Who’s From the Prairie?
Some Prairie Self-Representations in Popular Culture (2001)

By Alison Calder

References

Alison Calder is a writer and critic in Winnipeg, where she teaches Canadian literature and creative writing at the University of Manitoba and studies prairie culture.  She has published poetry and fiction in journals and anthologies. In 2002 Alison was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award.

FOR THE FIRST FEW MONTHS after I moved to Ontario from Saskatchewan, I woke up to the same advertisement on the radio.  The ad, for a real estate company, stressed the great bonuses available to consumers who chose that company to represent them.  It worked by mocking the bonuses offered by another, fictitious company.  These bonuses started out small (a calendar with pictures of kittens wearing cute outfits) and progressed to the increasingly comic and useless, finally reaching the nadir of all bonuses: a framed photograph of Saskatoon at night.  You can imagine my response.  I had moved to a place where my point of origin, the place I called home, had the cultural status of a punchline.  This article traces, through my own experience, some strands of what Rob Shields describes as the social spatialization of place1, in an attempt to move beyond the transparency of geography to recognize the prairies as socially constituted space, and to examine how the prairies come to mean, and what those meanings are.

My initial impulse for this article was to write about the negative images of the prairies that continually surface in popular culture.  This popular prairie is a strange and paradoxical place, at once a weird, gothic landscape populated by alienated and malevolent rednecks (as in  popular representations of Alberta), and also a warm, descent place inhabited by honest, hardworking folks with good community values (as in the pictures of church socials that often grace the pages of Canadian Living magazine).  The popular prairie is primarily defined by its landscape, which, like its population, is see as extreme2.  Frequently, landscape and people appear in a kind of cause-and-effect relation: the prairie environment is seen to breed a certain type of person, whether it is the inherent goodness of the folks seen in CBC’s series Jake and the Kid, or the inherent eccentricity of the characters in the movie Fargo, to use an American example.  I thought of writing about the insistence in popular culture on placing the prairies in the past, position them resolutely in a discourse of dust storms, deserts, and Bennett buggies.  But by focusing on what is done to the prairie, on extra-regional definitions of the place that function to construct the prairie as nostalgic, declining, and dependent, I realized that I would be replicating that notion of regional passivity.  People in the prairie provinces are not victims: instead, they actively define themselves, working out of complicated mythologies of their own, developing narratives of identity to fill various individual or cultural needs.  The inadequacy of the victim mentality and the need to consider regions relationally rather than in isolation was brought home to me on one visit to Saskatoon, where I was introduced as being “from Ontario.”  My new acquaintance smiled broadly, extended a hand, and said, “Don’t worry . . . we’ll try not to hate you.”  My poor-me perspective deflated.

The Ideal Rural Past

My first winter in Ontario was cold.  I was on campus early each morning, and as my colleagues from Ontario arrived, I noticed a pattern.  Each person entered the room, mentioned the weather, and then turned to me and said, “Of course, it wouldn’t fell cold to you.”  I complained about it to my friends back home, citing it as yet another example of Eastern ignorance.  (In Saskatchewan, Ontario is the East.)  But then I went home for Christmas . . .  and when I came back, I was doing it too.  You call this cold?  Why, in Saskatchewan it’s so cold that we plug in our cars!

I mentioned my complicity with what I had formerly characterized as Eastern ignorance as a way to lead into a discussion on prairie identity as it is produced within the region.  I used the word produced because one of the chief characteristics of prairie identity as it manifests itself in popular culture is its ability to be very consciously produced3.  This production can be motivated by a mixture of many desires: to differentiate oneself from a generalized Canadian or global culture, to affirm one’s place in a particular group, or to tie into particular market forces, among other possibilities.  None of these possibilities is inherently good or bad.  But I want to examine the implications of a particular kind of prairie identity, typified in two books by Dave Bouchard, Prairie Born and If you’re not from the prairie….4  The two books are similar: If you’re not from the prairie… is described on the sleeve as “a nostalgic pilgrimage to a place that symbolizes a unique lifestyle,” and Prairie Born is described as “a book that will stir warm memories for all those ‘prairie born,’ no matter where they find themselves.”  Bouchard’s verse is complemented in each book by paintings of prairie scenes, with children playing hockey, waiting for the school bus, or picking stones in a field.  These books are deliberately nostalgic, seeking to evoke warm feelings for a place of safety, childhood, and home.  These may be children’s books5, but I’ve seen If you’re not from the prairie . . . on coffee tables and under Christmas tress from coast to coast.  I went to a wedding at which the groom’s family, from Regina, presented the bride’s family, from Cape Breton Island, with a copy of the book, to further understanding between the two.  My mother sent me a T-shirt printed with lines from the book, to keep me company in Ontario.  As of the summer of 1999, the books carry stickers reading “over 100, 000 sold.”

