People and Prairie Space: Knowledge of the Self and Knowledge of Space

Abstract

In Chapters 2 and 3, I discussed the ways in which Wiebe's writing represents the alterity of people. In the remaining three main chapters, I shift my focus towards epistemological problems of spatiality and the ethics of representing encounters with the alterity of space. In the present chapter, I discuss the relations between people and Prairie space in Frieda Friesen's chapters in The Blue Mountains of China, in the construction of the Aboriginal other in The Temptations of Big Bear, and in Adam Wiebe's chapters in Sweeter than All the World.These narratives show that the Prairie is an immense space, one that has not been rendered immediately knowable by discourses of colonialism or such physical transformations as urbanization or, historically, the introduction of the railway. As Alison Calder and Robert Wardhaugh note,the 'Canadian Prairies' came into being as a consciously constructed space, an entity produced in order to fulfil specific economic and imperial needs.1Explorers and surveyors had considered the area inhospitable, but it was deliberately reconstructed [...] as a paradisal farmland2 to attract immigrants and thus establish British/Canadian control over the Prairies. Immigrant farmers, however, saw that they could only find that paradisal land if they reconstructed the Prairie to correspond to these images; the Prairie landscape and climate not magically domesticate themselves to accommodate the images that the colonizer imposed on them.Wiebe, however, raises the introduction of the railway as an important image in representations of the Prairie. In an oft-quoted passage from a 1971 essay, he draws a parallel between the introduction of the railway and the construction of discursive spaces suitable for representing the Western land:to break into the space of the reader's mind with the space of this western landscape and the people in it you must build a structure of fiction like an engineer builds a bridge [...]. poem, a lyric, will not do. You must lay great black steel lines of fiction, break up that space with huge design and, like the fiction of the Russian steppes, build giant artifact.3Wiebe here subverts a powerful image imposed on the Prairies by totalityseeking colonialist history: first, that the Prairie was big, and perhaps too big for anyone to understand. Second, as it was largely uninhabited - the First Nations, of course, not count for the colonialist - the Prairie was a big, empty space. As more immigrants settled, the region became less empty, but the image of its emptiness persisted, as it was easier to impose the discourse of colonialism or building the Canadian nation upon an empty space.Consequently, representations of the Prairie rarely arose from being on the Prairie, and they created a silence that Robert Kroetsch identifies when he remembers how the books that filled his childhood did not ever mention the prairie world I lived in. Full of words, those pages were blank.4 Kroetsch does not identify the books he read as a child in more detail, but notes that growing up in Western Canada meant being immersed in History. Literature. America. Britain. Europe.5 Literature in Kroetsch's childhood would mean reading British and U S literature, not only because they supported the historical act of colonizing the West that was central for constructing the British empire and the continental USA, but also because texts originating in the Canadian Prairie were in short supply. In short, the Canadian Prairie of Kroetsch's youth was absent from most texts actually occupying Prairie space.In Wiebe's essay on Western landscape, however, the immense dimensions of the Prairie and the relative emptiness that they suggest appear as qualities that enable a text to represent the Prairie, and do not hide it from sight. While Wiebe claimed that A poem, a lyric, will not do,6 Kroetsch soon proved in his long poem Seed Catalogue (1977) that a poem will indeed do for break[ing] into the space of the reader's mind with the space of this western landscape and the people in if':7We give form to this land by runninga series of posts and three strandsof barbed wire around a '/4-section. …