The Prairie West: Historical Readings

Allen Seager taught in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University, Burnaby.

Cobbling together books like this is an act of duty, involving much legwork and legalistic wrangling but few individual rewards: congratulations to Professors Francis and Palmer. Teachers of western Canadian history, long frustrated by the lack of a suitable anthology on the prairies, will welcome the publication of The Prairie West: Historical Readings; it will make a serviceable companion piece to W. Peter Ward and R.A.J. McDonald’s British Columbia: Historical Readings (1981), and in certain respects represents an improvement over the latter. Each of the 14 topical sub-sections is prefaced by an editorial introduction and a bibliographic guide. And both editors resisted the temptation to include more than one sampling of their own intellectual wares. Relative to their British Columbian counterparts, of course, the prairie editors were able to draw on a wider and deeper pool of scholarly resources, including historians and a sprinkling of social scientists.

The collection includes 31 readings in total, authored by 26 men and 3 women. Two authors receive double-billing. This is more than justified in the case of Gerald Friesen, who was commissioned to write a general historiographical introduction as well as sharing his previously published thoughts on prairie art and literature in the concluding section. Friesen’s The Canadian Prairies: A History (1984) is available for those who detest anthologies. More questionable is the double-billing received by economist Ken Norrie, whose neo-classical macro-economic models and methods have never offered a convincing critique of that which he rightly criticizes: popular regional shibboleths about the economy. More radical political economists such as Larry Pratt, John Richards, or Garth Stevenson are overlooked.

It would not be practical to attempt a substantive review of the contents of this reasonably comprehensive collection. The editors have apparently searched through past and present writings with diligence. For their final selections they have mined previous anthologies, published monographs, and nine different journals. The Journal of Canadian Studies (three offerings) was perhaps overused, while regional journals, especially Saskatchewan History, were possibly too quickly dismissed as resources. The exclusion of one major national journal, Labour/Le travail, is consistent with a weak treatment of labour and the left in The Prairie West. The only item under the labour heading is David Bercuson’s “Winnipeg General Strike,” a thrice-told tale pained with a similarly liberal interpretation of agrarian radicalism in the post-World War I period: L.D. Courville’s “The Conservativism of the Saskatchewan Progressives,” Prairie socialism receives equally short shrift, presented without an opportunity to compare and contrast different historical views. Doris French Shackleton, Peter Sinclair, Seymour Lipset, or Lewis H. Thomas could have provided additional insight into the CCF in its Saskatchewan setting alongside Walter Young’s Anatomy of a Party excerpted here. Some may quibble with the overall emphasis on less contemporary historical periods, but this is an accurate reflection of the weight of contemporary research.