Introduction

In the wake of Colten Boushie’s murder, Gina Starblanket and Dallas Hunt unpacked the colonial scripts that surrounded his death, and the historical tropes that permeated the subsequent trial, media coverage, and public discourse: farmers protecting their castles and frontiersmen taming the wild, to name a few.^[1] “Settler colonialism narrates itself into being through processes of storytelling,” they argued, and these myths have long shaped settler imaginaries, interactions, and institutions in ways that have “real, tangible, material effects for Indigenous peoples.”^[2] The prairies specifically are marked by “tropes about the virtuousness of its people and the righteousness of its political and cultural formations,”^[3] a pioneer mythology of innocence, hard work, entitlement, and agrarian progress.^[4] This story continues to be told in classrooms and courtrooms, settler homes and families, newspapers and comment sections – and it is being reinvigorated and leveraged by reactionary provincial governments to further a hostile political agenda.

While unpacking the content and consequences of such cultural narratives is crucial, it is also worth examining the processes and indeed the people that produced them. Where does this pioneer mythology come from? How, over the last 150 years, has it emerged, evolved, and insidiously permeated the fabric of Prairie cultures, historiographies, institutions, and beyond? Some answers lie with state-driven, institutional, and top-down processes of history making. Starblanket and Hunt, for instance, analyze how the Dominion government propagandized Canada’s West through the late 19th century as a fertile “land of opportunity,” emptied of Indigenous life or political formations, and available for deserving white settlers to remake themselves into “self-reliant farm owners.”^[5] Timothy Stanley traces how a popular 1920s textbook indoctrinated Saskatchewan primary school children into a racist common sense understanding of their history: “white supremacy had become love of king and country, …invaders had become ‘pioneers’… [and] the creation of European dominance [had become their] grandmother’s farm.”^[6] But I am interested in how turn-of-the-century homesteaders themselves helped create the pioneer mythology. As Michel Rolph Trouillot articulates, historical actors are “engage[d] simultaneously in the sociohistorical process and in narrative constructions about that process.”^[7] This paper explores how colonial narratives were crafted and disseminated by these historical actors-cum-narrators, with a focus on what I am calling settler sociality.

Settler sociality exposes how formal and informal settler social networks – ranging from extended families to ever proliferating clubs, groups, and associations – were influential spaces for the creation and propagation of particular renditions of prairie history and particular ideas about citizenship and nationhood, land and property, Indigeneity and settlerness. Across the prairies, thousands of homesteaders, seeking social connection and belonging in their new home, participated in collective practices of narrativization to secure their own place in the colonial-slash-national project (and to paint Indigenous peoples as vanishing, irrelevant, or murderable^[8] – and then as “fortunate beneficiaries of our altruism”^[9]).^[10] A century later, these myths remain a powerful force that facilitate the ongoing dispossession and colonization of Indigenous peoples across the Canadian prairies – and so must be denaturalized and confronted.

Case Studies

To better understand how social collectives facilitated both informal and formal practices of historical creation, I will engage with three case studies grounded in early 20th century Saskatchewan: old timers’ associations, the boy scouts movement, and extended families. These three case studies emerged from the newspaper archives and local histories that I was reading in pursuit of my own ancestors’ homesteading story, and they illustrate some of the mechanisms, networks, and practices through which homesteaders became producers of their own history.

Old Timers’ Associations

Between the 1890s and the 1920s, many prairie cities, towns, and districts formed Old Timers’ Associations.^[11] These associations established membership criteria–pioneers who had settled a given region before a particular date^[12]–and generally defined their objectives as two-fold:

1. to “promot[e] good fellowship among its members”^[13] or encourage “social and friendly relations of the pioneers of the district”^[14], and
2. “the preservation of the early history of the settlement”^[15] or to “rescue from oblivion the memory of the early settlers and keep records of the adventures of the pioneers and explorers of the North West Territories.”^[16]

The first objective was fulfilled through annual Old Timers’ banquets, often attended by hundreds. These events would feature a meal (sometimes privileging food that “formed an important part of the daily diet of those early days”^[17]), singing (lyric sheets provided), and dancing (“only the old-time dances will prevail”^[18]).

