Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy

Joe Cherwinski is a professor of History at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland.

Scholars are reinterpreting Prairie farming experience before World War
I, and Lost Harvests is another contribution, this time considering the
Indians and their role in the region’s development. To date, the view
has been that pioneer farming was a white activity, that plains Indians
were wandering hunters and gatherers who—once they were confined to
reserves—could not adapt to agriculture, and that this inability led
ultimately to their dependence and poverty. Carter argues that this view
was promoted by bureaucrats responsible for Indian affairs, and that it
remains part of the legacy that historians inherited and utilized
without question. She, instead, taps the growing body of historical
literature on post-contact history, plus a wealth of innovative
documentary sources, concluding that officials were a major contributor
to the Indians’ fate.

While the Plains Cree, the focus of Carter’s study, were skilled
hunters with a sophisticated social organization, they began to adopt
agriculture to supply food when the buffalo population started to
decline after 1870. They were confined to reserves to meet that need and
to satisfy the late-nineteenth-century white idea that farming was a
means of social uplift for the Indians. Once they were on the reserves,
however, those responsible for their care saw them as intent only on
defrauding the government, and thus only paid lipservice to the desire
to see them succeed. Lacking sufficient human, technological, and
financial resources, and faced with hostility from white settlers who on
one hand saw them as competitors and on the other cast covetous eyes on
reserve land, their fate was clear. Despite these liabilities, some made
advances in productivity to farm ways, but—like large numbers of white
settlers—most failed. Whites, however, at least had the option of
leaving for greener pastures; Indian farmers did not. Demoralized and
apathetic, they sunk into poverty, thus fulfilling their supervisors’
belief that Indians and agriculture were incompatible.

Carter’s conclusions make this an important book, and essential
reading for those interested in Western and Native history. Its only
fault is that it still reads too much like a thesis: the graduate
student’s penchant for encyclopedic detail is too obvious for its real
message to emerge clearly.