As the title If you’re not from the prairie . . . implies, this book is about identity, and the implications of the kind of prairie identity it posits should not be accepted uncritically.  Bouchard’s text draws on the idea of community, and the implications of the kind of prairie identity it posits should not be accepted uncritically.  Bouchard’s text draws on the idea of community, but in that community are embedded particular kinds of exclusion that are very far from idyllic.  The book’s title signals a dichotomy: there are those who are from the prairie, and then there are those who are not.  There is no connection between the two groups: “If you’re not from the prairie,” Bouchard writes, “You don’t know me.  You just can’t know ME.”6  The prairie dweller’s essential self, emphasized by Bouchard’s capitalization, remains inaccessible to an extra-regional audience.  The text of Prairie Born turns on a series of contrasts, in which the narrator first addresses the experience of his imagined reader (who, interestingly enough, is not from the prairie), and then contrasts that with a description of his own, different experience.  An example is his description of autumn:

Go back for a minute, remember your fall
Leaves changing colours, you raked and you hauled,
I too know this season, but for me it’s much more
And the earth knows my secret’s not found on her floor.7

Bouchard thus creates a prairie community by insisting on its alienation from other places: the “secret” of the prairie can only be understood by those who have direct experience of the place. This is a kind of retrospective community, based on a childhood identification with a landscape of origin.  Regional commonality is forged by excluding others.

The reason for this distinct prairie community is, according to Bouchard, the environment, as the impact of the landscape and the weather forges a common prairie ethos.  This environmental determinism is explicit:

If you’re not from the prairie, you can’t know my soul
You don’t know our blizzards, you’ve not fought our cold
You can’t know my mind, nor ever my heart,
Unless deep within you, there’s somehow a part . . .
A part of these things that I’ve said that I know,
The wind, sky and earth, the storms and the snow.
Best say you have—and then we’ll be one.
For we will have shared that same blazing sun.8

Identity is grounded in landscape, where the experience of “shar[ing] that same blazing sun” create a particular kind of person.  My own response to the weather-based comments of my Ontario colleagues comes from the same logic: emphasizing the extremity of the conditions of a Saskatchewan winter marked me as a member of a particular community (here, one signified as “not-Ontario”) and posited a kind of superiority based on endurance.9  In other words, landscape and weather made me different.  However, this difference was to a certain extent fictional: I was cold in both provinces.

Basing an identity on an ostensibly neutral landscape may seem innocuous, but it does have a few unpleasant effects.  As W.H. New points out in Land Sliding, landscape and power are inextricably linked in Canada.10  Roberto Dainotto has argued convincingly that much regional theorization is based on a frequently unstated desire for purity and authenticity, in an attempt to reach back to a supposedly simpler, happier time.11  This simple vision requires exclusivity: to posit a strong, cohesive prairie identity, all complexity must be suppressed.  The boundaries of identity cannot, in this essentializing model, be permeable.  We see this kind of rigid simplicity in the nostalgic idyll Bouchard creates.  In describing only one kind of prairie experience, Bouchard evokes a sense of nostalgia for a prairie that never really existed.  In his books, the person who is from the prairies is exclusively rural and exclusively white.  The young boy in the ball cap seen in the first of Henry Ripplinger’s paintings, Time Out, grows up to become the narrator’s stand-in on page 25, the weathered farmer in the ball cap standing in his newly harvested field.  If you’re not from the prairie. . .  takes a very particular experience and generalizes it to become the prairie experience, an assertion that denies a “prairie” identity to those whose experience are outside this model: people who grew up in a prairie city, for example, or on a reserve.  No people of Aboriginal ancestry appear anywhere in these books, an omission that, given the demographics of the prairie provinces today, points to the inadequacy of the title Prairie Born.  And because these books are deliberately nostalgic in tone, they also do not recognize the increasingly complicated immigration patterns and racial diversity in the region.  In fact, these books work against recognition of the multiracial composition of the prairie provinces by erasing what multiracial contact historically occurred: the prairie are represented as only White space.  Prairie identity is thus frozen at a particular historical moment, walled off from other regions, unable to evolve to reflect the hybrid identities of prairie dwellers today.12  Such arrested ideas of identity are, as Dainotto writes, “menacing and childish.”13