The second objective is important for excavating the emergence of a potent pioneer mythos. Old neighbours were encouraged to “exchange reminiscences of their early experience”^[19] at these events, a process of collective narrativization shaped by the surrounding social context. Historical narration also happened more didactically, with toasts and speeches enforcing certain framings at the expense of others. At the Regina Association’s banquet in 1900, for instance, the premier of the then Northwest Territories addressed the attendees, arguing that the very existence of an Old Timers’ gathering was a testament to the “development of the Empire”; he situated the Canadian west favorably in a wider network of British values, institutions, and military strength, and passionately celebrated the “growth of the Imperial idea.”^[20] Another speaker responded to a toast to the “Legislative Assembly”:

North-West pioneers, better than the people of older communities [in Eastern Canada], understood and appreciated the advantages and meaning of parliamentary institutions by reason of their having witnessed and borne a share in the practical development of such institutions. The people in the territories had seen a constitution grow from quite primitive stages. They had watched and assisted in the rearing of it from its foundations.^[21]

Early pioneer attendees were encouraged (by speakers, committee members, and one another) to position themselves as active participants at the beginning of benevolent Prairie development. Pre-settlement history, colonial conflict, and Indigenous people do not factor into the story at all. Rather, as at a 1909 banquet, “voices from the past… conjure magic pictures of the early days, the scent of the open prairie, the sound of thousands of buffalo hoofs, the spirit of the great blue sky, and the unbounded plain.”^[22]

Both structurally (via an exclusive form of collective identification premised on firsting and founding) and substantively (via the interpretations explicitly prioritized), these social institutions massaged early settler understandings of Prairie history and gave Old Timers a platform and a vocabulary to become historical narrators themselves, with the authority assigned to “history from the lips of men who made it.”^[23] The camaraderie and sense of shared positioning created through these associations may have made them particularly potent sites for people to reformulate and narrativize their own experiences as part of a solidifying pioneer mythology. Inherently nostalgic, Old Timers Associations continued to host popular meetings and events into the second half of the 20th century.^[24]

Boy Scouts

Founded in England in 1907 by Robert Baden-Powell, the scouting movement quickly spread to Canada and grew into the largest youth movement in the country.^[25] Troops popped up in prairie cities starting in 1909, and by the early 1930s, there were over 7000 Boy Scouts in Saskatchewan alone.^[26] From the beginning, the scouting movement emphasized seemingly innocuous values like cooperation and navigation or first-aid skills. As glowingly framed by the provincial commissioner of the Saskatchewan boy scouts, himself a former homesteader: “Scouting teaches loyalty without militarism, religion without dogma, and… makes for peace, brotherliness, and good will throughout the world.”^[27]

But scouting was also always invested, explicitly and implicitly, in particular versions of hegemonic masculinity and imperial citizenship.^[28] Before pivoting into children’s programming, Baden-Powell had spent thirty-five years suppressing resistance across the British Empire: “militarism, racist pedagogy, and colonialist violence [were] threads that wove together Baden-Powell’s two lives,” Kristin Alexander and Mary Jane McCallum contend, and were built into the Scouting movement from the very beginning.^[29] The institutions of Scouting (and Guiding, the parallel organization for girls) must be understood as relatives of the fascist youth groups of inter-war Europe, rather than their antitheses, as they shared a “‘common grammar’ of physical discipline and a desire for racial regeneration.”^[30]

As elsewhere in the British empire, scouting was imposed upon Indigenous children to assimilate them into Canadian citizenship,^[31] but I am interested in the role that early 20th century scouting played in settler communities on the Prairies. Many saw the “frontier” as a distinct and generative fit for the movement.^[32] As one newspaper editorial from 1909 suggested:

The Canadian west is still new, no matter if it is filling with the rapid thousands… The formation of a boy scouts brigade in any western town will bring out a corps of youngsters who are more naturally adapted to the work than their less favored comrades in the east and in other parts of the empire. … Here we have the hills, the mountains, the prairies and the virgin country…[that] bring the idea of scouting closer to the youth and give them a deeper interest in the work.^[33]

Proximity to the outskirts of empire and the beginning of settlement is positioned as an asset for aspiring scouts, who – as first or second generation settlers – were seen as naturally adept at the wilderness and “homesteading” skills elevated by scouting literature and practice.

