Tag: history

38. Rob Cowen, The North Road

When I read a review of Rob Cowen’s The North Road in The Guardian last winter, I knew I had to read it. A study of a highway? On foot? Yes! Of course I was interested. My first book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, covers similar ground (forgive the pun). I immediately ordered a copy, and in July, I finally got down to reading it. I’m happy I did.

The North Road isn’t, as I had imagined, a book about a 400-mile walk following the path of “the North Road,” a historical highway (now the A1 and its variants) which runs from London to Edinburgh and beyond. Cowen isn’t wedded to the idea of walking, although the first half of the book tells the story of a long walk from London to Nottinghamshire, partly alone and partly with a friend, an active-duty soldier, known only as A, who joins Cowen when he is on leave. The rest of the book follows the highway by car. The pandemic is one reason for that change; another is that Cowen journeys at times with very different companion, his mother. That shift in the means of travel didn’t affect my interest in the book (which is a surprise, because I can be rigid about these things), and it becomes the occasion for Cowen’s experiments in genre, which add so much to the book.

Cowen begins with a day spent volunteering at an archaeological site uncovered by an expansion of the A1 in Yorkshire. It’s impossible, he suggests, to dig anywhere in England without uncovering evidence of its history. Roman, neolithic, Bronze Age, modern–it doesn’t matter: bodies, pottery, coins, weapons, the remains of structures (particularly henges) are everywhere. The way people lived, their technologies and burial practices, means they left many traces. That’s true here as well, or at least it was. The areas of native grassland that remain unploughed are full of tipi rings, farmers often collected hundreds of arrow heads and other knapped flint objects, former buffalo jumps were the sites of centuries of bones. The difference, perhaps, is that when the grassland became fields of wheat, the tipi rings and medicine wheels were destroyed, and the bones of the buffalo were shipped away to be turned into china and fertilizer. The arrowheads often end up in boxes in local museums, separated from their context by the plough and their first settler collectors. Similar vandalism happened in England, of course. Victorian archaeologists broke into tombs; many of the stones at Avebury were deliberately shattered by clergymen who believed they were evidence of Satanic worship. But more tangible evidence of the past seems to remain in England, even before those blue medallions began to be installed on any old building where something somewhat interesting took place.

But this book isn’t just about artifacts or material culture. It’s about stories. Like me (and like other walking writers, from Matthew Anderson to Iain Sinclair), Cowen looks for evidence of the past in the pedestrian present, while also learning everything he can about the history and geography of the places he visits. While walking, he keeps an eye out for old coaching inns, since the North Road was, for much of the 18th century, a busy coach route. He tells us when he sees evidence of the road’s earlier Roman incarnation. He tracks the rise and fall of towns and villages as the road was moved or the railway passed (or didn’t pass) them by. But the stories are what make this book come alive: stories about people who grew up or lived or met their endings alongside the North Road, including Margaret Thatcher, the prizefighter Tom Molineaux, the poet John Clare, the murder victim John Barugh. And stories from Cowen’s own life, his struggle to overcome childhood trauma, and stories about his family, who lived in Doncaster (right on the road) before moving down to London. That complex, layered mix of memoir, biography, history, geography, and attention to place, as well as the stories of the difficulties of a long walk, make this book a must-read for anyone interested in such things.

And that leads to Cowen’s shifts in genre, from nonfiction to fiction, where historical evidence is missing or where he wants to get inside those stories. There are two long chapters of fiction here: one about a contemporary (more or less) travelling IT support person, leading a lonely life in hotels and on the motorway, and the other about a woman trying to escape William the Conqueror’s soldiers during the Harrying of the North, a scorched-earth campaign against the Danes and Anglo-Saxons, mostly in Yorkshire, who were rebelling against his rule after the Norman Conquest. To call that campaign “ethnic cleansing” might be anachronistic, but from Cowen’s account, it seems accurate. I don’t know how much his fictional version of events stacks up against the historical record, or if there is much of a historical record of what it was like to be a victim of the Harrying, since a) few of those people could write and b) any documents would’ve been burned along with their homes, but the narrative is so engaging that it doesn’t matter. In that way, The North Road asks us to think about the way fiction and nonfiction blur together, the way that our knowledge is partial, the way that our memories are constructions.

I was amazed by The North Road, and I’m looking forward to reading Cowen’s other books (nonfiction and poetry). I’m not tempted, though, to follow in his footsteps and try to walk from London to Doncaster (or wherever he stopped), mostly because I don’t have the courage for that much trespassing and wild camping (walking beside highways in the UK is more than unpleasant–it’s suicidal, since there are no shoulders). I’m glad he did it, though, and delighted that he wrote this book.

38. Trevor Herriot, Towards a Prairie Atonement

Saskatchewan writer Trevor Herriot’s Towards a Prairie Atonement is the third book I’m teaching in my summer course on place writing. It gets a shout out in the book I taught right before this one, Kit Dobson’s Field Notes on Listening, which makes for a nice segue between the two texts. Early in his book, Dobson is trying to explain to the reader why he’s so interested in listening, and he uses Herriot’s book to do that:

I think of this work of listening as part of what Trevor Herriot calls “the work of atonement that stands before all prairie people today.” Atonement for what? Lost opportunities, Herriot suggests. He writes about how prairie grasslands have been destroyed over time by agriculture and private land use systems. He laments the loss of Indigenous ways of managing the land that predated colonization, as well as the loss of Métis land systems that were disrupted in the wake of the Northwest Resistance and the execution of Louis Riel. With those losses came shrinking prairies, loss of habitat and exploitation of the land. All settlers on the Prairies are implicated in this history, which is by no means in the past. So how to atone?

