Introduction

INTRODUCTION My great-grandmother, Eleanor, boarded a steamboat with her husband, David, and their two sons, John and Desmond, in 1925.She waved goodbye to Ireland's rocky shores, to the rolling green pastures, and to the stonestrewn farmland.They abandoned the marshy flats of Mount Mellick, a tiny village located in the geographical centre of Ireland where her husband was born.Ireland was a country that no longer wanted them.David had served the British Empire as an officer for the Irish Guard, for which the Irish separatists despised him.But beyond the fire that was smoldering between the British separatists and loyalists, my great-grandparents left Ireland because there was scarcely any land left to farm.David was the youngest boy amongst his four siblings.His father, a poor potato farmer, had nothing to offer his son.David inherited the knowledge of farming, but when it came to land, he only had rocks.Eleanor and David fled their mother country and crossed the Atlantic in pursuit of what was called 'free land' on the vast spread of the Canadian prairies.My great-grandfather fought in WWI, and under the Soldier's Land Settlement Act of 1919 the British Empire offered him a loan to immigrate to Canada, settle on a quarter section of land outside Wolseley, XII WOMEN WHO DIG Saskatchewan, and sow wheat where the native prairie grasses once sprang from the earth.They traveled in winter, before the thaw and fertile promise that spring brings.When they arrived, Eleanor could not believe her eyes.The door to the farmhouse, a wooden clapboard structure, was wide open.The snow had accumulated inside the house like a massive heap of sugar.David handed her a shovel and they began, digging in, carving out a new life on the land only ten kilometres south of the Qu'Appelle Valley.The story behind the naming of the Qu'Appelle River and Valley reveals that my great-grandparents were not the first people called to settle on the Canadian prairies.In 1804, Daniel Harmon, a Métis fur trader, paddled along the river and encountered a group of Cree hunters.The hunters told Harmon that a Cree spirit possessed the river, floating along the surface of the black waters, crying out in Cree, "Kâ-têpwêt?" "Qui appelle?," meaning "Who is calling?"In 1852, the Hudson's Bay Company established a fur trading post along the Qu'Appelle River, and seventy years later, the forces of colonialism called my great-grandparents to the land that had never belonged to the Canadian government to sell.For ten thousand years before David and Eleanor came, Indigenous communities lived in spiritual communion with the land without owning the land.Land ownership did not always align with Indigenous cosmologies: land was the foundation for the life force; it could not be owned, but it was known, navigated, and managed in complex ways, according to each group's traditional ecological knowledge and understanding of geography, botany, wildlife, weather, and the seasonal changes.The Blackfoot, the Assiniboine, the Dene, the Cree and Saulteaux, and Métis peoples, amongst many other Indigenous groups in the west, were hunting and gathering peoples who depended on the earth in diverse ways: harvesting roots, berries, bark, and wild plants, and hunting moose, elk, deer, bear, and woodland caribou.Many Indigenous groups on the prairies followed the migratory paths of buffalo throughout the expanse of what would come to be known as western Canada.

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