Tag: Trevor Herriot

57. Iryn Tushabe, Everything Is Fine Here

Here’s my last blog post of 2025: a brief appreciation of Regina writer Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here. Before I get to that welcome task, I want to express some gratitude the fact that I’ve read some 60 books this year (I didn’t blog about a couple here but did elsewhere). I love my job, but it takes all of my energy, and the fact that I managed to read these (mostly short) books is a wonder. I have friends (I’m looking at you, Tanis MacDonald and Kim Fahner, but I know many other friends fit this description, too) who seem to read a book every day and even post capsule reviews of them online. My average of one book per week will have to do for now, even though it doesn’t feel particularly ambitious. I mean, one of my students, a talented and prolific poet, has set out to read Moby Dick over the holidays. That’s ambition. By comparison, I am a lazybones.

But I did read Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here. I wanted to read it earlier, and it became my holiday treat, filling the space usually occupied by Great Expectations, which contains my favourite Christmas dinner in literature (poor Pip!). Not that Everything Is Fine Here is a Christmas story: it isn’t. It’s a story about a family that’s divided by religious bigotry exported to Uganda by American evangelical Christians. One of the latest shapes colonialism takes, I suppose, although I’d hazard to bet that the British left sodomy laws behind when they decamped. It’s also a coming-of-age novel; the protagonist, Aine, is 18 years old, an aspiring naturalist and writer (is that a nod to another Regina writer, Trevor Herriot? I should ask Iryn the next time I see her), caught between her “savedee” mother and her courageous sister. I don’t want to say anything more about the narrative, which moves in surprising directions, because I don’t want to spoil this book for anybody.

What can I say, then, that won’t give anything away? How about a list of what I liked about this charming first novel? I really liked the book’s representation of Kampala, for one thing. I doubt I’ll ever go there, and my experience would be different from Tushabe’s, since she was born in Uganda, but she caught what I imagine to be the complexity of an African capital. I liked the chapters at Aine’s boarding school, too. They’re different from the boarding schools in Alpha Nkuranga’s Born to Walk–Nkuranga went to school in Uganda as a Rwandan refugee, and the cruelty she encountered shocked me–and I was heartened by the idea that not all such institutions are so horrible. Not that there isn’t cruelty in Everything Is Fine Here: the worst possible outcomes of Uganda’s laws prohibiting same-sex relationships shape the narrative, but the cruelties are smaller, more domestic and familial. Not that small cruelties are acceptable or easy–no. Even the savedees ought to understand that their God must’ve created people who love in different ways, and that if those kinds of love are acceptable to that God, they ought to be acceptable to us, too. Besides, those verses about same-sex relationships in Leviticus? That book of laws is full of lots of things that, if taken literally, would lead to our executions, including the shirt I wore yesterday, a mix of polyester and merino wool. No blended fabrics, according to Leviticus! Breaking that rule meant death. Yes, I know we’re probably supposed to understand that metaphorically, as a commandment against marrying unbelievers or something, but too many people take the commandments in Leviticus literally. If we’ve put the one about blended fabrics aside, if we’ve decided that makes little difference to us now, maybe we could put some of the other laws aside, too. Things have changed.

I loved this description of reading fiction, too:

Aine stayed outside on the veranda, engrossed in the novella. Time always flew by when she read fiction. Her senses sharpened, connecting her to a world where people were dealing with problems much like her own, making her feel less alone.

I’m reminded of the Life magazine interview where James Baldwin talks about the way that reading lets us know that our challenges are not unique to us, and I know Tushabe is aware of that interview, but the notion that reading sharpens our senses is new to me. If I ever get a chance to teach a course on fiction, I’ll offer this quotation as a hypothesis for my students: is this what happens to you when you read fiction?

I liked so many other things about this book: the straightforward incorporation of African languages into dialogue, the description of life in a small town, the recitations of the names of birds, the characters who are good and bad mixed together, whose behaviour can be understood even if it’s unworthy of them. So Everything Is Fine Here did turn out to be my holiday treat.

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.

33 Kilometres on the Old 16 Road Loop

A few weeks ago, I suggested that my goal was to be able to walk, comfortably, 32 kilometres (or 20 miles). Yesterday I walked a little farther than that. But comfortably? I’ve got a lot of walking to do before I’ll be able to say I’m comfortable walking that distance.

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My plan was to walk through the university (I had a meeting there) and down to Old 16 Road, which I’d follow as far as the Cowessess Gas and Grocery (along the route Trevor Herriot took on the walk he wrote about in his wonderful book, The Road is How). When I got to the gas station, I’d eat lunch. Then I’d start walking back northwest towards home. And that’s what I did.

