“Towards a Prairie Atonement”
By Trevor Herriot
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$22.95
ISBN 9-780889-779648
Award-winning writer, prairie naturalist, and birder extraordinaire—Regina's Trevor Herriot requires little introduction. River in a Dry Land: bestseller. CBC Radio: regular. I’ve just devoured Herriot’s Towards a Prairie Atonement—an eloquent treatise on the interconnected injustices that Colonialism and profit-at-all-costs dealt the prairie Métis and all living things dependent upon the Aspen Parkland grasslands. Though compact in size, this three-part essay dispenses an enormous amount of history, appeals for a reckoning, and delivers a few slight feathers of ecological hope. Herriot says he “set [his] heart on telling a story that [would] inspire people to take a second look at what we all lost, and could yet restore, in our regard for more sophisticated and nuanced forms of land governance”.
The wisely-woven text begins with a map of the Saskatchewan and Manitoba rivers and historical sites discussed, and an edifying timeline that stretches from the 1600s to 2012. These centuries saw the beginnings of Canada’s fur trade; the North West and Hudson’s Bay Companies jostling; buffalo’s demise; a plethora of government decisions that greatly impacted upon the Métis; the plight of Louis Riel; the establishment (and consequent brutal displacement) of a 250-strong Métis settlement around the Ste. Madeleine mission north of Fort Ellice; the institution of community pastures in Saskatchewan and Manitoba via the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Act (the Canadian government’s response to the Dirty Thirties); and Stephen Harper’s reckless gutting of the PFRA, created in 1935 for the “protection and programming for vulnerable grassland ecosystems”.
With each of Herriot’s books, it’s not just what he says (and considering his passion, intelligence and concern, he has much to say) that appeals, it’s also how he says it. Birds are never far away, and here we find the longspur’s “warm and holy” eggs in his initial paragraph, where he’s walking, as he’s done for two decades, “onto the scattered archipelago of native prairie islands surrounded by a sea of cash crops”.
His human company in this story includes fellow grassland naturalist and photographer Branimir Gjetvaj and Michif Elder Norman Fleury; Fleury provided the book’s “Afterword”. Together they walk and talk in the Spy Hill-Ellice community pasture among rare birds, “small mandalas of antennaria in bloom,” and the Ste. Madeleine headstones. At this site years before, the Métis “spoke the language, sang the songs, and told the stories that their fur-trading ancestors first voiced in the prairie world”. Even now, Métis (“new people who were not this and not that,” Fleury says) families gather at the pasture’s “well-tended” campsite for a summer celebration, and indeed, the import of community and “how the prairie might bring us together” are part of what Herriot advocates. The Michif are tenacious.
Colonialism, Herriot asserts, is “an utterly unreliable narrator” and atonement begins with “recognizing and honouring what was and is native” but’s been “evicted from the land—native plants and animals but the original peoples, cultures, and languages too.” I assert that Herriot’s a completely reliable narrator, and I’ll never tire of his imperative themes.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
“The Treasure Box”
By Judith Silverthorne
Published by Your Nickel’s Worth Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95
ISBN 9-781988-783888
The Treasure Box is the fourth Judith Silverthorne novel I’ve read during my decades as a book reviewer, and again, this Regina-based writer has mesmerized me. I reviewed Silverthorne’s middle years’ novel, Convictions, in 2016, and must reiterate what I wrote about that novel, as it absolutely also applies to The Treasure Box: “This is extremely competent writing, and what's more, it's a story that's hard to put down.”
Silverthorne’s credible and likeable ten-year-old narrator, Augustus Ludwig (aka Gus), has just reluctantly moved from Calgary to Regina after his parents’ split. Now Gus, sister Hannah and Mom have moved in with Grandad, who is suffering from intermittent memory loss, and will soon be transitioning into a seniors’ home. It’s a lot, but there’s more. At school Gus becomes the target of “serious bonehead” Connor and his gang of “top dogs,” who mock his name and make school miserable, but their teacher, Mrs. Redmar, has given the class a family history assignment that may change everything for empathetic Gus … his curiosity about his own ancestors, his acceptance of the move, and even his thoughts about his unusual name.
Initially Gus feels that his family history will be “lame,” as Grandad’s the only relative he knows, but in the first chapter he finds himself in the attic, where “The bare dim bulb cast spooky shadows across the slope-ceilinged space” and inside a “scarred, wooden drop-leaf desk,” he uncovers a carved wooden box—the treasure box. The disparate items inside, ie: a “snippet of faded blue ribbon,” a coin, and a scrap of a map possess the ability to transport him back to World War II, and even much further back, to the 1600s. Each time he dares handle the objects in the treasure box, he is briefly but viscerally transported to life-and-death scenes involving his ancestors. But who were these people, and how were they connected to the yellowed, German baptism certificate from 1944 that only cookie-baking Mrs. Kramer (“Vhat do you vant?’”) down the street can translate?
