By Clint Westman, University of Saskatchewan

In autumn 2019, I began doing fieldwork in a different province, on a new topic. After 10 years living in Saskatchewan, I wanted to launch a new project, actually doing (rather than just teaching) anthropology in that province. I have begun studying bison reintroductions on protected lands (former ranches) in southwestern Saskatchewan, specifically at Grasslands National Park (GNP) and the Nature Conservancy of Canada’s (NCC) Old Man on His Back Prairie and Heritage Conservation Area (OMB).

How do bison refract key regional questions around land, history, and reconciliation? The combination of large bison herds and expansive protected areas interests me, because of the way it obscures the boundary between wild and domestic, while mobilizing iconic imagery of prairie landscapes. GNP is home to hundreds of bison, while OMB is home to dozens. Both herds, now grazing freely on thousands of acres of native grasslands, were initially brought from Elk Island National Park in Alberta. In turn, the Elk Island bison were descended from animals captured in Montana during the 1880s and relocated. As geographer Jamie Lorimer might say, restoration of this keystone species presents an example of conservation after nature. Nature may need a human helping hand to reverse course and (symbolically?) rewild particular places.

As one ecologist told me, “we’re still trying to figure out why we brought them back.” My research implicitly responds to this question, while engaging the affective encounters bison may afford. Another scientist stated, “when you look into their eyes you can see they have a soul,” later acknowledging that he could not make that comment in a scientific context. It is such tension and overlap between ways of knowing animals and being in places that interests me.

The bison’s presence has had benefits for both human and nonhuman entities with whom the bison are entangled. They have reengaged with other species, including prairie dogs, grasses, and birds, in synergistic relationships, on lands where only cattle grazed for more than a century. Tourists are also part of the scene. In 1955, novelist Wallace Stegner wrote that any tourists arriving in southern Saskatchewan would feel “appalled and misdirected” (2000: 4), while the land (sometimes) showed more of its beauty to local inhabitants. Yet now, GNP and OMB are tourist attractions. People seek out the very landscapes Stegner described as so unforgiving.

For some people, working with or observing bison in their habitat can be highly meaningful. To many area residents, though, it might seem like a frivolous use of good cattle country. Indeed, protected area establishment and bison reintroductions have been subjects of concern for some neighbouring landowners. Coinciding is a depopulation of rural areas and a narrowing of working and social opportunities on such landscapes (as ranches, in this example, become parks and conservation areas). This may pave the way for conflict and resentment, as well as socio-economic changes.

Can a reintroduced species be characterized as wild? Although bison on these lands are represented as free-ranging, and enjoy considerable freedom on a day-to-day basis, the herds are managed, periodically handled, and partially integrated into agricultural production systems. Plains bison are a threatened species, in light of hybridization and disease. Current scientific research focuses on mapping the bison genome, as well as its interactions with disease and parasite pressures, and on the challenges of moving genetic material while avoiding contact between individuals from isolated and potentially diseased herds. Conservation herd managers and bison scientists alike are increasingly consulting Indigenous communities with an interest in bison. I will document these processes and work with Indigenous knowledge holders in doing so.

Bison and prairie may stand for many things to different people. The landscape at GNP and OMB is replete with sacred and significant places, including hilltop teepee rings and vision quest sites, as well as farmyards, outbuildings, and old equipment. Such evocative, multi-layered connections set the stage to engage with both Indigenous and settler attempts to understand these places. This will require learning from local knowledge holders and from secondary literature.

Learning about Euro-Canadian placemaking will draw on literary and artistic work, including that of famed ‘local’ writers Sharon Butala (a former owner of the OMB lands), Wallace Stegner, and others. Artists, writers, and fans frequently visit GNP and OMB, to connect with the landscape and the literary traditions it has inspired. Some locals think the arts people are weird. Yet, for many artists, and other visitors, this land presents “thin places” (though calling them thick may be more meaningful in anthropological terms), potentially providing a way to connect with Indigeneity and spirituality.

Apart from the studies of John Bennett’s ecological anthropology team in the late 1960s, there has been very little anthropological research on contemporary human-environment relations in southern Saskatchewan. Peter Stephenson, who worked with Bennett, later stated that Bennett’s Northern Plainsmen research program never got the acknowledgement it was due. Stephenson ruefully hypothesized that such neglect was likely in part because the project had focused on agrarian relations in (you know) Canada…  and worse still, in Saskatchewan! Perhaps the Wheat Province seems too familiar for even anthropologists to see as strange? I attempt ethnographically to undo this conventional notion and bring focus to an understudied place.

I do not claim to be the only ethnographer working in the province. Yet I push against the cliché that Saskatchewan is too flat, empty, and boring for tourism, passionate scientific research and conservation practice, or even sustained ethnographic attention. Travelers, artists, and writers who come to southwestern Saskatchewan are drawn by the stark power of the landscape and the light. “Land of living skies,” just like the license plate says.

In southern Saskatchewan, there is indeed frequently “nothing to block your view,” quoting comedian Brent Butt. Butt here suggests the potential to bring particular clarity to a politics and poetics of landscape and species unfolding in this place. Perhaps it is the flagship herds of bison, themselves, which may make the prairie seem more interesting, worth visiting or viewing? More than a token of settler guilt, they are a key component of efforts to (re)create heritage landscapes and invoke Indigenous pasts, presences, and absences, while appealing to a cosmopolitan tourist market. For many people, it feels right just to see them there. For those who know and work with bison most closely, it can be deeply spiritual. It can sometimes even feel like love.

I will explore the multiple affective connections that bison may foster among those encountering them on the open range. I welcome comments and suggestions from other researchers, who may have explored out-of-the-way places in other multispecies ethnographic contexts.

Works Cited

Bennett, John W. 1969. Northern Plainsmen: Adaptive Strategy and Agrarian Life. Chicago: Aldine Atherton.

Butala, Sharon. 1994. The Perfection of the Morning: An Apprenticeship in Nature. Toronto: HarperCollins.

Lorimer, Jamie. 2015. Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation After Nature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Stegner, Wallace. 2000 (1955). Wolf Willow. New York: Penguin.

Stephenson, Peter. 2011. Northern Plainsmen Revisited. In “Sleeping with an Elephant:” Traces, Tidemarks, and Legacies of an Engaged Canadian Anthropology. Panel organized by Janice E. Graham. American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal.