Acknowledgments

Bone Coulee resulted from my exposure to Saskatchewan places, including a buffalo jump. I wanted to include a semblance of that culture in the novel. Maria Campbell had helped me earlier with Andrei and the Snow Walker.  I asked Carol Greyeyes, Kim Morrissey, Brenda Niskala, Valerie Creighton, and Andrea Menard, and they all read an early draft of Bone Coulee. They were gracious in their understandings of my blunders. 

Nicole Hanke-Bear invited me to the drama class in her First Nation’s school. Dana Hansen gave me a replica of a stone duck his grandmother found on the shores of Lake Diefenbaker. Anne Clark showed me quilts. Christopher Walsh explained rodeo bull-riding to me. Frank Orton showed me the buffalo jump across the coulee from his home. 

The Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corporation employed me part-time for ten years, where I encountered the ways and whims of farmers, and their use of the land. I saw its use to grow wheat, and I imagined its use long ago when it nourished the buffalo herds. 

Geoffrey Ursell carried me through several drafts of Bone Coulee, and at one point suggested I make an abrupt turn. I should narrate in the voice of a prairie farmer of Ukrainian background, rather than of English, and the narration changed.

For over two decades I’ve belonged to our Revisionists’ Writing Group in the Village of Beechy. Lois Meaden offered advice taken from her life as a rancher in the Coteau Hills. Margareta Fleuter shared her experiences from her twenty-five years of teaching school to First Nation children at Montreal Lake. And through all my time with these Revisionists, Sharon MacFarlane has dogged my work with her insistence for clarity. To my editor, Jake MacDonald, I give thanks for digging up the broken doll, and to Nik Burton for asking Jake MacDonald to be my editor.

I thank Mavis, who through all of this, has had to live with me. To all here mentioned, and to the many I’ve missed, I am ever grateful.