Season 1, Episode 18: Agriculture, Colonialism, and Drought in Western Canada

with Shannon Stunden Bower

In Episode 18, Alex, guest host Bruce Smedley, and me discuss environmental history and water management with Shannon Stunden Bower, an associate professor at the University of Alberta. Shannon highlights the historical context of agricultural practices in the Prairie West, the impact of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration (PFRA), and the unintended consequences of initiatives like strip farming and irrigation projects. The conversation also touches on the importance of indigenous knowledge, the need for sustainable farming practices, and the role of public interest in environmental management. The episode underscores the significance of learning from history to inform present and future environmental policies.

Welcome and Introduction to Shannon Stunden Bower, NiCHE, and J. Bruce Smedley

Alex:

Welcome to The Gravity Well, where we break down heavy ideas into small buckets anyone can handle. Our mission is simple, to work through our differences and collaborate with others through a conversation and process. Together we can face our dilemmas and make our world a better place for everyone.

Jenny:

I normally do my half, which is a statement around truth and reconciliation, but I want to do a reflection this week. I had an amazing conversation with a man by the name of Harley Bastien last week, of Piikani Reserve. One of the questions I had asked him, which is in the flow of these conversations we’re trying to have, is around “What am I missing in my thinking?” I presented to him what we’re trying to do in the real world. We’re having this conversation, trying to bring people into understanding, make sure that we’re bringing in expertise, people that are passionate about positive change in this province, but in the lens of trying to restore our environment and try to restore some social stability in the real world. We’re looking to restore the Eastern Slopes. In particular, we’re in Southern Alberta, and we have this water crisis. I’ll let Alex say more about what we experienced today in the city, but it’s a real-life issue.

J. Bruce Smedley is with us today. Bruce has been a mentor to me for almost a year. We are part of a group called 4C, the Concerned Calgarians on Climate Change. We have a guest tonight, and I’ll let Alex properly introduce you, Shannon. A friend, Sherry Herschel, has been helping us connect with water experts, people who are knowledgeable to help us understand this problem better. Bruce is here to ask questions and offer some thoughts as well as takeaways. I just want to say a couple of things from Harley. I phrased this problem around the Eastern Slopes, I was saying I think of the Eastern Slopes as the taps.

Every time we log, we’re shutting off the taps. Every time we coal mine, we’re polluting the taps and taking water out of the taps. Same with oil and gas sites, roads, et cetera. All of the things that are hurting our water. I finished all that and Harley said, “It’s not ‘our’ water.” I think this is one of the things that I’m hopeful from your knowledge base, Shannon, will help us better understand how we are “human-centric” in our thinking as Westerners. Or at least I am in my thinking, in that, we forget that there is creation around our lives that is not being honoured or held sacred. That’s the knowledge I wanted to carry forward from Harley last week. There’s much more to it. I hope people take a chance to listen to his discussion with me. He was extremely honest, it was a humbling discussion, and I’m grateful for his time. That’s enough for me.

Alex:

For those who don’t know me, my name’s Alex. I’m a jack of all trades. I’ve worked in many different industries over the years specializing in the fine arts, as well as, as a volunteer, private security, special events, crowd control, those types of things. Spent nine years in construction on many different sites. In terms of socializing and getting to know people, I’ve spent a great deal of time just trying to communicate with people in the local community at cafes and whatnot trying to understand as many people from as many walks of life as possible. It’s given me a unique ability to translate different areas of expertise into common English. Explainable models for the general public to understand. Today’s guest is Shannon Stunden Bower [an associate professor at the University of Alberta, and a NiCHE Canada executive and editorial board member], which is the Network in Canadian History and Environment. The group includes graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and recent PhD graduates interested in environmental history. Shannon, please tell us who you are, where people can find you a little about NiCHE and the importance of environmental history specific to water.

Shannon:

It’s such a pleasure to be here. Thank you for the invitation. I should start by acknowledging how glad I am to be part of this conversation. I’m Shannon Stunden Bower. I’m a white settler scholar. I work at the University of Alberta. I use she/her pronouns. My ancestors are of Western European origin and they’ve been in North America since about the 1920s. Just to give you a sense of where I’m coming from, from a personal perspective, I’m an associate professor in the history program at the University of Alberta. I’m trained as a historical geographer, and I work now mostly in the field of environmental history. I am a member of the editorial group and also the executive for the network in Canadian History and Environment. I’m not a member of the New Scholars subgroup within NiCHE, an amazing group, but I’m not part of that.

Alex:

I stand corrected.

Shannon:

I’ve been around in the scholarly community a bit longer than that. NiCHE, the Networking Canadian History and Environment is an organization that emerged about 20 years ago. We’re celebrating our 20th anniversary this year. It emerged from an effort to inject new energy and organizational power into the field of environmental history and adjacent fields like historical geography in what we now call Canada in Northern North America today. The Network in Canadian History and Environment is a broad group of researchers and educators that work at the intersection of history and nature, including non-human nature and humanities. Within that broad definition, we do many things while exploring the historical context of environmental matters. We look to communicate our findings broadly with other researchers, an interested public, and policymakers. The best way to find NiCHE, learn more about what we do, and get involved is on our website, niche-canada.org is our landing page.