Despite the “virgin country” construction, the Canadian Boy Scouts material does not deny or erase Indigenous peoples. On the contrary, it is overflowing with mentions of Indigenous techniques and skills, in line with the antimodernist compulsions of the early-to-mid-century that mined purportedly pre-modern cultures to resolve a perceived crisis of masculinity.^[34] The Boy Scouts’ Handbook for Canada includes dozens of pages dedicated to “woodcraft,” often specifically citing Indigenous knowledges (though mediated through anthropological distortions and generalizations), teaching scouts how to “construct snow houses in accordance with the Eskimo style,” copy native techniques for making bows and arrows, teepees, snow shoes, fishing rods, and totem poles, or follow the model of “our North American Indians [who] are past-masters in th[e] art [of trapping].”^[35] Scouting was a prototypical way for settlers to engage in what Philip Deloria called “Indian play”^[36] – “appropriating and mimicking so-called uncivilized and pre-historic Indigenous cultural practices with the aim of strengthening modern white bodies and spirits.”^[37]

Unlike classrooms, commemorations, or Old Timers Associations, scouting was not explicitly about history. But despite and through its nostalgic turn, scouting literature and organizational cultures helped substantiate and reinforce a linear narrative of unfolding development and progress. All of Baden-Powell’s texts, the foundational doctrines of the Scouts, are overflowing with ideological rationales for the project of British imperialism.^[38] And the literature developed for the Canadian branch of the scouts reinforced a more specific story. For example:

Many of the original pathways through the forests of Canada, across her plains and through her mighty mountains, … were used by the Indians, and later by exploring adventurers, trappers and settlers. In many cases, to complete the romance, the old pathways were followed by the railroads.^[39]

This is a familiar tale: the natural replacement of “Indians” by adventurers and settlers, the railway’s penetration of Canada’s mighty landscapes – this is a story of inheritance and replacement, rather than conquest or resistance.

I suggest that the social context of scouting gave this narrative additional power. Scouts were encouraged to see themselves, through their belonging in a highly ritualized and bounded in-group, as players in this story. “Times change,” the Canadian Handbook read in 1930, and

the conditions which confronted… the pioneers of settlement and religion in North America no longer exist. Yet is there continuing need for the spirit of chivalry… it is one of the aims of the Boy Scout Movement to keep alive amongst us the rules of fair play which have done so much for the moral tone of our race.^[40]

In the Canadian prairies – where, unlike further south or east, “early settlement days” were not distant history when early scout troops were founded – this call may have been particularly powerful. From patrol leaders to provincial commissioners, many of the adults involved were themselves homesteaders, for whom scouting could be tied to both their real and the mythologized pioneer experience. As Baden-Powell himself had written from England:

These vast lands are calling for men who are prepared to give up some of the soft things of life and get down to real jobs of work…  The Empire waits for you! … you will have the joy of creating something — perhaps a farm won out of the prairie.^[41]

Scouting offered ordinary people a stake in this mythology and cultivated a more personal investment in the narrative than is likely from a pulpit or a classroom. By participating in scouting, children were invited into a role in a story, one that – although no doubt complex and contested, particularly for non-Anglo settler communities who often navigated tensions between the impulses of preservation and assimilation – further integrated a pioneer mythos into children’s sense of themselves for generations.

