199 research outputs found

    Progress, crisis, and stability: making the northwest plains agricultural landscape

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    This research traces the nature and impetus of agricultural landscape change from 1910 to 1990, within the northwestern transboundary plains of southern Alberta and Saskatchewan and northern Montana. Using information gleaned from aerial photographs, field survey reports and maps, government staff personal correspondence, agricultural statistics, land settlement records, and local histories, this dissertation describes an evolutionary and regionally-contextual process of landscape transformation. The temporal pattern of landscape change in the northwestern plains region was not linear. The greatest landscape changes took place between 1910 and 1930 when mixed grass prairie was converted to an agricultural landscape over a relatively short breaking-in period that followed initial agricultural settlement. After 1930, landscape changes were more evolutionary. Incrementally, more land was tilled, with little alteration in basic field arrangement and farming systems. Aerial photographic evidence suggests that a common declensionist historiographical narrative of Great Plains anthropogenic land degradation, culminating in the 1930s drought disaster, doesn’t apply to the northwestern plains. Rather, the timing of settlement, coinciding with widespread adoption of farm-based mechanization, and a pre-existing understanding of environmental limits to agricultural viability, impelled northwestern plains farmers to independently adopt scale economy and efficiency principles promoted by government agricultural economists from the 1920s to the 1980s. Furthermore, farmers adapted specifically to regional land and weather conditions using locally-derived soil management innovations. Farmers and in-the-field federal government staff cooperated on research that led to the spread of innovative and successful dryland farming techniques. Government agents of both Canada and the United States played an important role in testing and publicizing the local adaptations. This work establishes a new timeline for northern Great Plains history and reveals the importance of regional context in place history. In the northwestern plains region, the 1930s were not a turning point in the agricultural land use history, but rather a time marker coinciding with the maturing of a highly-mechanized, scaled-up, and responsive ‘modern’ agricultural system

    Cree (NĂȘhiyawak) Mobility, Diplomacy, and Resistance in the Canada-US Borderlands, 1885 - 1917

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    This thesis examines the borderlands history of the Cree (nĂȘhiyawak; primarily under Chief Little Bear) from 1885 to 1917. It combines archival research, digital mapping (GIS), ethnohistory, and data analysis to track Indigenous movements and to analyze how the Cree navigated their status as “foreign” Indians. It focuses on Cree transnational mobility, diplomacy, and resistance from the events of 1885 at Frog Lake, North-west Territories, to the eventual creation of the Rocky Boy Reservation and its membership roll in 1917. This research determines not only how the border affected the lives of the Cree, but also how the Cree created the borderlands in which they lived. I argue that although the Cree suffered from substantial hostility, violence, and dislocation, they successfully worked within and challenged restrictive colonial notions of land and nationhood imposed by the international border. Finally, this thesis argues that the shifting and haphazard ways colonial regimes defined Indigenous identities created fissures in pre-existing community and kinship structures that continue to create challenges for these communities

    Shared landscape, divergent visions? transboundary environmental management in the Northern Great Plains