From there you can explore the various things we have to offer, including a blog post or a blog series on environmental history topics that post multiple times a week. We also have a book series at the University of Calgary. We publish a series of scholarly papers, we run a newsletter. There are a whole bunch of ways through NiCHE that you can learn more about the environmental history community and hopefully benefit from a historical perspective. Environmental issues concern many of us in different ways at this point. How am I doing?

Jenny:

That was great. And also, your background, you were saying is in drought and flood history in Alberta specifically, is that right?

Shannon:

I’m interested in water and state power. How organizations of government have tried to manage water with varying levels of success. My first large-scale academic project in this field was the study of wetlands and land drainage in Southern Manitoba. I’m a Manitoban by birth, and I spent many years there, including some experiences of flooding, catastrophic flooding in that case. My interest in water management in Southern Manitoba led me to undertake a study of water management in the southern portion of that province. Since then, I’ve worked on water management in the Prairie West in a number of other ways, including in a large-scale project that’s just coming to fruition and a new book that’ll be out this fall on a federal government environmental management agency called the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration often goes by the acronym, PFRA was an agency of the Canadian federal government created in the mid-1930s and in the context of the difficult years of that decade. And that undertook various sorts of environmental management, and environmental transformation activities in the Prairie West and elsewhere right up until 2009 when the organization was ultimately eliminated.

Jenny:

Awesome. We’ll let you dive into that a bit more, but let’s take a moment here and let Bruce if you wouldn’t mind introducing yourself. Say a little bit about what brought you here today for us. Thank you.

Bruce:

Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity to be here. I am interested in your history of environmental studies. I’ve been a professional engineer now for 50 years. I go back a long time in terms of the history of environmental aspects. The first project I worked on was the mercury pollution from the chloralkaline plants in the pulp and paper industry in British Columbia back in the early 1970s. And some of the minimata diseases, I think. I did some work with the other pulp mills across Canada at that time. And in that aspect of it, more recently in the 1990s, 1991, I wrote the professional engineers submission to the Rio Conference. At that time there was a process where you’d send it to the federal government and they would vet it and send it to their Rio Conference.

It was the beginning of the climate change conferences if you will. That is how I got started with this. And then since then, I’ve done projects pretty much all over the world for various agencies like the World Bank. I did the pharmaceutical industry in China. I’ve worked on many projects mostly to do with mining and some with fisheries in Thailand and Indonesia. And, of course, all of those different industry sectors have water as a kind of major component one way or the other, either too much too polluted or not enough.

And then my interest in this whole field came about in the context of climate change and following that whole subject matter since the beginning of 1990, I guess pretty much is when I started seriously looking at all of those issues. I did a lot of environmental impact statements and water was always a component of those particular issues everywhere from the Canadian Arctic to the middle of Alberta to Peru and places like that. I stayed very interested in this whole field and tried to match what the industry does with the public context of where the industry is located and the various government, local people, and Indigenous people’s contributions to the water issue. There are a lot of aspects to it that I’m interested in.

Jenny:

Excellent. Thank you so much, Bruce. Shannon, if you wouldn’t mind, we had the privilege of hearing a little bit from Shannon today about the history that she’s unpacked in the relationship between settlements and water and drought, all of those intersections. Shannon, if you wouldn’t mind just walking through that same story you offered for us today? The history of how all of these pieces relate together and of course some things that I might’ve missed, as well.

More to the Dust Bowl Years than Broadly Understood

Shannon:

I think our conversation, our earlier conversation started from a discussion of the 1930s and what often gets called the ‘Dust Bowl’ years. Years that we remember as a period of environmental crisis. We should start by recognizing this was a really difficult period for all sorts of people on the Prairie West and around the world. But there is a bit of scope to put the hardships of those years in the broader context. I’d like to do that in two ways. One is, that there’s some benefit in historicizing what we often use colloquial terms and common everyday terms of “the drought of the 1930s.” The rates of precipitation in the 1930s were lower than those that newcomer settlers, non-indigenous agricultural colonists who had by and large arrived in the Prairie West from the late 19th century through to about World War I.

In the early 1910s, [settlers] arrived in an unusually wet period. The long-term climate history of the Prairie West tells us. They came in and took as normal the rates of precipitation that were in evidence in this period. This is a 15-year period of intense colonization, and agricultural colonization in the Prairie West. As we go through the 1920s and into the 1930s, we see a resumption of something closer to the long-term climate normal. Insofar as the long-term climate normal in the Prairie West leads us to anticipate these multi-year periods of reduced precipitation. The newcomers in the 1930s didn’t have the benefit of that historical perspective.

This is an understanding that scientists have put together over time, largely through the use of proxy records like tree rings, which capture records of precipitation over the long term. In the 1930s, rates of precipitation were surprisingly low for those who were involved in the colonization, the agricultural colonization of the Prairie West, but they weren’t unaccountably low in terms of the long-term climate history.

That’s one historical perspective that can be useful in terms of thinking about these years. Another perspective on these matters that can be useful is that we’re talking about a period in the Prairie West that was difficult not just because of drought, but also because of the effects of a global economic depression in the context of the economic depression of the 1930s. Prices for key commodities like wheat, which was a commodity produced by many prairie farmers, dropped substantially. There was a second factor making those years particularly difficult for those involved in agriculture in the Prairie West. And the third factor that we see in characterizing this difficult period of the 1930s is the fact that by the late 1910s, certainly into the 1920s, and really by the 1930s, we’re starting to see the accumulating consequences of unsustainable agricultural practices, things like black summer fallow, ways that newcomer farmers tried to capitalize on what they saw as the environmental affordances of the Prairie West, but that ended up leading to things like soil degradation.