Family histories

Family histories–the “memories and stories passed down the generations”^[42]–are one of the more influential sites of historical meaning-making. It would be a mistake to disregard such insidious, intergenerational artifacts, because these stories often become the “myths we live by.”^[43] The version of history told within homes and families usually centers the teller’s own life or that of their immediate relatives: a convenient genre for the pioneer myth in which memories of hardworking grandparents and great-grandparents serve an important function.^[44] As an effective and affective site of historical production and reproduction, mobilization and internalization, family memory brings the past resoundingly into the present,^[45] and can play an outsized and perhaps underestimated role in influencing “what descendants believe” about both history and politics.^[46]

It is impossible to directly access the intimate and ephemeral storytelling which occurred in the homes of early 20th century homestead families; we can only work with such echoes as are discernible from the family histories that were eventually recorded in local history books, museum exhibits, genealogical databases, etc.^[47] While a systematic analysis of these texts is beyond the scope of this chapter,^[48] my preliminary engagement has found remarkably consistent narrative arcs, even if immigrants-slash-settlers were coming to Saskatchewan from quite different place or contexts. These pioneer stories often centre struggle, but with an emphasis on overcoming hardship (rather than anger at being deceived or neglected, for instance). The absence of Indigenous people is notable, though it is hard to parse when and where this absence is a discursive feature versus a reflection of the emergent spatial apartheid that governed prairie life; the emptiness and availability of the prairie plots is simply taken for granted. Pride at having “played their part in the settlement and building of Saskatchewan”^[49] and a celebration of familial connection to land are recurrent refrains.

These stories are ripe for weaponization in contemporary comment sections and editorials, cited as grounds for righteous settler entitlement. Through narrating a familial connection to early settlement, Sunera Thobani argues, “subsequent generations of Canadians [are able] to define themselves as repositories and preservers of the national inheritance.”^[50] By taking on the labour and homestead land of my ancestors as a kind of symbolic endowment, I can–according to settler logics–make a more authentic claim to citizenship, Canadianness, and this land itself: as the pioneer fantasy goes, after all, it was my predecessors who cleared the wilderness, braved the dangers, and built this country.^[51] Crucially, Thobani clarifies, this supposed link “becomes comprehensible only within the context of the continuity of their shared racial identity”^[52]; descendants of Black homesteaders, for instance, may encounter skepticism about their belonging in Canada despite being rooted here for many generations. And the selective celebration of ancestral connection to place–such as a Saskatchewan program honoring families who have farmed the same land for a hundred years^[53]–is an ironic move given the erasure and disruption of the nêhiyawak, Nahkawininiwak, Nakota, Dakota, Lakota, and Denesuline’s own (much longer) relationships to that same land.

When educator and activist Sheela McLean reflects on the stories passed on in her own settler Saskatchewan family, she remembers the emphasis on how her “grandparents immigrated to Canada with very little”:

I came to understand these stories as narratives that reproduced the idea that our collective family wealth and status as white settlers was earned through ingenuity, … erasing the colonial policies that enforced differential access to resources, such as land. The story that my family built a life from nothing works to make economic inequality between white settlers and Indigenous people seem natural and normal.^[54]

McLean’s reflections about how her family’s homesteading stories upheld the illusion of a meritocracy expose some of the important ways that ancestral myths can shape our understanding of the world today.

Conclusions

Historical production and historical producers

Paige Raibmon has argued that more attention should be paid to the relationship between settler practices and colonial policies, between the myriad of individual, ordinary, contradictory choices, and the bigger project – dispossession – to which they contributed.^[55] Translating this vital analysis to the question of historical production reinforces the importance of investigating myth-making from the ground up and from the hearth outwards, and looking for historical producers in unexpected places. Any divide between private and public collapses in both the Prairie myth’s content, a national origin story which emphasizes the domestic above the political,  and propagation, in which intimate familial memories play such a central role. And while the homestead historiography has focused on the stages of life deemed active and productive–early adulthood and middle-age–these case studies include children and elders as central figures in the contested terrain of myth-making.

Founders and firsters

There is a familiar vocabulary for the historical narratives produced through settler colonialism – founders and firsters^[56] and blank slates, civilization and development and progress. The recentness of colonial occupation on the prairies meant that homesteaders, just a few generations ago, could readily slot their lives and labour into the “origins” of Prairie history. The argument that homesteaders were vital on-the-ground enactors of Canadian and imperial territorial and institutional expansion has been compellingly made by contemporary scholars,^[57] but I suggest that many homesteaders understood themselves in this way as well–albeit with a celebratory emphasis on British values and Canadian nation-building rather than white supremacy and colonial replacement.

