In 2023, I began an ongoing collage series called The Enclosure Series. The series is an attempt to reconcile the love and nostalgia I have for the land I visited during childhood, with the deeper history of how land became free for settlement and the Indigenous peoples of Canada dispossessed.
The collages in this ongoing series include my photography from the area, pieces of ephemera found on the farm, and other found paper objects. My grandparents had originally lived on a small piece of land called the ‘home quarter,’ which backed onto Tramping Lake. The farmstead that they lived on, the one I grew up with, was later built about a mile down the road. Although the original home quarter no longer had a building on it, the old foundations were still there, and we would go visit it often. It was surrounded by a small piece of original, virgin prairie, used as a cattle pasture, perched at the edge of the coulee. When my uncle took over the farm and quit raising cattle, he tried to rent the pasture out to neighbors. But by that time, many small family farms in the area had retired and sold their land. The farms that were left were larger, and more specialized, and nobody wanted to rent a small pasture on the edge of a coulee. So, it was plowed under for farm land.
I did not know about this until after it had happened… finding out about it broke my heart. For my uncle, it was a practical decision. For me, it was the loss of the only small piece of true prairie I could claim roots in. Ironically, it illustrated a microcosm: prairie roots run deep, but they can be plowed under in a heartbeat, and I am hardly the first to be dispossessed of them.
There were a lot of things I didn’t know back then, about history and colonialism, but I slowly started making connections – I “did the research,” as they say. In school we were sold the story of the vast, empty Canadian prairies, populated by massive herds of buffalo and small, roaming tribes of Natives. We weren’t taught that Indigenous populations had been already been decimated, at best estimate, by 50% to 90% from the rapid spread of European plagues a hundred years before settlers even arrived in the interior. Later, the truth about residential schools came out. I have since had the incredible privilege of being part of a recording crew that sat with Indigenous Elders and preserved their stories, their trauma, of being taken from loving families at a very young age and being forced to grow up in abusive institutions, and how it impacted their lives. Beneath all this is loss of land and sovereignty.
What I am left with are two things I must reconcile: one, love and nostalgia for the farm and my family, which have given me the most core identity-forming moments of my life; and two, that those opportunities were offered to us by a system that brutally oppressed others, and put a price on land with its only value in production.
The collage series so far has dealt with one part of this equation: the gentle holding of nostalgia. I also think a lot about what parts of the story are mine to tell – and what parts I cannot tread on, because they belong to Indigenous voices and perspectives. There is a tradition in Native storytelling of stating up front that one has the right to tell a particular story, either because it is one’s own experience, or because it was passed on with express permission to share in some manner. I think about this a lot; the answer I keep coming back to is that white people (aka colonizers) and their descendants do need to speak on these things, as they are part of our history, too. And I believe the land needs voices – the more, the better. So much had already disappeared before my generation was born; it is terrible to realize that those tiny pieces that were left are disappearing too.
Learning history allows one to, hopefully, look at current systems with fresh eyes and new perspectives. I have observed that it can be very hard for people to look at the systems they live in as things that are separate from their own cultural identity – when identity feels threatened, it shuts the door on learning. There is a process of grief and confusion that one must be willing to sit with and move through, to acknowledge and begin to understand the greater grief of others.
Sources
For anyone wanting to learn further, there are many good resources out there and perhaps better ones than I have recommend here. However, these are the sources that helped shape my understanding.
The first book I read that put the Indigenous history into perspective was Stolen Continents: Five Hundred Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas, by Ronald Wright. It tells the stories of the conquest and survival of the Aztec, Maya, Inca, Cherokee, and Iroquois. For me, this book set the foundation that almost everything we learned about Indigenous history in school in the ’90’s was wrong, or vastly understated. Wright was one of the first to champion the historical evidence of strong, thriving Indigenous populations that could easily have rebuffed colonizers had they not been decimated by European disease.
The Wicihitowin Indigenous Engagement Conference was held at Wanuskewin, SK, from 2018-2022. The stories that were recorded are not accessible publicly over the internet, but one of the conference panels featuring Survivors Circle speakers can be found here. A list of speakers from the Survivors Circle can be found here. The Survivors Circle speakers had their residential school stories recorded for posterity.
The 2023 CBC Massey Lectures by Astra Taylor gave me a new perspective on the Enclosure Movement in England in the 16th century, where land changed from a shared community resource to an owned commodity. The whole series is worth listening to, but the second lecture in particular is relevant. English rulers perfected a system of land ownership by kicking their own commoners off of common land, before exporting that system to other places. In other words, we did it to ourselves first.