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I walked this route two years ago, and I haven’t done it again, partly because I was apprehensive about the angry farm dog who lives near the bridge where Old 16 Road crosses Wascana Creek. And, sure enough, he was there, enraged that someone was trying to walk through what he considers to be his territory. But this time I was ready. I had a couple of dog biscuits in my pocket. My theory was that angry dogs could be calmed with treats. So when Mr. Farm Dog started growling and barking, I tossed him a Milk Bone. It worked! He ate it and wandered away. I didn’t take his picture, though, because I was too relieved, and surprised, that I got past him so easily. But I did take a picture of Wascana Creek, just on the other side of the bridge, where one lane has been closed for repairs.

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Sadly, the Cowessess Gas and Grocery no longer sells bannock. “Yeah, the guy who used to make it moved away,” the fellow behind the counter told me. So I ate a Clif bar instead, along with one of the apples I’d put in my knapsack. Then I turned and headed back.

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As soon as I could, I left the highway and walked through the city’s southeastern suburbs. When I did the same walk two years ago, I went along a footpath that runs through a long park. This time, though, I couldn’t find the footpath, so I walked along the sidewalk until I passed the Mormon temple behind its high steel fence. The golden figure on top of the temple is the Angel Moroni, who supposedly showed Joseph Smith where the golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written. Apparently every one of their temples has the same sculpture on top of it.

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I trudged over the bridge across the Ring Road and plodded through Wascana Park. Eventually, tired and sore, I got to a pub, where I had a drink and met Christine for a lift home. So I didn’t quite complete the entire circuit: I only walked 33 kilometres instead of the full 35 or 36 to complete the loop. And I can’t say I was comfortable. No, it’d be more accurate to say I was exhausted. Truth be told, I still am. I know it’s possible to walk that kind of distance day after day–when I was in Spain, walking the Camino de Santiago, that’s what I did–but I’m not ready to do it yet. I will be, though, before I leave for my next walk.That’s my new goal. I’ve got two months to reach it.

Walking and Connection

A few years ago, writer and naturalist Trevor Herriot fell off of a ladder. Well, maybe it’s not the fall so much as what he was doing up on the roof of his house: killing pigeons. The pigeons were nesting in a hard-to-reach spot next to one of the dormers, and their presence had led to an infestation of bird mites in the second floor of the house. So the pigeons had to go. That’s what Herriot was doing on the roof of the house when his ladder slipped out from underneath him and he landed on the front lawn.

This accident led to a kind of mid-life crisis. What was a man who had written a book about prairie songbirds, who had a regular guest spot on the local CBC station answering questions callers asked about birds, doing killing pigeons? Was his loss of balance on that ladder a metaphor for a larger loss of balance in his life? Despite his attempts to live in harmony with nature and in communion with other people, was he really that different from those who don’t question our culture’s lack of connection and community?

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Herriot went on a vision quest–three days sitting on a prairie hill top without food or water–and then walked for three days on a 40-mile pilgrimage to his family’s weekend home, east of the city, in an attempt to answer these questions. (The Biblical echoes are accidental, I think, but important.) His recent book, The Road is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire, and Soul, is a chronicle of his search for answers. The focus is primarily on his walk: not just the walk, but what he thought about as he trudged down grid roads and waded through sloughs. It’s a very personal book in which Herriot lays bare his various failures to live up to his ideals or his ethical standards. We learn about his relationship with his wife, Karen; about his friendships; about his past. I know Trevor slightly, and I was surprised to discover that he is so hard on himself and so skeptical about what he has accomplished. Perhaps this is simply a book about a good man who wants to be better.

Herriot’s walk is relatively short, but it runs across country that is inhospitable to travel by foot–or is nowadays, anyway. It’s not that the prairies hereabouts are flat, that the mosquitoes are ferocious, that farm dogs are dangerous, that there’s nowhere to get water–although all those things are true. It’s that nobody walks in this part of the world. Nobody would consider doing what Herriot did. If you want to walk, to hike, you go somewhere else–to the mountains, or some sacred path in some other part of the world. But Herriot wanted to walk on the land he knows well, on the land he’s worked to understand over the last 30 years or so. And in many ways, his walk is a response to something the late Bob Boyer (a Métis-Cree artist famous for his blanket paintings) said during a panel discussion about the Qu’Appelle Valley, the subject of Herriot’s first book. “I don’t know what all this crap is about the valley,” Boyer had said. “What’s the big deal? It’s no holier than any other place. It’s all sacred ground. All of it.” Herriot’s walk is an attempt to take Boyer seriously, to treat this tamed and humbled landscape, this damaged ecosystem, as if it were sacred ground.