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    The 49th parallel border dividing the Great Plains region has been described since its delimitation as an ‘artificial’ construct, as no natural features distinguish the ‘Canadian’ and ‘American’ portions of the landscape. While the border subjects the landscape to different political, legal, philosophical, and sociocultural regimes on either side, the region’s contemporary and emerging environmental problems span jurisdictional boundaries. Their mitigation requires new forms of environmental management capable of transcending these borders. In this dissertation, I examine the prospects for implementing ecosystem-based approaches to environmental management in the Frenchman River-Bitter Creek (FRBC) subregion of the Saskatchewan-Montana borderland. First, I interrogate the extent to which residents perceive the FRBC region as a ‘borderland’. Then, I examine the range of implications of ecosystem-based management approaches for institutional arrangements, environmental governance, and traditional property regimes and livelihoods in the region. The research methodology includes an extensive literature review; multiple site visits to the FRBC region; a series of semi-structured interviews with employees of government agencies and environmental nongovernmental organizations, and with local agricultural producers; the analysis of historical maps and of selected ecoregional planning documents; and attendance at public meetings in the FRBC region. The research results are presented in a series of four manuscripts. The first manuscript describes perceptions of the border and the borderland through time. The second manuscript examines changes to the border and the relationships across it instigated by the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the 2003 BSE Crisis. The third manuscript examines the extent to which a ‘shared landscape’ transcends the border, and describes how the different regimes across the border create ‘divergent visions’ for landscape and species management. The fourth manuscript investigates the ways in which incorporating a broader range of actors and disciplines could reconceptualize environmental management as an inclusive processes that is cognizant of local history and values. By examining the imbrications of the fields of environmental management, border studies, and political ecology, this research advocates adopting an historical approach to environmental geography research so that contemporary problems may be understood within their local contexts. It emphasizes the importance of including a range of stakeholders in environmental management processes. It identifies the difficulties inherent to adopting ecosystem-based approaches to management, and stresses the practical value of transboundary collaboration for goal setting so that the tenets of ecosystem-based management may be achieved under the existing jurisdictional frameworks in place. It provides significant insights for policy makers, in that it presents residents’ reflections upon their involvement in environmental management processes, and upon the impacts that recent changes to border and national security policies have had upon borderland residents. Moving forward, this research uncovers the need for continued investigations of the impacts of border security policies and legislation on borderland communities and species, for more study of the ability of state agencies to meaningfully incorporate local actors in environmental management, and for investigations of trinational environmental management efforts in the North American Grasslands

    Searching for Sakitawak: Place and People in Northern Saskatchewan\u27s Île-à-la-Crosse

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    This presentation is a history of a small community, Île-à-la-Crosse, located in an area now part of Saskatchewan, Canada. With an historic reputation for cooperation and enviable trading circumstances, its residents traditionally have determined that protection of the community ensured the best opportunities for the advancement and security of individuals. As a result of this belief, residents reinforced their own understandings of sustainability as a means to ensure personal success. The community’s fame for hosting such a set of norms grew, particularly from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and outsiders often visited to improve their own efforts as a result of this reputation. Given the belief that community longevity assured individual concerns, many visitors quickly decided to adopt local processes even if those functions contrasted sharply from their own original beliefs. Based on these decisions, the visitors’ institutions experienced changes as well. Through this social cooperation to better ensure personal success, a culture began to develop, and so the village’s distinctive administrative and economic processes were continued through family and neighbourly ties. Some characteristics, such as multiculturalism, shared land use, complex trading activities, and sustainability, further distinguished Île-à-la-Crosse as a result. Though well aware of the village a number of parties (such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Canadian government), still regularly excluded the community from their deliberations because of its unique ability to supposedly need less intervention considered necessary elsewhere. These various corporate and political authorities, concerned with their own existence, instead emphasised the conditions of communities that demonstrated social hostility, monetary difficulties, and other forms of disparity. As these historic parties failing to appreciate the village’s positive components in their fullest form, historians also did not integrate the village into their narratives since they almost always focused on conflict and change in their investigations. Because of this missing analysis about Île-à-la-Crosse, historical accounts have created lacunae in our understanding and awareness not just of local but also of provincial and national issues pertaining to “development.” Today, the lack of historic and historical awareness has as well directly impacted a modern day Indigenous “land claim”. Particularly when examining “absence” and “overlap” in a space’s natural and social form, Île-à-la-Crosse’s story from its earliest existence to its present shape can finally remind us how local conditions –even before humans started living in those circumstances – can teach us about how to survive and succeed today as individuals and as part of a larger community and country. It also reminds us how we should pay more attention to peace, cooperation and interaction in both intellectual and social circles

    At the edge : the north Prince Albert region of the Saskatchewan forest fringe to 1940