By the 1920s, we had Alberta and Saskatchewan provinces that had been created in 1905 in the context of a rush of agricultural colonization. We’re trying to figure out how they were going to adjust their agricultural economies to deal with what was becoming a clear agricultural problem related to these unsustainable agricultural practices. If it was already a problem by the 1920s, by the 1930s, when you’ve got the challenge of lower than anticipated precipitation, you’ve got the challenge of low commodity prices, you’ve got the additional factor of these accumulating consequences. This is a really difficult period for people involved in agriculture in the Prairie West.

Alex:

The 1905 rush of colonized agriculture, leading also into the First World war, and those disruptions and confusions that were happening led to the development in 1913 of the Department of Indian Affairs under Duncan Campbell Scott. He ran that department, which furthered, using legal language upon the Indigenous populations in various regions, especially like Alberta Prairies, Saskatchewan prairies, and so on, to compartmentalize these populations into segregated reserves and prevent them from herding their cattle the way that they normally would. They were starting to run out of feed. Interestingly, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Blackfoot were making quite a bit of headway in terms of their own agricultural practices, but they were stymied by these legal processes and field agents that would embed themselves within these communities to essentially bribe them with very small amounts of money that may be promised to justify the acquisition and the annexation of their lands.

And then by the time 1935 came around when this PFRA organization was created, I think with good intentions, but a lack of understanding of how the environment worked, as you had said earlier, do you think that in some cases some of the basic ideas of say strip farming were good ideas and they had the right intentions, but maybe there wasn’t an intimate understanding of the environment that they were trying to set out to propagate these ideas forward? And then you had mentioned these flies that came as a result of this particular type of agriculture that was one of those unpredicted negative consequences of the strip farming. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit more on the flies.

The Experience of Indigenous Peoples in the Prairie West

Shannon:

You hit on a number of important issues, Alex. I’m going to start by picking up on the fundamental issues you raise about the experiences of indigenous peoples in the Prairie West. I think something we talked about this morning, that definitely should be revisited at this point, is how the period of agricultural colonization is really tightly coupled with processes of indigenous peoples dispossession. The creation of reserves, the signing of a number of treaties across the Prairie West, the imposition of a number of genocidal policies on indigenous peoples in the Prairie West. Were part of a process of what scholar James Daschuk has called clearing the planes, meaning moving indigenous peoples and indigenous communities out of the way as it was perceived by those involved in executing this policy of the agricultural society that was going to develop to benefit largely Western Europeans or Americans or people who had been in Canada for generations already by this point, eastern Europeans later on.

And we need to recognize that these are processes that went together. Indigenous peoples, as you

we’re suggesting, Alex, we’re well-acquainted with the process of adjusting to change over time. They had been tireless and creative in adjusting to change through the period of the fur trade. They’ve been coping with epidemic diseases of European origin for generations already by this point in the context of the developing agricultural society in the Prairie West from the late 19th through the early 20th century, we see many indigenous peoples, many indigenous communities with an eye to agriculture as another technique of adaptation that their communities could access. But as you were suggesting, Alex, there were a really substantial number of policies put in place that impeded the ability of indigenous peoples to find success in agriculture. My colleague here at the University of Alberta, Dr. Sarah Carter, has written really extensively about these policies.

They included things like the So-called “Peasant Farming” policy, which obliged indigenous peoples to use outdated agricultural technology to try to farm, even while the settler farmers that they geographically abutted were encouraged to use up-to-date machinery. One example of the policies that were put in place deliberately by the Canadian State to hinder Indigenous Peoples through this process. As you were suggesting, this history of disregard of indigenous peoples and indigenous interests is one that persists into the 20th century. Of course, up into the present day, Indian Affairs is a bureaucracy that’s been in place since the 19th century. It remains in place, and in many ways reflects some of the fundamental problems in the relationship between indigenous peoples, certainly in the Prairie West, across what’s now Canada more broadly, and the Canadian State. Really glad you touched on that.

Jenny:

You covered that first half and then I think the one thing he did touch on, which would be a really good time now, can you speak a little bit about your book and what you’ve uncovered with this? The acronym is left me PFRA Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Association.

The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration

Shannon:

Yes, exactly. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration was created in 1935 in the context of this 1930s emergency that I was describing a few minutes ago. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration was created by the federal government as part of what was called the Canadian New Deal. Listeners might be more familiar with the American New Deal, a suite of policies put in place to the south of us to try to deal with a crisis in the United States. At that time, there was a whole suite of policies parallel in some ways different from others in Canada that were called the Canadian New Deal as a reference to that set policies in the South, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, the PFRA was one of these policies that was brought in at that moment. The Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration remained in operation as a bureaucratic entity within the federal government, sometimes in the Department of Agriculture, sometimes in other federal government departments.

