We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays.

Frits Pannekoek is an associate professor of heritage studies, director
of information resources at the University of Calgary, and the author of
A Snug Little Flock: The Social Origins of the Riel Resistance of
1869–70.

The book provides a new reflective approach to Western “identity,” arguing that in the end all Westerners, particularly those in rural Alberta, become “indigenous” and all that that implies. Roger Epp, the dean of Augustana College of the University of Alberta, sees the people of the West, regardless of origin, as one—all linked through the land. Each of the ten chapters is a unique essay, rooted in memories, driven by connections to the environment. To Epp, an environmentalist, it is a landscape we have all shared in the past and will continue to share in the future.

The first two chapters deal with the Mennonite prairie experience of his extended family in Saskatchewan, Oklahoma, and Alberta, from their first immigration at the turn of the century through their often tentative involvement in prairie protest, and then to today. The whole book is, in fact, a very personal engagement with his landscape and being a rural Western Canadian by choice. Chapter 7, “We are All Treaty People,” deals with a scholarly reflection on the legal and philosophical perspectives and his very personal view of the treaties based on his sharing of the land with its indigenous peoples. He leads us through his own awareness of the very real occupation of lands that his grandparents considered theirs, but which he now realizes was always very much a part of the Aboriginal community—their landscape and life. And so it goes. Epp reduces the complex intellectual to a subtle reality. His chapter on his own institution, Augustana University College, now a college of the University of Alberta, is particularly insightful. He is aware that to be rural is to be considered “less sophisticated,” to be at the periphery of learning, and to be at the periphery of “real society.” He argues that universities are an urban “organized assault on parochialism” on rural students, which will ultimate destroy rather then encourage their “critical appreciation” of the world they know. Epp’s careful and reflective assessment of rural Alberta, its landscape, its society, and its heritage is a must-read for any urban Canadian wanting to understand this country.