Identification and belonging

Key to what I’ve called settler sociality is the way that collective forms of identification (proud old timer of X district, proud member of Y scouting troop, proud part of Z family) helped facilitate identification with a Prairie mythology. I suggest that the myth’s internalization into the realms of identity and social belonging may have made it harder to disrupt through straightforward historiographic interventions. Mythologized familial stories are particularly hard to unsettle because they are as emotionally charged as familial relationships (affection, obligation, resentment, and more) and because they may be intertwined with a sense of self (pride, identity, belonging).^[58] Reckoning with the causes, contexts, and consequences of our ancestors’ actions may also have material stakes: if our predecessors, whatever their intentions, were players in a massive process of land theft and dispossession, what does that mean for the legitimacy of inherited land title or generationally accrued wealth today?^[59]

Conscription and Self-Empowerment

Trouillot’s emphasis on how “historical production is itself historical”^[60] raises important questions: To what degree were these social networks and their narrativization practices steered by colonial authorities? Or if this same myth re-emerged from the grassroots, was it because of ideological commitment or the benefits accrued through adherence? Could British and European homesteaders have narrativized their experiences in without aligning with the wider settler colonial project? What incentives and pressures kept other narratives from emerging or gaining traction? More analysis is required, but if homesteaders as historical actors were often both used to further elite agendas and also driven to empower themselves at the expense of others, perhaps homesteaders as historical narrators were similarly both disciplined and motivated. This chapter has stayed close to the historical practices of the “exalted subjects”^[61] of the pioneer mythology, but what of the storytelling of those who departed from these normative scripts?

Absencing and Presencing

As Starblanket and Hunt note, colonial narratives of the prairies either erased Indigenous people entirely–as in the Old Timers’ narration of empty lands awaiting eager settlers–or else framed them in such a way that would “not interfere with the agrarian settler lifestyle”^[62]–as in the Boy Scouts’ positioning of Indigenous practices as a legacy to inherit or a resource to mine. What there is not space for is Indigenous peoples who pose an obstacle–either materially or ideologically–to the inevitability of settler ascendancy or the righteousness of settler dominance; thus the histories of both colonial conflict or of treaty negotiations, as far as I have found, remain almost entirely unspoken in these spaces. The copious repetitions of the pioneer myth attempts to make absent Indigenous sovereignty while making present settler entitlement, participating in the two-fold “project of replacement” that Patrick Wolfe deems integral to settler colonialism itself.^[63]

Dismantling and Confronting

Weaponized both explicitly and implicitly, revisionist retellings of prairie settlement play an active role in contemporary politics. The pioneer mythology buttresses a settler entitlement to land as property (and to property as freedom^[64]) while repositioning Indigenous people as trespassers, the consequences of which have been made so painfully clear.^[65] It also upholds Canada’s brand of purportedly compassionate and benevolent nationalism, a denialist fantasy premised on our “benign origins.”^[66] I take seriously Métis scholar Emma LaRocque’s call to action: “the responsibility to clean up colonial debris […] lies first with the colonizer. Colonizer sons and daughters need, even more than us, to dismantle their colonial constructs.”^[67]  I want to speak to other white settlers–especially the many thousands of us who trace our lineage through Prairie homesteads–about the connections between historical and contemporary colonial narratives and structures. “We have become comfortable laying responsibility for our modern-day ‘Indian problem’ at the feet of politicians and Indian affairs bureaucrats of days gone by,” Raibmon argues, but “we are less comfortable… dealing with the mundane practices of colonialism and dispossession as they were deployed by so-called regular folk.”^[68] Unsettling the Prairie myth requires grappling with the roles played by “regular folk” in both building a new colonial order and in crafting a potent colonial mythology. It requires engaging with the fraught and interwoven histories of Indigenous peoples, settlers, and arrivants,^[69] and with the reality of ongoing racism and colonialism in the Prairies. It means working towards other ways of remembering the past, taking responsibility in the present, and imagining futures beyond the confines of the colonial imaginary and the settler state.^[70]

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