It remained in operation through to 2009. Over these 70-plus years of operation, this is an organization that did a whole bunch of different things in the Prairie West and also more broadly, and it was ultimate lately eliminated in 2009 by Stephen Harper’s conservative federal government as a part of what some people have called Stephen Harper’s so-called War on Science, a whole bunch of cuts in the science capacity of the federal government at that time, and the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration was one casualty of that set of cuts. Alex, you were asking a bit about some of the agricultural changes promoted by the early PFRA, I think you might’ve mentioned strip farming, I could elaborate on that if that would be useful.

Alex:

For those who don’t know, the idea of strip farming was planting different plants in strips in rows so that they could maintain soil integrity, but there were some unintended consequences because it turns out that there wasn’t very much knowledge about how these plants would interrelate with the insect species in the prairie. If you could elaborate on that story. I think it’s kind of funny when man tries to make changes to nature, nature kind of shows them maybe those ideas weren’t fully thought out. It’s humbling, let’s say, right?

Shannon:

There are a number of core themes that define work in the field of environmental history that the scholarly field that I work within, and I would say the study of unintended consequences is very much one of those themes. Strip farming in the context of the 1930s, the goal was to try to keep soil anchored in place. This is a time when in the context of soil degradation, and what was taken for reduced rates of precipitation, there was a lot of top soil that was blown away, very valuable top soil. Arresting that soil was a major imperative for farmers and for the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration as well as other government agencies active in this time. One strategy that was attempted was what was called strip farming. This was interspersing cropped and fallowed strips of land.

The idea was that on the fallowed strips, you’d leave plant material. This plant material would capture the soil that was blown off, strips that weren’t cropped, ideally keeping the topsoil from going too far. This was one among a range of strategies and initiatives that the federal government through the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, in collaboration with farmers in collaboration with provinces and other actors, sought to put in place to deal with what was taken for this agricultural emergency in the 1930s. The unintended consequences in relation to strip farming is that it turns out that a landscape that has a lot of field edges as a stripped farmed landscape does is far more amenable to an agricultural pest and an agricultural insect known as the weak stem softly. This is an agricultural pest that’s common in the prairies, but it’s a pest that does better along field edges rather than in the center of extensive plots of wheat or grass grain or grass.

And when you create more field edges as you do with strip farming, you create populations of soft flies. When we look at the archival record of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, this is part of how I try to figure out what went on in the past, what that agency was up to. We see people move from being quite enthusiastic about strip farming, trying to get it in place as quickly and as extensively as possible to emerging concern about what was being created in terms of saw five populations and a real concern that in trying to arrest blowing soils, they were going to leave farmers susceptible to yet another agricultural disaster. And this situation was so severe in parts of Southern Saskatchewan in particular, that farmers abandoned strip farming thinking that they would do better to put themselves at the mercy of topsoil loss rather than at the mercy of these insects. Unintended consequences for sure.

Alex:

Can you talk a little bit about dugouts too? Dugouts was another one of those experiments they had where they wanted to capture the water that was coming from the sky. Were there any unintended consequences when it comes to insect populations or things like that from those?

Shannon:

So that’s an interesting question, specifically the intersection with insects. The PFRA had a whole water development project. It was one of the most enduring of the PRAs projects throughout the entirety of this organization, 70 plus years in operation, as you suggest Alex, early on, the PFRA provided a lot of support for farmers who wanted to create small reservoirs near their farms. Some of these would be called dugouts. They also made small stock watering gowns, just depending on what the geographical features of the farm would allow. These have been judged to be, I think, among the most successful of PFRAs undertakings. One of the reasons this undertaking is successful is because farms needed a steady supply of water. This wouldn’t be water used to irrigate agricultural crops. It would be used to meet household needs on the farm to irrigate farm gardens to maybe irrigate some forage for livestock, and certainly to water livestock. And it would make life a lot more convenient and a lot more sustainable on these farms, but it’s not large scale irrigation. The PFRA later on would get involved in some really large scale irrigation projects, but that’s a slightly different story.

The PFRA’s Failed Operations in Ghana

Alex:

Is that the Ghana story? Can you talk a little bit about where they went wrong in Ghana?

Shannon:

Sure. The PFRA was an organization that had a lot of expertise, a lot of professional expertise, and in the context of a mid-20th century moment where the international development imperative held that rich and powerful nations like Canada should extend aid to other nations that weren’t quite as rich or powerful. These were nations that had been subject to all the evils of extraction colonialism on a global scale. We’re talking about nations in Africa, and nations in South Asia primarily. The colonial origins of those disparities of wealth and power are important to recognize there. In the context of this mid-20th century moment where the beneficiaries of this global division of power and resources were thought to be under obligation, and in some cases we’re quite seriously motivated to extend support to less wealthy and less fortunate nations, we see Canada get involved in so-called international development.

One of the ways Canada got involved in, so-called international development was by loaning expertise to nations that wanted to take on development projects of various sorts. Canada’s international development efforts involved the PFRA, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. Insofar as this agency had the sorts of professional expertise that were valued internationally, Canada got involved in Ghana, which is a nation along the Gulf of Guinea in Africa. In the northern portion of that nation, there was interest in undertaking some of the water development work that the PFA had already been undertaking in the Prairie West. The PFRA undertook a project. There is the subject of negotiation between the Canadian federal government and the Ghanaian government right at the moment that Ghana was emerging from British Colonialism. It was very much a fluid moment in global geopolitics and certainly in the geopolitics around Ghana.

