Shannon Stunden Bower. Transforming the Prairies: Agricultural Rehabilitation and Modern Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2024. 315 pgs., ISBN 9780774870405.
Reviewed by Patrick Lee.
Shannon Stunden Bower’s book, Transforming the Prairies: Agricultural Rehabilitation and Modern Canada, analyzes the actions of the Canadian Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Agency (PFRA), a federal government organization, from its creation in 1935 to its elimination in 2009. Stunden Bower’s study draws on federal and provincial government documents to convincingly argue that, while the PFRA was designed to remedy damages to Prairie environments during Euro-Canadian settlement (specifically soil degradation), the agency also transformed Prairie landscapes and agricultural practices. She argues that these transformations were designed to promote high-modernist ideals, modernize Prairie agricultural techniques, and consolidate the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.
Stunden Bower presents a survey of the PFRA’s actions across the three Prairie provinces and, in one chapter, the nation of Ghana. Chapter one outlines how the PFRA was created by the federal government to build stability and prosperity in Prairie agriculture. Stunden Bower complicates this origin story by arguing that certain recommendations offered by the PFRA created as many farming issues as they attempted to solve. For example, the PFRA’s recommendation of strip farming as a means to prevent soil damage led to increased infestations of wheat stem sawflies that reduced harvests. Chapter two studies the southern Alberta sugar beet industry during the early twentieth century, arguing that PFRA actions during the 1930s and 1940s were sometimes racially motivated. To show this, Stunden Bower argues that the PFRA funded irrigation projects in southern Alberta that mostly benefited white sugar beet farmers, yet the agency failed to support the largely non-white sugar beet labourers who were negotiating for better working conditions.
Chapter three focuses on the PFRA’s community pasture program, arguing that though many saw the program as a success, community pastures promoted livestock intensification and the transformation of Prairie landscapes into settler-colonial environments. Chapters four and five concentrate on the PFRA’s contribution in the reshaping of the South Saskatchewan River system, and how the disruption of the river system negatively impacted Indigenous peoples in Southern Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba. Chapter six moves out of the Prairies, showing how the PFRA was deployed in Ghana and tasked with designing irrigation projects and training Ghanaian civil servants in agriculture and irrigation. Though this chapter takes the narrative outside of the Prairies, Stunden Bower effectively uses the Ghana example to show how the expert knowledge of the PFRA was sometimes ineffective because it failed to incorporate local knowledge. Chapter seven outlines the 1960s and 1970s as the period of PFRA decline in scale and authority, largely because of federal spending cuts. Through these seven chapters, Stunden Bower stresses the need to take a critical approach when determining the success of PFRA actions.
Transforming the Prairies serves as an exemplary text to illustrate the environmental and political interconnectivity between Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. This is apparent in chapter four, which focuses on the South Saskatchewan River system and the construction of dams in Saskatchewan. Stunden Bower shows that river transformations in Saskatchewan disrupted water flows and landscapes within Alberta and Manitoba. These changes to river flows altered animal migration and fish runs, which disadvantaged Cree, Métis, and other Indigenous peoples along the river system who relied on hunting and fishing. Stunden Bower also explains that the building of the Saskatchewan River dams in Saskatchewan prevented dam construction projects that Manitoba and Alberta had planned along the same river, creating tension between the Prairie provinces. The book shows that though the Prairie provinces have their own unique histories and political identities, the actions of one sometimes affect the environments and politics of the others.
This monograph covers a fascinating period in Canadian agricultural history that sometimes is oversimplified or misunderstood by those unfamiliar with recent Prairie histories. I greatly appreciated that Stunden Bower referenced James H. Gray’s Men Against the Desert at the start of her text, along with her attention to other foundational Prairie histories, such as Gerald Friesen’s The Canadian Prairies: A History, and Barry Potyondi’s In Palliser’s Triangle: Living in the Grasslands, 1850-1930. She argues how these texts either focus on narratives of success or critique capitalist expansion. Stunden Bower also points out that these other works depict the PFRA as a bulwark against environmental degradation or an effort by the federal government to rectify the damages created during homesteading and expansion. Her work challenges these narratives and extends the story of the Prairies to show that the establishment of homesteads not only caused harm to the land, but also transformed connections with nature and established systems that prioritized settler-colonial ways of life.