But just because I can analyze and criticize this nostalgic, rural identity as inadequate does not mean that it has no importance.  Saskatchewan, for example, is a shrinking province: many of its young people move elsewhere to look for work, and much of its older population moves elsewhere to retire.  And they take books like Bouchard’s with them as cultural souvenirs, even though the culture reflected in the pages may have very little to do with their own lived prairie experience.  The books are appealing because their narratives have the familiarity of fairy tales, wrapping up with a happily-ever-after ending.  It is precisely the seductive quality of these books that makes me uncomfortable with their claim to represent accurately an ideal, real world.  Ursula Kelly writes that “cultural nostalgia is not only weakening, it is also blinding.”14  In situating prairie identity only in the past, only in an idealized rural landscape that may not ever have existed, these books deny regional identity a future.  The prairie becomes a place that once existed, and now is only a warm memory.  Its decline can thus be figured as inevitable: if the region is a lost Eden, already vanishing in the imagination, then the economic and cultural deprivations it suffers can be easily naturalized.  “Why do our regions seem forever to be passing away?” asks Jim Wayne Miller.  “Why are we always surprised to discover they are still there?”15  the answer, I think, is not just the general Canadian culture constructs the prairies as a region in decline, but that in a search for identity, those of us from the prairies are invited to cling to an artificial, land-based nostalgia that located us and our place firmly in the past.

The Romantic Landscape

The evocation of an idealized rural past is one way in which people from the prairie provinces might choose to identify themselves with place.  Another dissimilar, but not entirely unrelated, popular model they might follow involves mystification of the landscape as seen in Courtney Milne’s very popular collection of photographs, Prairie Dreams16, and Sharon Butala’s bestselling memoir, The Perfection of the Morning17.  The popular interest in these books can be related to a general cultural interest in environmental issues combined with a search for New Age spirituality, and is partly motivated by the same sort of nostalgia that impels readers to purchase If you’re not from the prairie. . . .  The back jacket of Milne’s collection advertises that it “caputur[es] the prairie region in all its wonder and diversity.”  But there are no photographs of the urban prairie in this book; in fact, virtually all images of houses or buildings are of structures that are abandoned or decaying.  Similarly, the extracts of poetry and prose that accompany the photographs either celebrate the beauty and/or harshness of the prairie environment, or describe farming experiences.  The images are beautiful: the landscape is stunningly photographed.  But again we see the celebration of a particular kind of prairie experience, the evocation of a particular kind of history, to the exclusion of others.  There are no people in these photographs, perhaps because to display the real people who live on the land would shatter the illusion of an unpopulated, starkly beautiful wilderness. 

A similar lack of community appears in The Perfection of the Morning.  This memoir narrates Butala’s rejection of what she describes as an unhealthy, unhappy, academic urban existence in favour of a more meaningful life on a ranch in southern Saskatchewan, and chronicles the way sin which she attempts to come to terms with the landscape and with herself.  Using a mixture of ecofeminism, Jungian psychology, and New Age and Native spirituality, she navigates through a sense of alienation and loneliness, finally achieving a kind of unity with the place.  One of the reasons that Butala’s book has been so popular, I think, is that if fulfills a kind of escape fantasy for a largely urban audience, being a narrative that suggests that, given the right circumstances, one can leave a cold, unhealthy city for a fulfilling life in the “wilderness.”  This romantic idea of the recuperative wilderness is not new, of course; its lineage can be traced back through Thoreau and Emerson to the early Romantics18.  What I find interesting is that Butala never acknowledges this lineage.  Instead, her Romantic explorations of self and landscape are presented as the accidental experiences of a naїve narrator, untutored and unschooled.  She appears as, in Randall Roorda’s term, a “nature savant.”19  Give the premise of her memoir—that the urban is bad and the rural is good—she could hardly present herself otherwise: to appear at all intellectual would be, in her terms, to be somehow inauthentic, not a real prairie person at all.  As she writes in “The Reality of the Flesh,” “There are those novelists who, when the impulse to write comes upon them, to turn to look out the window, or go outside for a long walk across the prairie, or drive out to Fort Walsh, or go  to have a talk with an old man; and there are those novelists who go to a literary café, to their bookshelves, to their memories of the great works of other novelists, and to long, learned conversations with scholars whose ideas are built and honed.  I am one of the former and I view the latter with respect and not a little envy mixed with a dash of perplexity.”20

In this description, the “real life” write has privileged access to prairie landscape, history, and people, while the “literary” writer, insulated from prairie reality, works from a generalized and imported literary culture.  The ideas of the true prairie writer are not “built and honed”: rather, they come directly from the environment, unmediated by any theoretical agenda or aesthetic theory.  The prairie person exists in nature, without thought. 