The PFRA took to work in the northern portion of Ghana had mixed success in producing some of the infrastructure that they had committed to producing. Ultimately, the project lasted for about five years before it was deemed that it wasn’t going to be any more successful than it had been. At that point, Canadians returned home. The upsetting legacy of what happened in Ghana is that the water infrastructure that ended up creating circumstances that had some really negative health consequences for Ghanaians. When you build reservoirs and largely irrigation projects in the Prairie West, you might create circumstances where there’s a greater risk of Western Equine Encephalitis. By and large, a horse infection can affect humans, but it’s not, and since the 1970s, there’s been a vaccine, but it’s not a massive health concern in Ghana. However, there are a number of illnesses that relate to vectors like snails, like mosquitoes with populations that increase a great deal when there’s more water around year round. One of the legacies of the PFRA project in Ghana is some deteriorating health effects, higher rates of disease, and these were higher rates of disease that just weren’t a risk in the Canadian Prairies just because of the distinct environments at play. And in some ways, I mean, it’s a upsetting story of the PFRAs involvement there and of unintended consequences that had really tragic human results for human populations in northern Ghana.

Bruce:

A bit of money being spent by the Canadian government in farming in Africa, and a lot of those projects didn’t work out very well at all. There have never any water quality studies done before. They put a lot of money into wells. The other problem they had was it wasn’t culturally suited to the kind of culture that was there in the sense that the water well meant that people congregated around the well, when in fact a lot of these people migrated and moved all the time. It was inconsistent with their culture completely. It was a very poor learning curve, I think, for Canadian government in Africa. The other thing you mentioned was farming in Canada. I am married into a farming community, and from the 1930s, these people weren’t farmers that came to be farmers, they occupied free land in Canada, but they didn’t had very little experience about the climate at all.

It took them quite a few years, I mean a decade or more, to learn what to do with the land and the markets and supplies and everything else. It’s been a hundred years now since there’s been farming on a lot of these properties, and they’re finding that the soils are deteriorating and the micronutrients are being lost in that period. A lot of the farmers today are having trouble with their crops in the prairies because they’re not aware of the boron and the micronutrients that are in the soil. And then of course, there’s always the cross-cultural problems in the sense that a lot of the native people in Canada used to migrate in the wintertime. They didn’t stay around all year round. They went further south and moved to a great extent and also occupied different pieces of land. They wouldn’t come back to the same piece of land for years at times. That whole cultural mix gives a lot of aspects that make it very difficult to transpose people from Europe into a different culture, whether it’s Canadians in Africa or Europeans in Canada.

Shannon:

Local knowledge matters.

Bruce:

It does matter.

Shannon:

The farming community that you’re connected to, Bruce, and they’re challenging learning curve. The situation was made even more challenging for many farmers by the fact that the Canadian federal government promised them land that attracted them here, and marketed this as the Last Best West as if the farm was going to be unrolled before them. It was a difficult, surprising, and devastating experience for many newcomers who came here and found something different than what they had expected.

Bruce:

Yeah, my wife’s father, came and it was 13 years before he could afford to bring his wife over from Europe. It was a long time.

Jenny:

I think about what you were talking about earlier in the colonial model that’s still playing out today, we still have some of the same dispersion of populations into marginal areas. And from my recent learning, 80% of the world’s most critical habitats are now being probably long time being managed by indigenous communities. As somebody who, as Bruce was saying, was in the oil and gas industry, I was in the oil and gas industry, to not understand that when somebody is protecting those lands, the significance and the importance of supporting that rather than feeling like that’s a step against the process. I’m going to back up and try and ask a question, but I know it’s not an easy one to ask, which is, knowing what we know about the thirties and knowing what we know about how we behaved and how we reacted to the thirties, what do you see happening today that is similar? You’ve talked offline about water management and how we’ve managed that. Can you speak about today’s context in what you’ve learned? And I know you said earlier today we can’t take history and project it forward. I’m asking you to do something that you’ve already said is not helpful. But if you can think about at least some of those things that we are still perpetuating that you think that we could stop contributing to.

Current Day Settler Colonial Behavior

Shannon:

We may go back to the perspective that Alex called us to recognize earlier, and that is the coupled nature of resettlement by non-indigenous newcomers and Indigenous dispossession in that context, things like the PFRA, the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration, which at least in inception was intended to support settler farmers that has the effect of compounding the dispossession of Indigenous peoples through to the present. We have an organization, the PFRA, that at least in origin, didn’t have a mandate to engage with Indigenous peoples, nevertheless consolidating the legacy of settler colonialism. And that’s just one example. There are a number of other examples one could point to as we go further and up through to the present. The takeaway is that reckoning with the legacies of settler colonialism, both the legacies of the past and settler colonialism as an ongoing process requires clear attention, deliberate focus, and a willingness to understand how to understand problems or solutions that don’t explicitly seem at first blush to be about Indigenous peoples or about colonialism are very much part of colonial processes and need to be recognised as such and addressed as such.

Bruce:

I’m curious about the economics of farms in the farming community. I know there are people there who like the lifestyle, they enjoy the lifestyle, but they’re not great commercial farmers in the sense that they’re not growing their farms or making a profit on it. They cover their costs, and that’s about it. Historically, the prairies were more suited to a lifestyle. You lived here for a while and then you went somewhere else. This whole idea of commercialization is changing. The whole nature of farming right now, there are no young people who are getting into the business. It’s just too expensive to buy land. Now I’m seeing two out of five people at least that are retiring and trying to find somebody to farm their farm for them because they haven’t got anybody to take it on. There’s a real crisis in the farming community in Alberta that we’re just ignoring right now.

