Review of Overlooking Saskatchewan: Minding the Gap edited by Randal Rogers and Christine Ramsay.

The editors of Overlooking Saskatchewan take on the task of reclaiming 'the impossible project of community' (xi), made doubly impossible because this Canadian prairie province is often dismissed by metropolitan Canada as flat, monochromatic and uninteresting.Who from here does not recognize the familiar look of the outsider who wonders as we speak why we would want to live in this void between other 'real' and 'true' placesin the gap, as the joke goes, between Calgary and Winnipeg, to be looked down on, literally, as one flies over.(xii) Think the famous New Yorker magazine cover, in which flat, brown nothing begins three feet into New Jersey.But an accurate portrayal of the province's racial, class and gender diversity, many contributors note, is also thwarted by Saskatchewan's very boosters, who champion a 'Saskaboom' centred in the energy, real-estate and other overwhelmingly white-dominated businesses of the large cities, while ignoring the enduring poverty and exploitation visited on Aboriginal Canadians as well as the Mtis (people of mixed French and Aboriginal ancestry who were literally shunted into the ditch, as contributor David Garneau documents).Such narratives are rarely likely to warm the hearts of the Chamber of Commerce.Overlooking Saskatchewan, then, brings together writers from history, literary studies and arts practitioners who seek to reclaim the province as a place that matters and in which community, ironically, arrives out of a recognition of 'the impossibility of adding up, of ever finally reaching a state of comfortable identity and total belonging', (xiv) especially when racial rivalries and enmities between Anglo-Canadians and pretty much everyone else are added into the narratives.In this the contributors largely succeed.Central to the contributors' project is the inclusion of the previously ignored/marginalised Aboriginal presence, as well as reflections on the once shunned Ukrainian, Chinese and other non-British settlers who staked out a place in the province.What Overlooking Saskatchewan presents is a messy, complex and confounding narrativebut out of multi-vocality the gaps in the Saskatchewan story are mended.As in any edited volume, some chapters are stronger, or perhaps will appeal to various readers based on their own disciplines and interests.Nicole Ct movingly analyses Joey Tremblay's play, Elephant Wake, in which the mentally challenged protagonist JC stubbornly hangs onto his near-ghost town Francophone home town as well as his misguided belief in his cultural and ethnic purity, when all evidence points to his blended English, French and Native heritage.The artist David Garneau looks at the marginalisation of Mtis who were cast aside to live on marginal unclaimed lands -far away from 'modern' (white) Saskatchewan, but near enough to become a ready source of low-wage labour.Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia or 'undocumented' Latinos in the U.S. would understand this exploitative nearnessfarness paradigm.The francophone, and especially the 'vanishing' (but not quite) Indian presence in the province presents a story of 'hybridity that challenges conventional ideas of identity and place, especially those directed toward purity' (xxviii).Perhaps the grimmest reminder of this enforced racial purification of the 'Saskaboom' saga comes from Brenda Beckman-Long, who examines narratives of Natives who have survived 'starlight tours' in which police officers in Saskatoon and Regina snatch Native men from city

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