Candace Savage

The impulse to shift people from where they are to where the government wants them to be is a recurring motif in Canadian history. On the prairies, to cite an extreme example and the one that I know best, an official program of relocation lies at the very heart of nation building. The formative gesture of the young Dominion was to clear the ­territory — ­forcing Indigenous peoples to abandon their lands and settle on reserves and filling the emptied space with…

Truth is the first casualty of nation building, and Canada is hardly unique in preferring flights of fancy to bitter lumps of fact. It is sweet to believe that this country was created through peaceful negotiation, without resort to force of arms, through the goodwill of a few dozen bewhiskered, frock-coated gentlemen sequestered in conference rooms. And to think we have been living that dream of compromise and inclusion for the last…

The day after I finished reading Kyo Maclear’s new memoir, Birds Art Life: A Field Guide to the Small and Insignificant, three things happened that took each of her themes in turn. First, we saw the swans. By “we,” I mean me and my partner, Keith—although in emulation of Maclear’s own subdued…

My friend Susan remembers walking on the log sills of the Métis longhouse, but that was decades ago, when she was a child. “I’d say it was about 40 feet long,” she says, tracing a line in the air with her finger, “and there was a pit, some kind of cellar, I guess. The last time I came…

There is no more exciting companion for a walk across the prairies than Trevor Herriot. I have only been out with him once, several years ago, but the experience was unforgettable. It was a big, blue, shining day, and a troupe of us were scrambling across a high, shining expanse of natural grassland in southwestern…