Shannon:

Interesting farms are getting larger. They’ve been getting larger throughout the entire period. We’re talking about today since the 1930s and even we’re aware of how responsible farming requires farmers to be engaged with their soil, to know their land very well, to adjust to prevailing circumstances, and to maximize production while minimizing environmental harms. And that can be harder and harder to undertake at larger and larger agricultural scales, particularly in the present-day context where there are fewer supports, fewer supports available to farmers than there have been in the past. The elimination of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration is just one example of the shrinking capacity within the public sector.

We used to have a pretty robust infrastructure of agricultural science within the federal government to support farmers. Increasingly, we’ve seen the advent of neoliberalism and the belief that smaller government is always better. We’ve seen an elimination of those sorts of services. Farmers’ primary relationships become with the private corporations that market agricultural chemicals there, Monsanto, and these are actors in the agricultural sphere who are employed in corporations that are mandated to deliver profit. These are not actors who serve some notion of the public interest as scientists employed in the public sector do. And I think that’s a concerning circumstance. And one that leaves farmers vulnerable

Bruce:

Part of your history does deal with the decommissioning of the research stations and what effect that’s had on the farming community.

Shannon:

I don’t deal explicitly with that. I talk a bit about the elimination of the Prairie Farm Rehabilitation Administration. The research stations worked hand in hand. In some ways, it’s a very parallel story.

Jenny:

Yeah, your comments earlier, Bruce, about not knowing how to manage land. I think that is a prevailing theme. We had Dixon Hammond on here, and he very humbly said, I didn’t know what I was doing. He’s engaged with his community and his neighbours to try and come to processes that make sense. But, and I’ve heard this elsewhere, I’m wondering, Shannon, if you can speak to irrigation, what our concern is we’re looking at, again, if I look at the eastern slopes being these taps, then we need to invest in restoring the taps, getting infrastructure out of the way, restoring our headwater force, getting roads out of the way, getting sites out of the way, cleaning up the mess. And that’s increasing our water storage capacity. I’m talking selfishly as a Western settler, but you get the idea that we want more habitat and everything else to serve agriculture sustainably.

Instead, what we’re seeing Bruce and me in these conversations because I’ve been attending all the watershed meetings, is talk about more irrigation and more dams, potentially water transfers from the north to the south, all of the things that we don’t want to do, talk about unintended consequences of species transfer between one bioregion and another, let alone investing in infrastructure that we’re seeing fail today, for example, in the Old Man Dam, the St. Mary Reservoir. Those things don’t make logical sense, in terms of the wrong place to invest, especially when we have this level of uncertainty. Bruce was talking about how people used to migrate because of environmental circumstances. And that’s quite frankly part of the thing we haven’t spoken about yet is we’re still in this modernity mindset that we stay put no matter what, and that’s becoming less and less realistic. Many comments, but I’m hoping you can speak a little bit about irrigation and your thoughts about it. Thanks.

Irrigation History of Alberta

Shannon:

I’m a historian. Forgive me if I want to go back a bit. The history of irrigation in Alberta dates from the late 19th century. Initially, we see newcomers engaged in small-scale irrigation, targeting their pieces of land. Eventually, we see corporate investors getting involved in irrigation because they think they’re going to make a lot of profit either through local economic development or through land sales at radically increased prices. We then see farmers banding together to undertake irrigation on a cooperative model by the 1930s, this moment where we rethink things, it becomes clear that irrigation is not going to produce a profit. The corporate investors are displeased as it isn’t financially viable to irrigate with a cooperative model. Under the terms that were initially imposed on farmers, it becomes clear that farmers working cooperatively can never make enough money to pay for the large-scale capital projects that are necessary for irrigation.

And we see in the 1930s, and the PFRA was involved in this, a shift in mentality around irrigation where it becomes framed as very much in the public interest. Irrigation becomes understood as a public good because that makes it an appropriate public investment. And we see the state setting up to pay for large-scale infrastructure projects, both the provincial state and the federal state, investing in these capital projects under the logic that this is a public good. That model prevails throughout much of the 20th century, including through a period of substantial reinvestment in Alberta irrigation in the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of efficiency gains in that period as they start lining canals and taking more care with water. There is not much environmental history. Stories are nuanced stories, and I think irrigation is very much a nuanced story. I think the history of irrigation tells us that very rarely is more infrastructure in itself a satisfactory solution that you can’t build your way out of very many problems, and in fact, you can create a whole bunch more.

Alex:

Do you think wetlands projects are a good means of restoring the water table and increasing diversity with flora and fauna? More biodiversity in terms of plant life and filtering that water as well. Allowing wetlands to do their jobs of cleaning the water. As long as we can make sure that enough of it remains in place and then enough of it is still moving that gets rid of sulphates and phosphates within the water itself, and that’s the beauty of it. As long as it’s moving, it’s itself cleaning, and we can use those wetlands to our advantage, and it doesn’t cost nearly as much to move some earth and just allow the earth to do its thing. We can plant a few seeds and allow them to restore. For instance, where I live right at the edge of the city in Rocky View County, we have a lot of wetlands within our community, and it’s on a hill, of course.

