Plain Speaking: Essays on Aboriginal Peoples and the Prairie

J.R. (Jim) Miller is Canada Research Chair of History at the University
of Saskatchewan. He is the author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A
History of Indian-White Relations in Canada and co-editor of the
Canadian Historical Review.

Plain Speaking is the product of a two-day conference held in March 2001
under the auspices of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and the University
of Regina “to converse on the various types and levels of connections
between First Nations and the Métis peoples and the Canadian Plains.”
Speakers came from a variety of Aboriginal organizations, as well as
from the museum, the University of Regina, and the First Nations
University of Canada. Two of the conference organizers edited a
selection of the presentations to create this volume.

The collection is an eclectic mixture of scholarly papers, such as
studies of Treaty 4 and the Greater Production Campaign; personal
reflection, as in an urban Métis woman’s explanation of her ties to
the land; and Elders’ testimony. Areas sampled include history,
philosophy, toponymy (the study of place names), medicine, poetry,
theatre, painting, and photography. As is usual with such collections,
the quality of the pieces—at least as judged by conventional academic
terms—varies quite widely. All together, however, the essays,
interview, and transcript of Elders’ remarks constitute a small
smorgasbord of the type of research and exploration that is going on in
the field of prairie studies at the present time. Although the
collection is rather Regina-centric, it is nonetheless a useful guide to
one regional section of a developing field of inquiry.