land out of production in order to rest it for a year or several years as he sometimes did; that they would have to put too many head of cattle on their grass, which would result in damage to the grass, and as the roots weakened, invader plants such as crested wheatgrass, or forbs such as sage, would crowd out the nutritious and cattle-friendly native plants. As our years together passed, he cut back his herd more and more in order to preserve the quality of the prairie under his control.
I admired a good deal more about him than only his love and care of his land. He minded his own business, kept silent when others might have gossiped or spread cruel stories. He placed a high value on his father’s dictum that he should care for his mother and his sisters and tried his best to look out for them, and did his — admittedly, distant — best where Sean was concerned, wanting to take responsibility, yet careful not to overstep boundaries for a boy who was close to his father. He loved his old friends and was loyal to them too, the men he had cowboyed with when he was young, and whose rodeo adventures he followed and admired. He had struggled too hard to maintain what he had acquired to be wildly generous (despite what some of the neighbours apparently thought, he was never a rich man), but he helped a number of people, quietly, behind the scenes. He didn’t seem to have any ambition to become a prominent community member other than by being a successful, knowledgeable rancher, one who could be turned to for advice about cattle or horses; if asked, he willingly gave it.
The older he got, the more he cared for his animals and the harder it became for him to do some of the things that the ranching enterprise required. Castrating young bulls or horses was something he would have preferred never to do again, and he particularly loathed de-horning as very painful to the animal and needlessly cruel; he even commented with disgust on the large size of some brands on animals we saw in the sale ring or elsewhere as causing them unnecessary pain. He refused to try to produce bigger and bigger calves at birth because of the danger and suffering this caused his cows. For most of the years we were married and sold cattle, we didn’t plan for early calves in order to sell them in the same fall, but sold instead “big” steers, those a year or even two years old. Thus, having very large calves at birth wasn’t necessary as, by the time the animals were sold, they had had plenty of time to grow to a good size. If this attitude to ranching sounds unusual, I suspect that it is, but more than once coming home from helping work animals on another ranch he remarked that some of the older men agreed with him. Once he came home saying he would never help out on that ranch again because the family who owned it did not look after its animals well enough, didn’t keep them in clean bedding or get them the help of the veterinarian in time, especially did not recognize their right to be free of pain. Being “hard” on your animals is a quality in a rancher or farmer that is detested by rural people of quality, of which Peter was one.
All of these were things that I loved about him, was sometimes in awe over, because, taken together, in my experience they were rare. And of course, they culminated in his ultimate determination that his land would not be sold to farmers and broken into separate pieces when he died; that the land he so cherished and nurtured, gave even his potential prosperity to, would be kept in one block and never broken; that the native prairie would be kept, in perpetuity, in excellent condition. He dreamt, too, of the day when there would be native bison back living on it again. I was thirty-six when I married Peter, and it took me time to appreciate the quiet depth of his character. Though both of us might be embarrassed by declarations of undying love (I am sure he is looking over my shoulder as I write this, and can imagine his sheepish grin and his turning away if I had written anything like that), I never stopped thinking myself fortunate to have him as my husband.
Nobelist writer J. M. Coetzee remarked that every writer’s life in art goes through three stages and “in the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question.” In my early days in Saskatchewan, living on layers of history, this was my “great question”: What is a human life worth?
Of course, I’m not sure I knew that at the time, formulating it explicitly only in hindsight. The more I found out about prairie history and the history of the region where I’d gone to live with Peter, and also remembering my own family history, the more I pondered that question. One of the first and strongest of many things that struck me about the local culture was, delivered without fanfare or even the raising of a voice, the wisdom that came from the mouths of people with little or no formal education. Usually from old people, and I marvelled at how much suffering they must have seen, and how much thinking they must have done about it, and how humbly accepting of it they seemed to be. Coming from a university community as I had, I had grown to expect that you had to have at least a PhD and have written many books, and read many more, to be able to speak wisdom, and I was humbly disabused of such a notion.
Of the number of things I wanted to do in my books, one of the more important ones was to convey to the dubious urban reader the wisdom of rural people, this in order to show that to dismiss them out of hand, as was the habit of most urban people, was absolute foolishness. I wanted very much to show in my books that there are other ways to gain wisdom and understanding of the human condition than in the study of the writings of others, and that a rural life, seen as ignominious at the least, was worth every bit as much as an urban life lived in sophisticated surroundings, and with many more opportunities of the kind rural people could usually only dream of: wide travel, meetings with the famous and esteemed of the world, and familiarity with great discoveries and great music, with literature and the visual arts. I marvelled over how a life lived so close to the bone could teach so much about the human soul.
When I thought about this matter, I would lift my eyes and gaze out across the acres of grass empty of people and buildings all the way to the distant horizon, feeling the wind playing around me, it rarely stopping unless at sunset or at sunrise, when the world seemed to be catching its breath to pause in wonder, as I was, gazing at the luminescence of land and sky. Living in the bosom of nature all their lives, I thought, how could rural people not be fully aware, even in their blood and bones, of the mystery of human existence? This was what I ached to write, although I did not know how to do it, and could only keep trying and trying again, and knowing with each publication that I had failed in my aim, had fallen short of it. I often thought of the old saw that says that every writer has only one book in him or her and just keeps writing it over and over again. That was me, I thought, and book after book, I dreamt of the day when I would finally get it right, knowing all the while that without Peter to guide and teach me, I couldn’t do it.