Voices from Next Year Country: An Oral History of Rural Saskatchewan

Michael Payne is the City of Edmonton archivist and the co-author of A
Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

Voices from Next Year Country is based on the oral history component of
a large, multidisciplinary study on the changing nature of social
cohesion in rural communities in southern Saskatchewan.

The book begins with a short but thoughtful discussion of the value of
oral history as a research tool. It continues with some basic theory of
what constitutes community in a rural setting and how perception,
collective action, and social capital work together to encourage “a
bonding effect within a society.”

The comments of Widdis’s interview subjects—the meat of the
book—shed light on the evolving idea of community in six rural areas:
Balcarres, Carlyle, Craik, Naicam, East End, and Willow Bunch. Unlike
urban dwellers who often define their communities in terms of shared
work, cultural, or recreational interests, most of Widdis’s
interviewees see place as central to their notions of community. In
rural Saskatchewan, people still identify strongly with specific places,
but almost all describe significant changes in recent years in how those
localities have been defined. The impact of improved roads, declining
farm populations, and centralization of services has meant that rural
people in Saskatchewan have had to expand the area that they call home.
Several interviewees note that school, hospital, and business closures
have forced people to start thinking more regionally rather than as
residents of Craik or East End. Others observe that some of the old
identifiers of place have eroded as hockey teams, curling leagues, and
even churches and social clubs cast a wider geographic net in order to
remain viable.

The key message of this book is that despite significant strains, a
strong sense of social cohesion still exists in rural Saskatchewan
communities. As Widdis puts it, “place still matters,” there,
despite all of the media attention on the forces of globalization and
cultural homogenization.