Indian Fall: The Last Great Days of the Plains Cree and the Blackfoot Confederacy

J.R. Miller is a professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan,
the author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada, and co-editor of the Canadian Historical Review.

During the high noon of British imperialism, one of the favorite
literary forms was the rollicking good yarn, full of square-jawed
Anglo-Saxon men defying the odds and indigenous forces to paint or keep
another corner of the map imperial crimson. Indian Fall, by journalist
D’Arcy Jenish, is the inversion of the rollicking good imperial take
on history.

Jenish uses the collective story of one Blackfoot and three Cree
leaders to explain the simultaneously tragic and inspiring impact of the
loss of control over their territory and the political destinies of the
plains peoples between the 1870s and the end of the 19th century.
Through the lives of Crowfoot, Piapot, Big Bear, and Poundmaker, the
reader sees the decline of the bison and the bison economy culture,
Canada’s acquisition from the Hudson’s Bay Company of control of the
western interior, treatymaking, the 1885 Métis rebellion in
Saskatchewan, and the subsequent crushing of plains First Nations
political leadership by the federal government.

This is not just an exciting story: in Jenish’s hands, it’s also a
well-told tale. He uses a familiar journalistic device—the complex
story of general change depicted through a chronicle of the real-life
experiences of real people—to move the story swiftly and surely. Two
things make Jenish’s use of the device effective: the nobility and
pathos of the protagonists, and the writing skills of the author.

Although well-told and stirring, Indian Fall is not innovative or
original. In terms of its interpretation, the work follows paths well
worn by such historians as John Tobias, Brian Titley, and Hugh Dempsey.
Indian Fall lacks archival sources, but it makes effective use of the
best of published secondary accounts. Although students of the era and
theme will find nothing new in it, the uninitiated will find Indian Fall
both rollicking and riveting. Perhaps that’s enough.