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    Canadians have developed a vocabulary of regionalism, a cultural shorthand that divides Canada into easily-described spaces: the Arctic, the Prairies, the Maritimes, and Central Canada, for example. But these artificial divisions obscure the history of edge places whose identity is drawn from more than one region. The region north of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, is a place on the edge of the boreal forest whose self-representations, local history, and memorials draw heavily on a non-prairie identity. There, the past is associated with the forest in contrast to most Canadians' understanding of Saskatchewan as flat, treeless prairie. This dissertation presents the history of the north Prince Albert region within a framework that challenges common Saskatchewan and Canadian stereotypes. Through deep-time place history, layers of historical occupation in the study region can be compared and contrasted to show both change and continuity. Historical interpretations have consistently separated the history of Saskatchewan’s boreal north and prairie south, as if the two have no history of interchange and connection. Using edge theory, this dissertation argues that historical human occupation in the western interior found success in the combination of prairie and boreal lifeways. First Nations groups from both boreal forest and open plain used the forest edge as a refuge, and to enhance resilience through access to resources from the other ecosystem. Newcomer use of the prairie landscape rebranded the boreal north as a place of natural resources to serve the burgeoning prairie market. The prairies could not be settled if there was not also a nearby and extensive source for what the prairies lacked: timber and fuel. Extensive timber harvesting led to deforestation and the rise of agriculture built on the rhetoric of mixed farming, not King Wheat. The mixed farming movement – tied to landscape – underscored the massive internal migrations from the open prairies to the parkland and forest edge. Soldier settlement, long viewed as a failure, experienced success in the north Prince Albert region and gave a model for future extensive government-supported land settlement schemes. South-to-north migration during the 1920s was based on a combination of push and pull factors: drought in the Palliser Triangle; and a strengthening northern economy built on cordwood, commercial fishing, freighting, prospecting and fur harvesting, as well as mixed farming. The economy at the forest edge supported occupational pluralism, drawing subsistence from both farm and forest, reflecting the First Nations model. As tourism grew to prominence, the Saskatchewan dual identity of prairie/forest led to the re-creation of the north Prince Albert region as a new vacationland, the ‘Playground of the Prairies.’ The northern forest edge drew thousands of migrants during the Great Depression. Historical analysis has consistently interpreted this movement as frantic, a reactionary idea without precedent. Through a deep-time analysis, the Depression migrations are viewed through a new lens. The forest edge was a historic place of both economic and cultural refuge and resilience predicated on the Saskatchewan contrast of north and south

    Mapping MĂ©tis Stories: Land Use, Gender and Kinship in the Qu'Appelle Valley, 1850-1950

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    Examining MĂ©tis land use and occupancy of the Qu’Appelle Valley from 1850 to the mid-twentieth century, this dissertation addresses change and continuity in food harvesting practices, land tenure, spatial organization and family, kinship, and gender roles. It asks, What was the family and community contribution of women’s labour in food harvesting, preparation, production, and sharing from 1850-1950? Utilizing a methodology called “deep mapping” to merge qualitative approaches with digital technologies, it combines Indigenous community-based and oral history research methods, genealogical reconstruction, and Historical Geographic Information Systems (HGIS). HGIS combines historical research methods with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a computer-based mapping and spatial analysis technology for organization and analysis of geographically referenced data. MĂ©tis families first came to the Qu’Appelle Valley to hunt buffalo before taking up land on a seasonal and then on a more permanent basis by the 1860s. They supported themselves through trade with, and wage labour for the Hudson’s Bay Company as well as by what they could hunt, gather and grow. Doing so, they relied on recognizable cultural practices, including those that reinforced family and kinship structures and the roles that women filled in food gathering, preservation, and production. By the early twentieth century, as families struggled to survive within a growing, and often hostile, settler society, many found themselves displaced and forced to relocate to the road allowances or unoccupied Crown land around the Qu’Appelle Lakes. Each time these families moved, they resettled along familiar extended family lines and adapted to changing economic, social and political situations. When challenged by the imposition of settler colonialism, foreign land tenure practices, government regulation, surveillance, and state intervention into their livelihoods, they responded in flexible individual and collective ways grounded in an Indigenous worldview, their understanding of place, and familiar political approaches. They maintained a subsistence lifestyle of fishing, trapping, and harvesting wild plants and medicines mixed with small-scale agriculture and seasonal wage labour in the settler economy. Qu’Appelle MĂ©tis lived according to a worldview that privileged kinship relationships, extended family relationships, complementary gender roles in food production, and a mixed subsistence lifestyle. Consequently, women made a significant contribution to the economic production of their families through their food harvesting, production, and preparation activities