There are numerous topical threads in this novel, and I hope the book’s incorporated into classrooms across the country. There’s multiculturalism and racism (Gus befriends Yussuf, who’s family fled Syria, and First Nations’ Issac, who shares his lunch with a classmate who’s often hungry); aging; divorce; and war. The fascinating historical elements include The Thirty Years War and the Great Frost of 1709, when birds froze “like tiny marble statues” in trees and in mid-air. Silverthorne evokes both a prairie homestead (“A clump of tall aspens grew out of the foundation of the collapsing, grey-and-weathered barn”) and WW2 trenches (that “heaved with rats”) with equal success.
Though history’s a major element, the author consistently keeps us current, as well. Grandad says the war his father fought in (for the Germans) was “More real than video games,” and expressions like “No can do” and “Sounds like a plan” maintain the novel’s present feel.
And the conclusion: mastery. Congratulations, Judith Silverthorne. You’ve slayed it again.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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“Loggerheads"
By Bruce Hornidge
Published by Endless Sky Books
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$24.99
ISBN 978-1-989398-97-5
In 1993 I was minivanning toward Tofino with my young family while an anti-logging protest was brewing in the surrounding forest, and Bruce Hornsby’s “If a Tree Falls” was the soundtrack. Thirty years later, how ironic to read a detailed memoir by a former BC logger and get quite a different perspective on that tumultuous “War in the Woods”.
Loggerheads is a candid account of the “Clayoquot Sound land-use scuffle” between logging protestors and forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel, and the “world media hype” that accompanied it. It’s a peppery book, competently written by a man who had (caulk) boots on the ground: Ex-Clayoquot Sound forest worker Bruce Hornidge, who at times was “dripping saliva from [his] teeth” while protestors were “[chaining] themselves to logging equipment and [obstructing] forest workers from doing their jobs”. In his metaphor-rich account, he says the decade-long forest and land-use tensions “raged like a forest fire” and “a tsunami of Utopian beliefs and related misconstruing washed over the West Coast of Vancouver Island from around the world”.
Hornidge began working for the Kennedy Lake Logging Division of MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., near Ucluelet, in 1967. He pulls zero punches regarding how he felt about the demonstrators and tree-blockades, the “octopus-like bureaucracy,” the media (“There was little interest in the logger’s point of view from their predominantly urban audiences”), and “the affected people, the families losing livelihoods,” including his own family. He writes as well about “fear-style management,” unions (“a good thing”), fires, and of friends and foes made during his logging industry life.
Politics aside, the author also includes much practical information about what it takes to be a tree feller, with descriptions of bucking, falling (“a noble enough calling”), and the many ways a tree can end a logger’s life. One must “determine where the tree will go—and put it there”. Easier said than done. His conversational anecdotes frequently include drama ie: a chunk of windfall “took my hardhat off my head as I hit the good old Mother Earth” and “I saw the bar and chain beside my right eye and ear. My glasses disappeared off my face”. He discusses the brush aka “crap” (salal bush, ferns, etc.) that makes logging challenging, and something called “vibration disease” (Reynaud’s Phenomenon), caused by power-saw vibrations; they could eventually result in finger or hand amputations. Hornridge also shares the harsh psychological effects of being considered “a heartless chainsaw-wielding mass murderer of trees”.
In 1993 the band Midnight Oil visited the region “to bolster the Clayoquot Protest event”. Greenpeace and a “German film group” also amped things up: “It seemed the media was dancing for the protest groups, and the protest groups were acting for the media”.
Regardless of one’s opinion of logging, it’s undeniable that Loggerheads is insightful, well-documented, and at times poetic, and as its passionate author—now retired and living in Ontario—fittingly says, his “personal clarification of events” has been “Written, ironically, not on tables of stone like commandments, but on paper. From wood.”
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
"The Story of Me”
By Denise Leduc, Illustrations by Olena
Zhinchyna
Published by Lilac Arch Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$11.66
ISBN 9781778286933
Denise Leduc is a chameleon. The Aylesbury, SK writer easily changes genres, and she writes well in each of them. Perhaps you’re familiar with her children’s picture books—Poppies, Poppies Everywhere!, Letting Charlie Bow Go and In the Prairie Wind—or her titles for older readers, like Why Not Now?, My Sun-sational Summer and My Wonderful Winter. Her latest softcover is The Story of Me, a journal dedicated to her grandmother “for the memories she created with me when I was a young child”. Leduc writes that her “hope for these journals is to provide opportunities for our own reflection and for sharing between the generations”.