Stunden Bower shows the difficulty in flatly categorizing the PFRA’s actions using terms such as high-modernist, low-modernist, or technocratic. Instead, she provides examples of the PFRA acting as high-modernist, low-modernist and technocratic, sometimes during the same period. She draws from James C. Scott and describes high-modernism as a process of environmental change directed by state-sponsored experts, in this case, the federal government. One example Stunden Bower provides of the PFRA exhibiting high-modernist actions was the development of Diefenbaker Lake and other irrigation projects along the South Saskatchewan River system. Stunden Bower draws from Jess Gilbert and defines low-modernism as decentralized programs that rely on local individuals collaborating with experts to make meaningful change to environments. An example of this, according to Stunden Bower, is the creation of District Experimental Substations that were designed by the PFRA to test agricultural methods created across the prairies. Lastly, Stunden Bower portrays the PFRA as technocratic in how it elevated the knowledge of state-sponsored experts against local knowledge. She argues that this technocratic tendency largely contributed to the PFRA’s failed foray into the water development project in Ghana. Though the author shows many of the PFRA actions being akin to the high-modernism James C. Scott defines, by demonstrating that certain PFRA actions are better understood as low-modernist or technocratic, she adds complexity to the understanding of Canadian high-modernism and shows that PFRA actions can not easily be condensed into one kind of ideology.
One of the great strengths of Transforming the Prairies is its inclusion of Indigenous perspectives. The book draws from Indigenous scholarship to highlight the impact that PFRA policies tailored to Prairie rehabilitation had on the Métis peoples of Ste. Madeleine and Mistasiniy. Both communities were destroyed by PFRA actions, which according to Stunden Bower, was justified by PFRA leadership because they believed that Indigenous peoples would not capitalize on the agricultural supports offered by the agency. Ste. Madeleine was razed and the land was made into a community pasture, and Mistansiniy was flooded during the creation of Lake Diefenbaker. Additionally, Stunden Bower focuses on how dam construction changed the landscapes and activities of the Cree and other Indigenous peoples living in the Saskatchewan River Delta and in southern Alberta. New water systems changed water levels and limited access to animal and fish populations for Indigenous communities, which not only increased the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, but also further promoted settler-colonist ways of life, pushing some to take labour positions as farmhands or working at developing community pastures. This portion of Stunden Bower’s work forms a strong connection between Prairie agricultural history and Indigenous history that has not been included in many previous Western settler histories, while also bringing to light issues instigated by the PFRA that still impact Indigenous communities today.
Transforming the Prairies is a wonderful addition to the growing scholarship on Canadian Prairie history. It pairs well with works examining high-modernism and technocracy, such as Negotiating a River, by Daniel Macfarlane, and Made Modern, edited by Edward Jones-Imhotep and Tina Adcock, as it shows that the definitions of these political characterizations do not always fit nicely in Canadian examples. It is a book about a federal government environmental agency engaging in large scale policy making, placing it in dialogue with other Canadian environmental histories, such as Tina Loo’s and Meg Stanley’s “An Environmental History of Progress,” Tina Loo’s States of Nature, Joy Parr’s, Sensing Changes, and John Sandlos’ Hunters at the Margins. Additionally, Stunden Bower’s work provides new ways of thinking of the relationship between federal initiatives and their impact on the Western Canadian systems that still exist today, making her work relevant for any Western Canadian or colonial historical scholar.
Patrick Lee
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- Review of Stunden Bower, Transforming the Prairies - December 16, 2025