All the water that comes from the top of the hill goes through these series of artificial wetland basins. As the water goes down back to the inlet, it’s filtered, it doesn’t even really need to go through a major treatment from the plant. As for the previous comments and questions, I noticed something that Bruce was saying about the farming community, how they were just kind of promised it’s the new promised land, come out here and they have no idea what to do with the land. They were given this great dream, this great promise, and it took them decades to kind of learn about the land and how to use it. Given that history. And I know a history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but I do see some corollaries. I see some rhyming happening like the New deal and then the Green New Deal, and then migrants being promised, the great Canadian dream, the Swiss house in a village on a mountain, all this stuff, and then there’s no house available for them.

They’re stuck in a labour position that maybe they didn’t understand that they were getting themselves into, but they risked everything to come here. I see some corollaries and historical patterns that seem to be rhyming with each other over almost an 80 to 90-year cycle. And I find it interesting that in a strange way, because they rhyme and they don’t repeat as a general populace, people aren’t seeing those patterns manifest. And as a historian, I’m sure you see how those patterns manifest through those cycles over much more than just the past century and a half. I’m sure you go much further back into the cyclical patterns of empire and excess and falling, and with regards to larger firms and monocropping and all that type of stuff, I think one of the unintended consequences of technology or industrialization was pre-industrialization. You could only till a certain amount of land.

Maybe you had two horses and a tiller if you were lucky, or you had to till it yourself. But with the advent of technology now, we have massive combines growing crops, genetically modified crops provided by Bayer that are annuals, not perennials. You have to rebuy them every year. How is a farmer supposed to find a way out or at least find a way to express this is what we’re facing, it’s unsustainable. We need to scale it back. We need to get back to more intimate forms of farming.

I like to buy from my local market, the bear bond market because I know that I’m supporting people who are growing food in those smaller, smaller areas, but they take a lot of pride in it. They have greenhouses, and some of them take part in the largest greenhouse project in Canada, ladies and gentlemen. It’s out in Redcliffe, right near Medicine Hat. It’s about 20 minutes just outside of there, and you can get fresh organic vegetables grown year-round in those greenhouses. Unless you’re growing pot, which you can make a profit off of, there’s no reason to build a greenhouse to grow tomatoes and carrots is there.

Closing Thoughts and Following Shannon’s Work

Jenny:

This is a good run into some takeaways. Shannon, please offer some reflections on that and then we’ll do a round table. I don’t want to keep everybody late tonight, thank you so much, Alex.

Shannon:

Reflections. I guess maybe on an optimistic note, crises are terrible. They’re hard. There are often circumstances that further damage people who are already disadvantaged, and who are already facing oppression and difficulty along any number of lines, but crises are also moments of change. We see that in the 1930s with the emergence of the PFRA, this organization I think did some things that we need to think hard about on the prairies over the 1930s. If history doesn’t repeat but does rhyme, maybe the rhyme we need to pick up on here is that this can be a moment of opportunity where we can build something better.

Jenny:

Lovely. I’ll offer a few things and then let you do as well, Bruce. I think the public interest piece is really important to me. I think a theme that I see that’s prevailing today as well is this lack of, let’s say, first Indigenous participation in decision-making. Let’s lead with that and that follows through for all public for that matter. I work with a group called the Polluter Pay Federation as well, and we talk to landowners a lot about oil and gas wells on their lands and the emissions and how they can’t get traction from the government on those issues, and quite frankly, water usage from oil and gas as well going into their dugouts. This is stuff that is, I think we’ve never solved it. Like you said, Shannon, we’ve carried all of these processes forward. I think we can do it differently.

For example, I remember the license plates saying, give me another boom and I won’t mess it up. And that’s the reason why I didn’t get a bigger house than what we got. I learned from my parents going through the stress of that time to not expose myself in the same way. Yes, they rhyme, as you said, Alex, I love that it doesn’t repeat because we are learning and I think we have to. Well, I think there’s a big opportunity like you said, Shannon, we know the history. We can’t deny it. We’re at a point where we, as Harley said to me last week, have to move forward with the truth. To your point about science, we have to stand up for it, and I’m really glad to give you the space to help us understand how important that is and how it has been eroded and our need to stand up for that and the importance of it.

The one thing I will just add is community, Bruce, you said it, community is being broken everywhere, of course, primarily in the farming community. I think you’re right, Bruce. This is a major crisis that’s happening and it’s happening in corners that nobody knows about, and it’s really sad to know because I’ve met with a lot of landowners that are saying their retirements have been ruined because they have a well on their land that they can’t sell their property, or they are by a gravel pit that is extracting water and they’re seeing contamination in their well. There are real-life imminent consequences that we need to, this is like you said, Shannon, an opportunity for us to do that. Right. The last thing I’ll say is I just want to remind everybody that NiCHE Canada’s website is N-I-C-H-E-canada.org. As Shannon said, it’s an excellent resource for both podcasts. There’s scientific information and, I’ll let you say in terms of getting involved, Shannon, do you mind just ways that people can get engaged with the program with niche?

