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 the series so far include photos I took of the area around this land, and pieces of ephemera found on the farm. When I was growing up, the original home quarter no longer had a house on it, but the old foundations were still there. It was surrounded by a small piece of original, virgin prairie that was used as a cattle pasture, perched at the edge of Tramping Lake 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, but I 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 think it’s important to start here, because that’s the beginning of the story for me, and to walk anyone through the story requires a good beginning. I am also thinking a lot about what next part of the story is mine to tell – what parts I cannot tread on, because they belong to Indigenous voices and perspectives. There is a grounding tradition in Native storytelling of stating whether one has the right to tell a particular story, either because it is one’s own experience, or because it was passed on to the person 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 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 when I was young; it is terrible and incredible to realize now that those small pieces that were left can disappear too.
Learning history allows one to, hopefully, look at current systems with fresh eyes and new perspectives. I have observed that it’s very hard for people to begin 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 presence of the greater grief of others.
Resources
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. This book set the foundation that almost everything we learned about Indigenous history in school in the ’90’s, was wrong. Wright was one of the first voices 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 2023 CBC Massey Lectures by Astra Taylor gave me a valuable new perspective of 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 first 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.