I can certainly get behind that. Even before reading, I decided I’d share this book with my octogenarian mother, two provinces away, in Saskatchewan. Though we speak on the phone daily, an occasional conversational prompt is welcome. As Leduc suggests, “Sometimes conversations with loved ones … can help get the memories flowing”. The Story of Me delivers forty prompts to help one “remember stories” from his or her life, and it includes several spaces for personal notes and attaching photos or other mementos. Rather than using the book as a journal, I’ll use it to interview my mother and record her responses.
The book is beautifully illustrated by Ukrainian artist—and “optimist!”—Olena Zhinchyna, beginning with the cover painting of yellow blossoms against a purple background. The journal opens with the question “What are ten things you would tell people about yourself,” and a series of lines—like a ruled notebook—appear beneath this. On the opposite page, we find another original, full-bleed floral painting.
The next several pages are headlined with questions about family names, memories and traditions; holidays; childhood treasures and friends; birthplace and travels. Many of the aforementioned questions might be easy to answer, but queries like “What would be a perfect day inside?” and “If you could be an animal for a day, what would you be? Why?” require more contemplation, and that’s where things will get even more interesting.
The book ends on a sunny note, asking for a list of “Things I am Grateful For”. The illustrations—particularly the two evocative, wintery landscapes—may aid in contemplation as readers consider these wide-ranging questions about their experiences. Answering the prompts could take a few hours or a few weeks.
Christmas and birthdays provide wonderful opportunities to share activity books like this journal, but really, no special occasion is required to write about our own lives or to give someone our undivided attention while they speak about theirs. This book says: Go ahead. You’re important. And I’m listening.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
"2 Women 2 Generations 26 Poems"
By Sheri Hathaway, Illustrated by Olena Zhinchyna
Welcome Home Publishing
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$13.19
ISBN 978-1-7388223-4-8
I like to be surprised. Upon receiving the slim poetry collection 2 Women 2 Generations 26 Poems by Saskatoon’s Sheri Hathaway, I noted the book’s short, back cover description: “This is a mother-daughter project containing verse from two women of very different pasts,” and I fully expected that Hathaway—a grandmother of eight—had collaborated with a daughter on this collection of prairie-based poems. I was wrong. This book actually features the work of Hathaway and her mother, Louise (McLean) Hathaway, a former teacher who experienced the Great Depression and World War II. The elder poet died in 2009. Her daughter explains that she “didn’t know [her] mother wrote any poems,” but Sheri discovered them after her mother’s death “In her boxes of books, papers, photos and diaries”. Another surprise: both poets had published work in local publications.
The book mostly features Sheri Hathaway’s work; eight poems were penned by her mother, one of which, “Heart Cry,” is a fine example of showing emotion, rather than stating it. It begins: “Snow covers all./The brown mound of cloggy earth,/Our spray of mums,/gold, russet, and bronze for October,/The wreath of everlasting flowers/from his classmates”. Readers glean that the poet’s describing a child’s grave. The poem powerfully ends with three words: “our only son”. I also enjoyed the senior poet’s “My Childhood Home,” a descriptive piece written in quatrains. Rhyme was more commonly used when these poems were written, and she’s elected an ABCB rhyme scheme that doesn’t seem forced, ie: “Beneath the piano window/Stood the organ and its stool/Round which on Sunday evenings/Hymn singing is the rule”.
Interestingly, in organizing the poems for this book, Sheri Hathaway has included a prayer poem, “A Prayer for Family,” in her “Of Faith” section, and her mother’s section begins with “A Mother’s Prayer”. The latter piece was found “on the back of an old envelope with a grocery list on the other side and used as a bookmark”. Christianity and the poets’ personal relationships with their God is evident in several of the pieces.
The younger Hathaway show’s great
diversity in her subject matter. She begins with two sprightly children’s poems,
includes a humorous poem about being a young bride learning to ski, and also
writes compelling pieces about making marmalade: when the winter sun streamed
through the window, “The jars lit up like light bulbs, glowing orange and
yellow as if lighted from the inside”. The poem “Thoughts from a cancer clinic
waiting room” reveals a strong faith.
A freelance writer and watercolour artist, Sheri Hathaway was raised on a farm near Marwayne, AB. I consulted her website (sherihathaway.com) and learned that she’s “a former teacher and explorer of other occupations that now add fodder to her articles, poems, books and paintings.” The small graphics (not the author’s) dispersed throughout the book add to the generally upbeat tone of the poems, some of which earned prizes in contests.
Mother and daughter, different lives, similar passions for the prairies, poetry, and God’s “pure gold” love.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM
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