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[November 24th, Ürümqi] Dilhumar doesn't want to play with her daughter tonight. A hundred and--She has stopped counting since day one hundred, for no particular reason. A form of resistance? [...]

In her introduction to The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology, editor Karina Vernon writes that one main purpose of this varied collection of documents is 'to make the archive public' [...]

First, I must apologize to the souls of the house I am wearing the cheekbones of the mask only Like a pill bottle whose name is yours Name tagged on [...]

James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking series is often characterized as a literary staging ground, on which Cooper deploys, tests, and evaluates various political principles and representative figures. The Prairie, set on what Charles Adams refers to as the 'blank slate' of the newly purchased Louisiana Territories, is exemplary of this sort of function, as demonstrated through the conflicting modes of proprietorship and legal authority represented by Ishmael Bush, Mahtoree, and Duncan Uncas Middleton. Yet while in most recent scholarship what is staged in the Leatherstocking novels is either an arrangement of competing political theories or the duality of settler identity formation, this essay argues that The Prairie engages a more foundational, and explicitly geopolitical, concern. The fundamental tension of the novel, between its historically deterministic opening and closing and its highly convoluted and contested middle, is suggestive of a powerful anxiety, exacerbated by the Louisiana Purchase, over the basis of American sovereignty as it takes shape in response to Indigenous forms of territoriality. Read this way, the depiction of conflicting modes of property law, framed by the novel's narrative tension, appear as symptoms of the dilemma of what Manu Karuka has termed countersovereignty, made apparent as the Bush family are forced to acknowledge that the 'empty empire' of the Louisiana Territories is not so empty after all. KEYWORDS: James Fenimore Cooper, nation, nationalism, sovereignty, countersovereignty, law and property, Indigenous studies, settler colonialism, As the concluding installment of the Leatherstocking Tales, James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie is imbued with a peculiarly American sort of consternation over the lingering instability of national identity in [...]

'From the backseat her son explains what would happen if she got sucked into a black hole.' Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffee House Press, April 2024) by Danielle Dutton. Fifth [...]

We shop like days of yore, until all the fabrics and styles we pick out appear in piles at the register. When we were left at home as children, our [...]

Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) was born Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, East Prussia (now Poland), and grew up in Hamburg, Germany. He was educated at the University of Bonn but was imprisoned for fraud in 1903. After his release he fell into debt, and in 1909 he faked his suicide and fled to the United States. Three years later he moved to Canada and began working as a teacher at the Kronsfeld School in Haskett, Manitoba. He taught at seven different schools over the next seven years. He also earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Manitoba in 1922. He then served as principal of the Rapid City School until 1924, when he became a full-time writer. He published two collections of prairie essays, Over Prairie Trails (1922) and The Turn of the Year (1923), as well as a series of prairie novels, including Settlers of the Marsh (1925), A Search for America (1927), Our Daily Bread (1928), and The Yoke of Life (1930). While he is primarily known as a novelist today, he was more widely known as an essayist during his lifetime. In the summer 1939 issue, for example, Isabel Skelton praised 'the patient, thorough finish of his workmanship,' 'the fastidious rightness and accuracy of his words, phrases, and descriptions,' and 'the sensitive recording and discriminating of the delicately shaded moods of a solitary man.' The following essay was published in the July 1931 issue and included in the collection A Stranger to My Time (1986)., THE EXCEEDINGLY SLIGHT SLOPE with which the prairie south of Winnipeg drains, in a northeast direction, to the Red River is hardly perceptible; in truth, it amounts to less than [...]

The bare airport is filled with humanoid voice, robots asking questions about your journey history. From the third world of my memory, I am the bird with soiled plumage I [...]

Dawn Dumont The Prairie Chicken Dance Tour Calgary. Freehand Books. 2021. 306 pages. JOHN GREYEYES 'only wanted a coffee in the morning and a frying pan of beans and wieners [...]

We ate tumbleweed in brine after the government men shot the cow. Dust pushed the fences under. Whole days went by with no light. We learned to sit with our [...]

S. Leigh Matthews. Looking Back: Canadian Women's Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2010. 418 pp. $39.95. Looking Back, S. Leigh Matthews's [...]

Sue Sorensen, ed. West of Eden: Essays on Canadian Prairie Literature. Winnipeg: CMU Press, 2008. Like other collections of essays about, and anthologies of work by, writers based in the [...]

Russ Gourluck. The Mosaic Village: An Illustrated History of Winnipeg's North End. Winnipeg: Great Plains Publications, 2010. viii + 244 pp. Index. $29.95 sc. Esylt W. Jones and Gerald Friesen, [...]

Harvey Friedman wants to know who you are,' Mary Guthrie said. Harvey Friedman was the Dean of Liberal Arts. He was well-off, well-spoken, well-dressed. Some said dashing. Some said he [...]

Mama and the smalls mixed up bowls of bran and molasses to attract the grasshoppers, and arsenic to kill them, all of the molasses we'd said would make Februaiy tolerable. [...]

We buried Papa in that high place and then he came to the door and waited to be let in like a mangy dog the neighbors denied. The smalls said [...]

forthcoming September 2008 DOWNSTATE To have the same sound, to be called by the same name. Location's what you come to; it's the low point, it usually repeats. To me, [...]

Breath, unbound from desire for it. Pollen across a field. Me going quiet for it like owls do, the only sound at all their quiet nothing-- how heavy it is. [...]

ABSTRACT/RESUME This paper examines how state inspectors and 'visiteurs d'ecoles' (unofficial inspectors) shaped hegemonic and counter-hegemonic cultural practices in bilingual school districts in Prairie provinces before 1940. The study allows [...]

The strains underneath the surface theme of conservative political and family values in America in Laura Ingalls Wilder's 'Little House on the Prairie' are analyzed, as well as the old and new definitions of history placed side. What Laura has always been taught about America and its history is depicted side by side with what she experiences herself without being aware of her own experience.

Papa drags the plow west to the edge and back east to the edge, dredges up rocks. Then he drives a rack and we bend down to lift rocks from [...]

Daria Salamon. The Prairie Bridesmaid. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008. 264 pp. $27.95 hc. The Prairie Bridesmaid is the first novel by Winnipeg writer Daria Salamon. The novel follows the [...]

Jon Paul Fiorentino and Robert Kroetsch, eds. Post-Prairie: An Anthology of New Poetry. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005. 160 pp. $19.95 sc. In Post-Prairie, the editors, Jon Fiorentino and Robert Kroetsch, complain [...]