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A Geography Of Blood: Unearthing Memory From A Prairie Landscape (2012)

by Candace Savage(Favorite Author)

4.04 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1553652347 (ISBN13: 9781553652342)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Greystone Books / David Suzuki Foundation

review 1: As a geographer, I am often drawn to books with Geography, Maps, or Cartography in their titles. This one ended up being about a place that I had made a special point of visiting in 2010 after taking a class on Wallace Stegner and his writings on Eastend, Saskatchewan and reading most of Sharon Butala's books on the Cypress Hills. I visited Wallace Stegner's house where Candace Savage and her partner stayed as they got to know the town. I really enjoyed how she told her personal story, tied in the natural history of this unique location (Eastend and the Cypress Hills) and then told a history that went far beyond one that Wallace Stegner told of this place in bringing out the aboriginal history of this place, that is missing from most North American histories of places. She... more lets you into her thinking and this makes the book a very powerful as it combines the personal and the local with the ecological and social history of the place.
review 2: It's more of a memoir than a history - Mrs. Savage seeking to fill the gaps left by the established mythology of "How the West was Won". Beautifully written and beautifully evokes the Cypress Hills and adjacent Saskatchewan and Eastend. I read it while on a trip through those places and thought that its gentle narrative and stark historical backdrop nicely mirrored the feeling of the pretty Saskatchewan townlets nestled in harsh and ancient hills and plains. Her quest unearths the reality of the First Nation experience and the loss of that narrative in our own history - for example, her description of the meeting of Sitting Bull and Crowfoot in the Cypress Hills not long after the battle of Little Bighorn - a diplomatic and political event of enormous significance that none of us have ever heard of. Highly recommend this book to anybody and especially for travellers on the road from Cypress Hills to Eastend! less

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