Coming Home: Saskatchewan Remembered

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.

Ron Evans has contributed a powerful collection of stories, set for the
most part on his family’s farm. All are influenced by his relationship
with his father, who was a reeve for 41 years. Evans doesn’t tell us
much about his father and the politics that shaped him, but I suspect he
was CCF rather than Liberal (unlike the farmer who refused medical
attention because it had been “nationalized”).

The short reminiscences and poems that make up the volume reflect on
school, neighbors, and the farm. (Only occasionally does Evans venture
into his more risqué life at Berkley, California—not enough to annoy
the puritan sensibilities back home, but enough to indicate that he is a
man of the world.) We see the impact of the Depression on the author’s
relations with the community, the land, and his father. The thread of
the Social Gospel that was so much of Saskatchewan and might have
inspired Evans to become a United Church minister is nowhere in
evidence. But much rings true: his lack of contact with Aboriginal
peoples, his memory of the dust of the Depression, his experience of
small-town Saskatchewan café life, the rituals of farm culture and
hospitality.

Coming Home is a chronicle of a life lost and a past just beginning to
be understood.