    Towards an Institutional Counter-Cartography of Nurses’ Wound Work

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    Under the banner of continuous quality improvement, process mapping has become an increasingly routine feature of healthcare administration. Driven by demands to improve efficiency through standardization, nurses’ knowledge of their often-unpredictable work is routinely changed to fit within graphical representations that depict it as objectively controllable. Tensions that arose as I attempted to apply my knowledge as a specialist nurse in the rapidly changing area of outpatient wound clinics formed the direction for my institutional ethnography (IE) inquiry. As a student new to IE, I encountered challenges as I tried to explain to my informants how Dorothy Smith’s alternative sociology offered a unique way to explicate how their work is being organized. Recognizing that confusion arose when the term “mapping” was used to identify a key analytic process in both quality improvement projects and IE, I searched for a way to articulate how the two approaches are distinct. Parallels and divergences I discovered between the focus of the countercartography movement and the problematic emerging in my own study helped me not only to acknowledge my own participation in the ruling relations, but to better appreciate how using IE offered the potential to create a quite different picture of nurses’ wound work— one which challenges the official versions of their world on paper

    Vulnerability and Adaptation to Drought

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    Although there is considerable historical literature describing the social and economic impact of drought on the prairies in the 1930s, little has been written about the challenges presented by drought in more contemporary times. The drought of 2001-02 was, for example, the most recent large-area, intense, and prolonged drought in Canada and one of Canada's most costly natural disasters in a century. Vulnerability and Adaptation to Drought describes the impacts of droughts and the adaptations made in prairie agriculture over recent decades. These adaptations have enhanced the capacity of rural communities to withstand drought. However, despite the high levels of technical adaptation that have occurred, and the existing human capital and vibrant social and information networks, agricultural producers in the prairie region remain vulnerable to severe droughts that last more than a couple of years. Research findings and projections suggest that droughts could become more frequent, more severe, and of longer duration in the region over the course of the 21st century. This book provides insights into the conditions generating these challenges and the measures required to reduce vulnerability of prairie communities to them. Developing greater understanding of the social forces and conditions that have contributed to enhanced resilience, as well as those which detract from successful adaptation, is a principal theme of the book. To that end, the book examines drought through an interdisciplinary lens encompassing climate science and the social sciences. Two of the chapters are based on the drought experiences of other countries in order to provide a comparative assessment

    The contact uranium prospect, Kiggavik project, Nunavut (CVanada): Tectonic history, structural constrains and timing of mineralization

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    Uranium mineralization in the Kiggavik area, on the eastern border of the Thelon basin (Nunavut, Canada), hosts significant uranium resources within the basement and its understanding is critical to comprehending the genesis of unconformity-related deposits' structural controls and therefore exploration of these types of deposits in this prospective district. This article deciphers the complex multiphase fracture network associated with uranium mineralization of the most recently discovered, basement-hosted prospect in the Kiggavik area, named Contact. The Contact prospect is located along the Andrew Lake Fault (ALF), a major NE-SW fault corridor in the area. This study combines field work, drillcore logging, sampling, and macro- to micro- petro-structural analyses. Key results from this study highlight that the NE-trending ALF, along with the ENE-trending Thelon (TF) and Judge Sissons (JSF) faults, formed early during intracratonic rifting and deposition of the Baker Lake and Wharton groups (ca. 1850-1750 Ma) in response to the Thelon and Trans-Hudsonian orogeny. The ALF was affected by a strong silicification-brecciation event that likely developed at ca. 1750 Ma, and partitioned later deformation and fluid circulation. In the Contact prospect, the ALF was reactivated multiple times and mineralized in three stages with distinctive secondary fracture patterns, alteration, and mineralization types. Ten fracture stages have been identified at the Contact prospect, f1-f10. The first stage of mineralization, coeval with f5, is related to fluids of unconstrained origin that circulated through E-W faults in the area that locally re-activated quartz veins of the brecciation event at the intersection with the ALF. Mineralization at this stage is polymetallic and associated with weak clay alteration. The second stage of uranium mineralization occurred coeval with transtensional reactivation of the NE-SW trending ALF (f6c) and in relation to circulation of oxidizing basinal brines within the fault zone. Mineralization at this stage is monometallic and associated with illite and sudoite alteration. Later reactivation of the inherited fracture network (f8) led to strong illitization and bleaching of the host rock, with local reworking of the ore body. Finally, reactivation of the fracture network during f9 and 10 lead to circulation of meteoric fluids that remobilized mineralization in a third stage of uranium re-concentration along redox fronts, with strong illitization and bleaching of the host rock. Unlike the classic unconformity-related uranium deposits in the Athabasca Basin where clay alteration halos occur around the ore bodies related to mineralizing processes, in the Contact prospect the strongest clay alteration event (f8) postdates both main stages of mineralization. Along with uranium remobilization, the basement-hosted Contact prospect is likely a relict of what was once a larger deposit

