Q: Are there any elements in The Frog Lake Reader that come from your own personal experience?
A: I was well into the book when I realized what was really driving it: the fact that a mere 15 years separate 1885 and 1900, the year my paternal grandfather took out title on a homestead near Vegreville, not so far from Frog Lake, and yet I never recall my grandparents speaking of Native people or of the fact that the “free lands” that the Ukrainians settled had once been the homeland, the Motherland, of First Nations. So I think of The Frog Lake Reader as my attempt to write the history-before-the-history of the “opening” of the West.
3 comments:
My family settled in the Battleford area in the late 1890's as well and I certainly did not grow up hearing stories of the circumstances related to settlement of Europeans and its impact on existing aboriginal communities. Certainly advertisements overseas at the time 'advertised' the Canadian west as a wide open, abundant space waiting to be had.
I was taken by the observation that those aboriginal communities adopting to a lifestyle of trying to hunt in wooded areas suffered from the challenge hunting in this environment. On a recent trip to Calgary I recognized how difficult it would be to transfer a skill such as hunting in a plains environment to hunting in wooded areas - the plains skills would not be easily adapted to a wooded environment.
i hope that this book inspires Canada's aboriginal authors to write the story from their perspective and using oral knowledge that has been passed down through the generations.
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