I wish I could take credit for remembering that connection, but discovering it was a happy accident, a lucky bridge for my students that helped to carry them from one book to the next. It’s also an excellent summary of Herriot’s book and the central questions it asks. What is atonement, and how is it possible given the history Herriot and Dobson describe?

Herriot’s epigraph, a quotation from an essay by education professor Cynthia Chambers and Blackfoot Elder and scholar Narcisse Blood, offers one possible answer. “Whether we are indigenous or newcomer, today our tipis are held down by the same peg. Neither is going anywhere,” they write. “The knowledge and the will needed to protect and save these places no longer belongs to one people or one tradition.” The places Chambers and Blood are writing about are sites sacred to the Blackfoot, but Herriot extends that idea to the prairies in general, and what was once the Métis community of Ste. Madeleine on the border betweenSaskatchewan and Manitoba in particular. He describes what he means by “atonement” in his first chapter, “One Tent Peg to Share,” as a coming together, a meeting between two peoples “on level ground,” one where there is “sharing without taking.” He argues that the idea of atonement, expressed in this way, “brings us nearer to the place where we can be at one with the land and with one another across, but with deep respect for, all creaturely, cultural, and racial distinctions.” To atone, for Herriot, would be for settlers to recognize their (our) history of colonization, of extracting everything we can from the land, of pushing Indigenous peoples to the margins. He sees atonement and decolonization as synonyms: “The work of decolonizing, of atonement, begins with the act of recognizing and honouring what was and is native but has been evicted from the land—native plants and animals but the original peoples, cultures, and languages too.”

His second chapter, “On the Sand Plains,” looks at one specific eviction, one that resulted in the Spy Hill-Ellice community pasture. That large area of upland native prairie was, at the time, threatened by the Harper government’s decision to privatize the community pastures that had been managed by the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration since the 1930s. In private hands, those fragments of a disappearing ecosystem, temperate grasslands—the most threatened ecosystem on the planet—would likely be ploughed under, just like almost all of the rest of the grassland that was in this place when settlers began arriving here in the 1880s. But the story of how the Spy Hill-Ellice community pasture came to be is another ugly story of destruction and displacement. In 1937, the people living in the Métis community of Ste. Madeleine, located in part of that community pasture, were informed that they’ld have to leave. A year or so later, workers from the local rural municipality burned their homes and shot their dogs. They’d been left without after the grotesque swindle of Métis land scrip that had been perpetrated by the federal government, and in Ste. Madeleine they had been able to re-establish a way of life based on Métis land use patterns. That chapter brings together the history of the Métis in western Canada and at Ste. Madeleine with a visit to the community’s cemetery with Métis Elder and Michif language teacher Norman Fleury, whose family lived there. Fleury tells the story of Ste. Madeleine to Herriot. It’s a story of loss, of colonial violence, but also one of survival, and Herriot recognizes that both the Métis and the land itself have been deeply injured by colonization by settlers. Atonement would mean recognizing all of that, and then working together to restore the grasslands, wetlands, and rivers to good health, a “good work that would reconcile and bind all of us together,” but one we haven’t talked about. We are responsible to each other and to the land, he argues, and we will find a path forward “between the gravestones, in the unjust narratives of our collective history, and upon the sunlit plains themselves.”

The third chapter of Towards a Prairie Atonement argues that one way we could move forward together would be to consider the value of Métis land practices as a way out of the sterile binary of private property versus the public good. Those practices were based in a “sense of responsibility to the shared well-being of the earth,” and the Spy Hill-Ellice community pasture could become a place where “a remnant of the Métis commonwealth” could be restored. Perhaps, he concludes, “somewhere ahead, where the land rises to meet the pipit song that falls from summer skies, there might yet be a place, a sandy plain, where we, sharing one tent peg, can meet and see how the prairie might bring us together.” In the ten years since Herriot’s visit to the cemetery at Ste. Madeleine, we have made little progress towards the atonement he describes, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t start now.

The book concludes with a short afterword, written by Norman Fleury, who notes that Herriot’s questions made him uneasy at first, but that he can see that some good has come out of their connection. He also emphasizes, rightly, that the Métis are survivors. “We were good caretakers of the land,” he writes. “We were the stewards. We still are.” 

This is a lovely book, poetic and powerful, and it is no less urgent in its call to change the way we connect to the land than when it was published in 2016. The work of atonement remains essential. The realities of climate change, habitat destruction, and human displacement, tangible in the wildfire smoke drifting south, the ongoing destruction of the grassland, and the continuing calls for justice by Indigenous Peoples, demand our attention. We ignore them at our peril, here and elsewhere–and the place to begin will be with the recognition that our tents share a single peg, that we are linked by our presence here, despite our terrible history, and that we need to move forward together.