My objections to Butala’s ingenuous presentation become clearer when on examines how she represents the farmers and ranchers she encounters in her new life.  These neighbours rarely speak: they exist only in place, naturally there, in an entirely unreflecting way.  They are true naturals, in the sense of being one with nature and also in the now outdated meaning of “simple.”  The texutalized Butala, on the other hand, is far more complex, and must wrestle, sometimes almost literally, with the spirit of place, trying again and again to make it accept her.  All this wrestling is accomplished without acknowledging that intellectual inquiry is, in fact, what she is undertaking, that she is not an untaught child of nature writing things down just as they happen, but is rather a skilled author deliberately shaping the materials at hand into a life narrative.  There is a kind of dishonesty here that I find disturbing.  Rather than finding a new and empowering memoir of prairie experience, I locate in this narrative the same tired paradigms at which most prairie dwellers chafe: the notions that the only true prairie person is a rancher or a farmer, that no real prairie person has ay sort of intellectual curiosity, and that “prairie” is an ossified definition with strict and impermeable boundaries.  In her self-construction as the naїve artist, the authentic prairie writer, Butala cheapens both the lives of the prairie dwellers she records and her own literary achievement.21

The Value of the Definition

I have said that prairie dwellers are not victims, that they actively work to define themselves.  But while definitions of the prairies that come from within the region may respond to, incorporate, and challenge externally imposed images, these self-definitions often lack the cultural currency of the more popular, pan-Canadian ones.  An example of this inequality can be seen in the response to the discovery of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton in Eastend, Saskatchewan, in 1994.  A front-page article in the Globe and Mail about the find suggested that the dinosaur had died of boredom; clearly, small-town Saskatchewan was a place far removed from the hip, urban culture represented by southern Ontario.22  In response to this article, a radio station in Saskatoon sponsored a contest to suggest possible causes of a dinosaur’s death in Toronto.  The winning response posited that a Toronto dinosaur would have succumbed to solar confusion—in other words, that it would have died from the belief that the sun shone out of its own posterior.

There are several interesting if distasteful things going on in that radio contestant’s suggestion, but I want to use it to point to the idea of audience.  The Globe and Mail is a national newspaper.  A Saskatoon radio station, on the other hand, has only a small listening audience.  The kind of political and cultural protest encapsulated in the contestant’s suggestion will have little impact and will almost exclusively reach an audience of the already converted.  The same is true, I suggest, for anthologies like the ironically named The Middle of Nowhere, a collection of historical and contemporary non-fiction writing about aspects of Saskatchewan.23  The anthology’s subtitle is “Rediscovering Saskatchewan,” but the fact that it was published by a small, “regional” press (Saskatoon’s Fifth House) means that it will be accessible primarily to an audience already familiar with the place.  A book like Butula’s The Perfection of the Morning may achieve bestseller status, but I suggest that its popularity lies in the fact that it can easily be appropriated to a dominant culture through its reinforcement of prevailing stereotypes.

People from the prairies are often angered by the stories others tell about us, but it is time to examine the stories we tell about ourselves.  Claiming a prairie identity means taking a good long look at the place we call home and recognizing it in all its complexity.  In her essay “Can You Tell the Truth in a Small Town?” Kathleen Norris eloquently describes how nostalgic visions of the prairie make us believe in a past that never was and a present that will never be.24  There is nothing wrong with looking to the past for strength and community: the danger lies in choosing to believe in a false and simple past.  Acknowledging our complicity in constructing nostalgic and exclusive representations of the prairies also means that we acknowledge our power to change those representations.  The result, one hopes, will be images of the prairie in popular culture that are as complicated, messy, and vibrant as prairie culture itself.

Calder, Alison. "Who's from the Prairie? Some Prairie Self-Representations in Popular Culture". Previously published in Toward Defining The Prairies: Region, Culture, and History, ed. Robert Wardhaugh. Winnipeg: The University of Manitoba Press, 2001. 91-100.