As he walks, Herriot thinks about the connection between men and women (his main example, of course, being the connection or lack thereof between himself and Karen), about the connection (or lack of it) between our culture and the environment, about the way most of us are disconnected from the food we eat and the places where it was grown or raised. But primarily he thinks about himself, his own behaviour, and the ways he is or isn’t connected to the world around him. “Any aspirations I may have to safeguard wild places, grow gardens, and build community stand little chance of success if I cannot do a better job of tending to the holiest of connections, my sexual bond with the feminine (a bond with one woman in fidelity is a bond with all women in forbearance), and then, falling out of that primary bond, all of the others: with family, community, land,” he writes. “If I can set aside transcendence and union on some other plane, I might find ways to receive the gift of peace hidden within forbearance and continence on this plan, the gift of freedom hidden within the paradox of self-sacrifice.”

I’ve read this book twice, and while I enjoyed it, there are times that I want to argue with its author, too. For instance, Herriot recalls taking two acquaintances out of the city to see the birds in a nearby slough. His companions were amazed at the number of birds. “I saw all that was missing and they saw all that was there,” he writes. “And instead of complaining, they were utterly grateful, part of them bowing inwardly to each creature, each field of cut hay, or barn, or row of fence. I don’t know if I have ever felt that deep receiving thankfulness, but in that moment it seemed like a faculty I had lost and wanted dearly to have back again.” Of course, he knows what is missing because he has been studying this place for ages and has seen the number of birds decline as their habitat disappears under the pressure of industrial agriculture. His companions could experience that deep gratitude because they only know what is there, not what used to be there. Their approach to the land is innocent; his is experienced. Perhaps the only way for Herriot to experience that level of gratitude would be to go somewhere he doesn’t know very well, to walk somewhere new and strange, like one of the sacred paths he describes as “spiritual tourism.” I know a little about this from experience. Here, if I’m walking and I see, say, yellow sweet clover, I turn away from its yellow blossoms, its scent, because it’s an introduced weed. But in Spain, if I saw yellow sweet clover, it didn’t matter. For all I know, it’s always been there. It belongs in a way it doesn’t on the North American prairies. And even if it doesn’t, I don’t know any better, and so I was able to enjoy it, to be grateful for it.

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But I like this book. In fact, in late May, after I finished it for the first time, I walked part of Herriot’s route, down a grid road known as Old Highway 16, past sloughs and pastures full of waterfowl and songbirds (undoubtedly not as many as there once were, of course). I encountered an angry dog and saw some roadkill and noted what Wascana Creek looks like when it’s outside the city. I walked as far as the gas bar owned by a local First Nation, where I bought some bannock and ate my lunch on the same bench where Herriot ate his. “You’re not that guy who walks out to Cherry Lake, are you?” the gas attendant asked me. “No,” I answered, “but I read his book.”

Community pasture walk

Yesterday’s walk wasn’t a walk. It was more of a stroll, really, through a community pasture about an hour south of the city with a dozen or so birdwatchers and native-plant enthusiasts, led by naturalist and author Trevor Herriot. The walk was a fundraiser for Public Pastures: Public Interests, a group that is advocating for the protection of community pastures in this province. There were lots of longspurs and sparrows and hawks in the sky, including some prairie species I’ve never seen before. Trevor pointed out that grassland songbirds sing while they are flying, which is somewhat unusual, I gather (I’m not a birder although I’m always curious about the birds I see when I’m out for a walk somewhere). These species are all under threat because of habitat loss, and if the community pastures are sold off and the land broken for crop agriculture, they are likely to become extinct. Some 99 percent of the native grassland in this part of the world has been destroyed; is leaving the remaining one percent alone for birds and grasses and forbs really too much to ask?

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I’m more interested in plants than birds, and so I hung out with a grassland biologist who was identifying various species of grasses and forbs. I saw a lot of my favourite grass–blue grama grass–and identified a seed head that had stumped the group as shining arnica.There was a huge prickly pear cactus, too, and many pincushion cacti, although all of their flowers had finished blooming. There were a few introduced weeds, but they didn’t matter very much, the biologist said. “A big patch of prairie has a lot of inertia,” he told us. “It can survive a lot of abuse.” The one thing it can’t survive, of course, is being plowed under.

