| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 61

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Walter Hildebrandt and Brian Hubner, The Cypress Hills: An Island by Itself (Saskatoon: Purich Publishing Limited 2007)

THIS BOOK FIRST appeared in 1994. It grew out of research connected with the development of interpretive programming and the conservation of Fort Walsh National Historic Site. This edition includes some new material such as recent archaeological work in the Cypress Hills as well as a new chapter on the Nakoda in the 1880s.

The Cypress Hills are physically anomalous on the Canadian Prairies: rising up to 600 metres, this 2,600 square kilometre patch of land shelters flora and fauna unique on the prairies. Even at the greatest extent of the last ice age about 16,000 years ago, parts of it were never glaciated, and it is thus a remnant of the times before the prairie landscape was remade by the grinding weight and then the retreat of the great sheets of ice.

In this sense, the Cypress Hills district is, as Hildebrandt and Hubner subtitle their book, "an island by itself." But as this history of the district reveals, the Cypress Hills were in other ways firmly a part of Canadian and North American history and development. The district was long a meeting point, and its resources and security drew different people who coexisted or sometimes warred in the shelter of the hills. The Cypress Hills were a point of convergence for Plains Cree, Nakoda, and people of the Blackfoot Confederacy who went there as part of the seasonal rounds of the buffalo economy or sought food, timber and shelter in winter. Recent archaeological work by Gerry Oetelaar has shown that such convergence had ancient roots. One site alone has shown continuous occupation for 8,000–9,000 years, and his findings reveal that the Cypress Hills were part of a connected world of surprising breadth. As Hildebrandt and Hubner note, "copper from Lake Superior, and shell beads from Atlantic areas provide clues not only to their makers' belief systems but to their trade systems as well." (19)

Similarly, Hildebrandt and Hubner demonstrate that the evolution of the Cypress Hills district in the 19th century was directly and indirectly part of the history of the region and the nation. Cree middlemen connected the Cypress Hills to the Canadian fur trade, while the bison hunts of the 1860s and 1870s brought American hide traders and wolfers north. While hides were shipped south, pemmican from the district was traded a thousand kilometres north to sustain the fur trade. The opportunities of this trade and the upheaval at Red River during the Resistance of 1869–70 brought Métis settlers, hunters, and traders to the district.

The pathology of the relationship between American wolfers and hide traders with Aboriginal people in the district culminated in the most famous national event to occur in the district. The Cypress Hills Massacre of 1873 was a local event that became emblematic of Canada's need to assert control over its new hinterland through a paramilitary police force. In 1875 the NWMP established Fort Walsh near the site of the massacre as one of a string of posts across the west. But Fort Walsh and the authority of Canada it represented did little for local people. The disappearance of the buffalo by the early 1880s – part of the continent-wide decimation of the herds – brought predictable results to a society in which buffalo were central in economic and social life, and Fort Walsh largely became a welfare distributing point where rations were doled out to First Nations.

Hildebrandt and Hubner detail the impact of local events, whose motivation so often lay far away, on the social and economic life of the Cypress Hills. They pay close attention to this impact across a broad spectrum: how gender relations in First Nations in the district were reshaped, how economic life was transformed, how local conflicts shaped national policy, and, most dramatically, how the social and political structures of everyday life were altered by economic and political change. In part, this story is well known and familiar: how the pace of change grew in intensity between the 1860s and the 1880s, sweeping up people whose adaptation to the land over thousands of years now meant nothing in a new economy dominated by national and global forces and powered by different technologies, ideologies, and concerns. Hildebrandt and Hubner never lose sight of the local but link it to its context. For example, the relocation by the Canadian government of Nakoda people in the early 1880s from the Cypress Hills to a reserve near Indian Head, Saskatchewan is dealt with in terms of Canadian policies and attitudes towards First Nations. This event occurred less than a decade after Treaty 4 had promised the Nakoda tenure of land with spiritual and cultural significance for them, and it was achieved by the brutally simple tactic of reducing food rations to starvation levels. The impact on the Cypress Hills district was the elimination, for a time, of Nakoda people from the area, at great cost in personal and collective grief and pain.

The history of the Nakoda relocation forms the concluding two chapters in the book. One of these chapters is new, but it does not sit well with its adjoining chapter, and the two could have been more smoothly integrated. Indeed, the book ends rather abruptly and concludes with what is, in effect, a short postscript about Fort Walsh National Historic Site. This disappointing conclusion does not limit the strengths of the book. This is local history with its eye focused firmly on broader explanations and context, and it demonstrates that while the local can be most precisely understood as part of the general, the general can also be best understood by how it shapes, and sometimes is shaped, by the local.


DONALD G. WETHERELL Athabasca University

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