Nature's Past Episode 048: Ecotones and Saskatchewan History

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.

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