A farmer across the road was out with a big spraying rig applying chemicals to a wheat field. Trevor gestured towards a nighthawk flying ahead of the machine and said, “Someone should take a picture of that–nighthawks are endangered now, mostly because of the effects of agricultural pesticides.” He continued, “You know, the government says that it’s unlikely that these grasslands will be plowed under because the soil isn’t that productive. But look over there, across the road: it’s the same soil there and it’s being farmed.” Even the richest soils have been exhausted of nutrients in over 100 years of farming. Modern agriculture depends on chemical fertilizers so the quality of the soil doesn’t really matter; it’s just something to hold the plants in place.

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The walk was cut short when a bull–one of a group of youngish animals in the far corner of the pasture–suddenly got upset that we were walking around in his pasture. As he approached, complaining loudly, we hurried towards the fence and the safety of the grid road beyond. We got back into our cars and drove down the road to look at a wetland, and then, as the sun (reddened from the smoke of distant forest fires) touched the horizon, we turned around and headed back to the city.

Trevor’s book about the plight of prairie songbirds, Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds, has been in my to-read pile since it was published. I suppose I should get to it sooner rather than later, although I’m afraid it’s likely to be a depressing read. Nothing seems to matter anymore except making money, and if that means ground-nesting sparrows and pipits and longspurs disappear, if that means that the few scraps of native grassland that are left are destroyed by farming or resource development, so what? If such things don’t have a dollar value, they don’t have any worth. It’s such a sad, impoverished way of looking at the world, and yet it’s the only perspective that seems to matter these days.

Hamstrings

Last night, Christine and I walked to a nearby movie theatre, where we saw The Railway Man. It’s a good film about revenge and forgiveness, which is almost unbelievably based on a true story. The walk wasn’t a long one–maybe 6 kilometres there and back–but I was wearing new shoes that threw off my stride just enough that I woke up this morning with a strained hamstring in my left leg. That made our training walk today rather painful for the first couple of hours, and I was careful to stretch whenever I paused to let Christine catch up with me since, for some reason, we weren’t walking at the same speed, as we usually are. Eventually the problem resolved itself. Today’s walk was a little over 18 kilometres, which isn’t all that long–I’ve walked twice that far in a day. I was carrying a full pack for the first time, though, and it’s been unusually humid here, so I’m ready for a cold beer now.

There were a lot of people on the creekside path: cycling, running, and inline skating. There weren’t many walkers, though, and we were the only people who looked like they were out for a hike. A young woman stopped us and asked what we were training for. “The Cotswold Way, in England,” I said. We explained that it’s a 100 mile walk and we’re doing it over nine days at the beginning of August. “That’s really interesting,” she answered. “I love hiking but all my friends here think I’m crazy.” That’s the response I got from a lot of people when they learned that I had walked the Camino Francés. “Are you crazy?” I think it’s something about this city, about the flat topography and the fact that, for most people, hiking is something that you do in the mountains, which are a long way from here.

My friend Geoff, who lives in Victoria, British Columbia, has had very different responses from people who have learned that he’s walked the Camino. In fact, a store that sells hiking equipment asked him to come and give a couple of talks about his experiences. Hiking is part of the culture in Victoria, in a way it isn’t here. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been quietly suggesting that when we retire, we should be moving to the west coat instead of back to Ontario. Geoff has sent me pictures from the hikes he took while training for his second Camino (he just finished walking the Via de la Plata route from Seville to Santiago), and it’s beautiful there. Moreover, while the rest of the country is still experiencing snow and frigid temperatures, they’re enjoying spring flowers and warm weather. There’s no question which I’m going to prefer 15 years from now. (By the way, Geoff’s blog about his experiences walking both Caminos is available here.)

Speaking of flowers, I was surprised by the number of native plants I saw beside the creek today: Canada anemones and milk vetches and wild roses. There are, unfortunately, almost no native plants left on “Prairie Island,” where a prairie restoration project has turned into a patch of weeds. Only the wild roses and the wild blue flax are left. As I’ve learned, it’s almost impossible to restore land to prairie, particularly in a city: the weeds are just too aggressive. It makes protecting the remnant grasslands in this province even more important.

There’s an interview with naturalist Trevor Herriot about his new book, The Road Is How, here, in today’s Globe and Mail. I read The Road Is How this spring and it’s one of the books I wanted to talk about in this blog. Trevor has been an advocate for continued public ownership of community pastures in this province, since they represent one of the most important areas of unplowed prairie left here. I hope that campaign is successful; it would be a tremendous shame if they are lost.