Herd Mentality

Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge opens in the late 1870s with a hunting party searching for a new buffalo herd: “They’ll come back. They always do. It might not be this year. It might not be in my lifetime. It might not be in your lifetime. But they’ll come back. These prairies were meant for the bison and we were meant to follow them, to work with them, to respect them. The bison are the land just as much as we are.” This passage encapsulates the premise of Kerr’s novel, a dark and gripping imagining of the “Land Back” movement in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

The buffalo do return to the prairies, though not via the expected means. Like Avenue of Champions, Kerr’s debut from 2021, Prairie Edge anticipates an era of Indigenous governance while also maintaining skepticism toward performative activism. Two Métis cousins, Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey Ginther, devise a plan to secretly relocate a bison herd from a national park to downtown...