    Late Precontact and Protocontact Stone Circle Sites at Little Manitou Lake, South-Central Saskatchewan

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    This study focuses on the Little Manitou Lake archaeological complex, a collection of sites situated around the western end of Little Manitou Lake, located in south-central Saskatchewan. The majority of sites documented in this region contain stone circle features suggesting residential/domestic use while a handful of sites have been documented as ceremonial in nature, containing medicine wheels and vision quest features. Today, Little Manitou Lake is hypersaline and has been so for the last 2,000 years. Evidence suggests that the lake was previously a deep freshwater lake. Changing climatic and environmental conditions responsible for the transformation of the lake would likely have influenced lifeways of past populations and may have influenced use of this area. Archaeological sites around Little Manitou Lake have been hypothesized to relate to the saline/healing nature of the water. The named Manitou comes from an Algonquian word meaning “great spirit” and the lake became known as the “Lake of Healing Waters”. Ethnographic information indicates that aboriginal groups made pilgrimages to the lake to experience the lakes healing properties. The main objective of this research was to improve understanding of interactions between past populations and the environment of the Little Manitou Lake area and to set the local archaeological record into the broader context of Northern Plains prehistory. The importance of this area to past populations is demonstrated by the density of archaeological sites identified around the lake. Considering paleoenvironmental data in relation to these sites provides new insights about human-environment interactions and how changing environmental conditions may have influenced past use of this area. To achieve the objective of this study, three goals were set out and explored: to identify hearth deposits at archaeological sites that could provide dates for site occupation in the area, to review paleoenvironmental data to better understand changing water and salinity levels of the lake through time, and to carry out spatial analyses to evaluate how site placement may relate and help elucidate the overall cultural landscape. Hearth deposits, containing charred organics, were identified which produced dates for three archaeological sites, establishing part of the cultural chronology for the region and provided data which suggest occupation occurred during the late summer or early autumn. The sites were found to belong to the Precontact and Protocontact periods. Data from EkNk-3 indicated that occupation occurred during a period of transition from the Late Old Women’s phase to the Mortlach phase while data from EkNj-4 and EkNj-68 indicated that occupations occurred during the Mortlach phase. Dates from these sites, when compared to the literature relating to paleoenvironmental conditions in the region, allowed for the inference that Little Manitou Lake was a saline lake during site occupation, leading to an improved understanding of the environmental context in which the sites were utilized. Spatial analyses were conducted on both domestic and ceremonial sites in the area. Spatial evaluations of domestic sites at the western end of Little Manitou Lake provided insight about the patterning of features present at the sites. Spatial evaluations of ceremonial sites provided insight about the importance of prominent topographic features in the region and helped to elucidate the overall cultural landscape. Taken as a whole, data collected during this study provides substantive new insights about the archaeological environment at Little Manitou Lake
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