Essay

I knew about ranching back in the 1980s. Ranchers were the bad guys who killed off bears and whose cattle trashed their habitat. Like most environmentalists of the day, I got my insights from [...]

Charlie Russell loved to fly, and he seldom phoned first those times when he would fly his Kolb ultralight airplane north from Hawk’s Nest ranch on the boundary of Waterton Lakes National Park, [...]

The black and white photograph, such as those taken with a Brownie box camera, shows a man, perhaps 40 years old, with the sun- and wind-burned face of a farmer, a thick hank of dark hair falling [...]

I found him asleep at Wendy’s on a scuzzy patch of 17th Avenue, his forehead resting on the makeshift pillow he’d created from one arm. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew it was my brother: the [...]

I think Canada is not place to live. I think it is place for visit. (Alex) We had never considered buying our own home. The thought was never entertained. We didn’t have money, and had coached [...]

The winter of 1970. In “Room at the Top,” a coffee house about seven storeys up in the frigid night sky of Edmonton, a couple of folksingers are tuning up their guitars while their drummer is [...]

March 1945. The sea rose and fell as a bitterly cold wind swept over the ship. Restless refugees, chilled and miserable, stood on the deck nervously scanning the brackish Baltic waters for Soviet [...]

Auguste, Ernst’s mother, was wise to flee East Prussia when she did. Many who stayed starved to death or worse. One of Ernst’s childhood friends endured six years of forced labour in a Soviet [...]

We spend a lot of time together lately, Opapa and me, mostly on his treed acreage southeast of Edmonton where he lives with my Omi. Cloistered by the aspens and poplars surrounding the blue [...]

Drowning in the crass consumerism and gluttonous excess that have become synonymous with North American culture, it is easy to find comfort in the label “Canadian citizen”—polite, unobtrusive, [...]