Shannon:

Sure. Entry level would just be reading our materials, and engaging with the materials we put out. You can visit our website as you signal Jenny. We’re also on any number of social media platforms, if that’s a better way for you to see the work that my colleagues and I are doing around all of this, we’re available in those ways too. If anybody is keen on these sorts of things, we do take submissions from the public for our blog. If you are an environmental historian, an aspiring environmental historian, or someone who cares about the history of humanity and non-human nature change over time, there’s a prospect of getting involved in that way as well.

Jenny:

Excellent. Bruce, please, you can help round us out.

Bruce:

One thing I’ve noticed with respect to farming right now is that the farmland and the soils and how the roads are laid out and the drainage ditches and everything else have all been human-modified to suit the commerciality of the farm. As a consequence, we’re losing the trees, we’re losing the wildlife in the forest that used to be part of the farm property. We’re changing the slope of a lot of the drainage ditches to drain the water off the farm, but it creates a different habitat. We’re taking a lot of the small ponds and getting rid of those because you can’t drive a big piece of equipment through those ponds. We’re at a point where we have to start looking at being able to recharge the aquifer and maintain our yearly migrations. These things have become very important, much more than the dollar value of an acre.

Alex:

All of this is a thought and a question, Shannon, do you think that there should be, within the K-12 curriculum more of an emphasis on a well-rounded understanding of history and considering all aspects and people’s experiences from different cultures, Indigenous cultures included, and rather than politicising it or jockeying different groups against each other, would you like to see a more rounded understanding of the rich history that we have in North America brought to the K 12 curriculum so that at least when people went into their various professions, they would’ve a baseline foundation of understanding going forward? Do you think if maybe we were to be able to help influence that, maybe it would help the future generations in their decision-making process when they’re factoring in something that maybe is just a bottom line decision, but maybe it’s not just a bottom line decision, maybe it may have unintended consequences that they’re not necessarily seeing as far as the farmers are concerned?

Bruce, you’ve taught me a lot, and I think interestingly, we’re kind of on the same page that way where it’s these big machines are kind of disconnecting the farmers from the land that they need to maintain. And if we can not even necessarily make the machines smaller, but maybe make the tasks smaller, but provide opportunities for more people to have the chance to perform those tasks and make it more of an inspiring thing rather than just a cold, mechanistic corporate monoculture for-profit kind of endeavour that could do a lot of benefit for our watershed and keeping our groundwater stabilised and clean and it could produce healthier crops and restore the biodiversity that I think we desperately need. Jenny, I think you touched on a lot of points about the eastern slopes and the watershed and how it’s important to preserve those areas.

Our watersheds are essentially giant natural dugouts, and in some cases, we’ve just reinforced them so that we can capture a little bit more water. But some of the farmers that are on the slopes at the higher levels, they’re the first ones to run out of water, and the people who buy the rights to the land at the bottom are the ones who take it all. Maybe finding a way to grade that land so that the water can be captured in steps. And you see a lot of this stuff in Eastern Asia, you see it in Northern Africa, you see it in Central Africa across the continent. They’re doing these half-moon dugouts to build what’s called the Great Green Wall where they’ve stopped the expansion of higher desert just by doing this. There’s an NA Geo documentary on it. It’s fantastic. So I think preserving the watersheds, maintaining the water table, allowing the gravel deposits to work as they’re naturally supposed to do as French drains, adding wetlands back into the mix, allowing natural irrigation floor and fauna to do its thing, working with nature rather than trying to dominate it and then taking into context all that history has to offer.

It’s extremely rich, it’s extremely valuable. It serves as a textbook where things have been tried and sometimes they’ve failed, but there’s also a whole bunch of successes there that can be documented. In an understanding of that foundational history, we can at least look at the successes and then choose to repeat them, right?

Jenny:

Yes. And hopefully the big lesson, Shannon, we will let you give the final word for us. If you wouldn’t mind.

Alex:

I just want to quote Shannon’s book. You can find her book at the public library. You can also find it online. You can purchase a hard copy or a soft copy. The book is called Transforming the Prairies, Agricultural Rehabilitation and Modern Canada. You can find it in the nature and history and society sections at your local public library, or you can help sponsor Shannon’s work and a nice fat hard copy for yourself. Shannon, I’ll leave it to you and thanks for coming both of you. I really appreciate it.

Shannon:

Oh, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Alex, since you mentioned the book, this is a new book. It’s supposed to be available as of October 1st, 2024, stay tuned for that one. Hopefully, it will be in public libraries before too long for you to by it.

Alex:

Pre-order it.

Shannon:

Yes. I suppose pre-reserve it at your library. Maybe. It’s been a pleasure to be part of this conversation. I think one of the legacies of the PFRA, one of the positive legacies maybe, is that this is an organisation that acted in what it saw as the public interest, as blinkered, as that public interest sometimes was to engage in dialogue with farmers. I think talking about these things, building relationships, and building understanding is one thing we can work to carry forward.

Jenny:

Thank you both very much. We’re going to have Bruce on in July to talk about this letter that he’s drafted in this effort we’re trying to make in terms of getting a committee reestablished for water preservation and restoration in the province. Next week we’re talking with a group about the economics of happiness. Trying to get this sense of getting our economy centred on social and ecological well-being. That’s going to be an extension of this, and I’m sure we’ll carry forward some of your ideas. Thank you, Bruce. I appreciate your help in this one, too.

Bruce:

Nice to meet you, Shannon and Alex.

Shannon: Nice to meet you too.