Episode 48: Ecotones and Saskatchewan History

Download Audio

Subscribe

Arguably, the predominant landscape Canadians generally associate with Saskatchewan is one filled with waving grains of wheat and broad, flat vistas. It is the land of the living skies and one of Canada’s so-called Prairie provinces. And yet so much of Saskatchewan isn’t prairie. In fact, the prairie ecological zone covers only the southernmost part of the province. What about the rest?

Merle Massie confronts this matter in her award-winning book, Forest Prairie Edge: Place History in Saskatchewan. It is a book that takes readers through a different landscape in the province of Saskatchewan and invites us to think about the province’s history from a new perspective: a view from the edge. That is to say, Massie shifts her focus in Saskatchewan history away from the predominant narratives about the prairies and agricultural settlement based on the cultivation of wheat toward the province’s ecotone, the transitional zone between the prairie and the parkland, the forest edge.

It is at the forest edge that Massie finds different ways of thinking about sustainability, European and Euro-Canadian colonization of the West, and other relationships between people and the rest of nature. This episode of the podcast features an interview with Merle Massie about her fascinating new book.

Please be sure to take a moment to review this podcast on our iTunes page.

Guests:

Merle Massie

Works Cited:

Massie, Merle. Forest Prairie Edge: Place History in Saskatchewan. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014.

Harris, R. Cole. “The Spaces of Early Canada” Canadian Historical Review, 91, no. 4 (December 2010): 725-759.

Music Credits:

“Ballad Piano” by Steinier Dominique

“Synthesized piano” by Enriscapes

“Vox Vs. Uke” by Kara Square

Photo Credit:

“A family of six picnic at Waskesiu, Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan, 1950.” Source: Frank Royal. Canada. National Film Board of Canada. Library and Archives Canada, e010955736

Citation:

Kheraj, Sean. “Episode 48: Ecotones and Saskatchewan History” Nature’s Past: Canadian Environmental History Podcast. 27 May 2015.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Sean Kheraj

Associate Professor and Vice-Provost Academic at Toronto Metropolitan University

Sean Kheraj is a member of the executive committee of the Network in Canadian History and Environment. He's an associate professor in the Department of History and Vice-Provost Academic at Toronto Metropolitan University. His research and teaching focuses on environmental and Canadian history. He is also the host and producer of Nature's Past, NiCHE's audio podcast series and he blogs at http://seankheraj.com.

Latest posts by Sean Kheraj (see all)

• Thank You, Friends of NiCHE! - December 2, 2022
• Nature’s Past Episode 76: Methodological Challenges in Animal History - November 30, 2022
• Nature’s Past Episode 75: Uranium Mining at Elliot Lake - June 30, 2022
• How the Interprovincial and Trans Mountain Pipelines Were Approved - April 8, 2022
• Nature’s Past Episode 74: Colonial Legacies of Wood Buffalo National Park - March 28, 2022
• Reindeer at the End of the World: Apocalypse, Climate, and Soviet Dreams - January 25, 2022
• Top 5 Posts of 2021 - January 6, 2022
• 2022 Melville-Nelles-Hoffmann Lecture in Environmental History: Bathsheba Demuth - January 3, 2022
• Thank You - December 20, 2021
• Nature’s Past Episode 73: New Books in Canadian Environmental History - November 15, 2021