by George Colpitts
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2026/$34.99/258 PP.

As European settlers pushed in greater numbers into the Canadian west in the early 20th century, they found huge numbers of fish in Alberta’s lakes, streams and rivers—and excellent sport fishing. But as the pressure on those fish populations grew and catches declined, sport fishermen turned to conservation. Their attempts to protect the rivers and streams—and the battle over whose  interests to prioritize—is the focus of George Colpitts’s newest book, Troubled Tributaries.

Colpitts is a professor at the University of Calgary who specializes in environmental history. His book tracks “anglers,” sport fishermen using rod and reel, who pulled major hauls from Alberta’s rivers before the First World War but then saw ever more people lining the banks. Colpitts tracks the different paths taken by local groups that sprang up to protect fishing holes or to lobby for the closure of specific streams and areas. In High River, for instance, a “massive, grassroots movement” emerged to protect the upstream “nursery” areas of the Highwood River to “guarantee a supply of fish” downstream near town. In contrast, in the coal mining area around Crowsnest Pass, where “fish was still a major staple in coal miners’ diets, poaching was rampant, and stream dynamiting common,” conservation-minded anglers pursued a more inclusive approach that included co-operation in conservation efforts. They even pushed for the use of hatcheries to help increase fish populations.

The introduction of the automobile brought major tensions between small-town anglers and their big-city counterparts. Calgary outdoors enthusiasts could now reach what were once secluded fishing spots, pulling out the best fish and leaving behind a mess. Protecting the fish from this onslaught was a major concern of local angler groups.

But other forces were at play, which we can better see now in hindsight. Around Crowsnest Pass, notes Colpitts, “the industrialization of the river threatened to wipe out cutthroat, mountain whitefish and especially the bull trout population.”

Largely missing from this narrative of fishing in the early 20th century are the voices of Indigenous people. That likely says less about narrative choices and more about the fact that settlers coming west paid scant attention to the Indigenous people they were quickly outnumbering and displacing.

What Colpitts brings to light is an early conservation debate and the way settlers viewed their new environment. While the narrative is at times dry, it’s still a fascinating look at what was considered important for conservation more than a century ago.

Justin Bell is a journalist in Edmonton.

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by Blaine Newton
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2025/$29.99/182 pp.

According to philosopher Byung-Chul Han, “we no longer have any narratives that provide meaning and orientation for our lives,” as storytelling in the digital age is increasingly reduced to mere sound bites of distracted and disconnected information. Reading a short-fiction collection such as Blaine Newton’s Rag Pickers might be one kind of remedy. As its title suggests, the tales aren’t bent on ambitious puffery but are instead humble—and sometimes hilarious—pieces cut from the cloth of humanity. Newton is an award-winning playwright, and his first book features characters engaging with each other in a way that now, sadly, can appear old-fashioned.

The encounters are subtle, nuanced in a way Henry James would surely appreciate, emotive with melancholic perplexity,  with characters who often appear out of place, who gaze anxiously from behind curtains, who, like the protagonist in the title story, receive cryptic and useless messages that state “I wish you were dead” concealed within a thrift store jacket lining. The longest story in the collection, “Conversations with Cows,” was a Fringe Festival play and, with its two acts, mirrors the production, in which a young couple wrestle with the shifts in their relationship occasioned by a widening gulf between the kowtowing of making corporate money and the freedom of creating art. Newton is able to impart an essential message here, but rarely with a heavy hand (though perhaps with a surfeit of accretive clauses).

Similarly to Stephen Leacock, Newton is adept with the mistaken identity plot (“Coffee Break”) and the satire (“The Reluctant Poet,” a laugh-out-loud romp in seven cantos). Although he is often funny, even down to incongruous similes, as in “The Ascent of Hank,” when the titular character compares his crush’s eyes to a “standard company-issue Bic Cristal,” Newton is even more attuned to the small gestures between the old and infirm and those assisting them as movers or carers.

Consistently, Newton makes the reader feel. Even as one is guffawing at the erasure of stick people on a divorcee’s car, one is stirred by the way the mother’s hands “that had carried the weight of the bags” were now “fists,” or the “wonderful loaf” William finally wholly accepts at the close of “Downsizing,” or the aged man who imagines himself back on the ice, shooting the puck with a boy he sees “from a distance” before realizing “Time is still and hard, the wind like a hand pushing my face away.” Han stresses that narrative can “stabilize life” with its attention to the temporal. Newton’s rag pickers hit this empathic cue: they slow us down, send us deep.

Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah (2024).

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Edited by Jim Ellis and Noreen Humble
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2025/$34.99/176 pp.

Mythologies of Outer Space, edited by Jim Ellis and Noreen Humble, is, as a physical object, a beautiful book, with colourful pages filled with gorgeous art, photography and diagrams. It would not be out of place on a coffee table. But it is so much more than a book for display. From outer space archaeologist Alice Gorman’s fascinating examination of changing perceptions of the moon as a living (or life-supporting) entity or a dead and sterile rock, to Mi’kmaw astronomer Hilding Neilson’s examination of the relationship between astronomy, space exploration and Indigenous rights, to an afterword written by Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk, the book is a manifold engagement with space, in large part as it’s been imagined but also as it’s been experienced first-hand.

The book emerged, Ellis tells us in the introduction, from the 42nd annual community seminar of the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. Informally arranged into three sections, it opens with a focus on the moon. After Gorman’s chapter, Humble traces conceptions of the moon back to two ancient Greek texts written by Lucian in the second century C.E.: True Histories and Icaromenippus. She convincingly documents Lucian’s influence in work by figures as diverse as Johannes Kepler, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. Following this, Keith Sidwell’s translation of Lucian’s peculiar and amusing “Voyage to the Moon” is worth the read just for the wildly imaginative narrative of lunar gender and procreation.

After the lunar section is a collection of scholarly chapters, thankfully written for a general audience, with widely accessible scholarship devoid of jargon and intrusive citation. Neilson’s thought-provoking chapter stands out here. He convincingly argues that “treaties do not have a height limit,” that light pollution is colonization, and that “any action by Canada, as a nation-state, in outer space must be conducted with and with the consent of Indigenous peoples living on these lands.” Another chapter sees digital humanities scholar Chris Pak sketching a history of narratives of terraforming as a way of understanding different time periods’ views of the future and planetary development. Resonant with Pak’s piece, Stefania Forlini delves into archival work with the U of C’s Bob Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction. Gibson, whom Forlini identifies as a “lifelong collector of the everyday,” compiled more than 880 anthologies that “exemplify the carefully curated work of a collector with ‘scavenger sensibilities.’ ” This chapter is accompanied by compelling reproductions of rare periodical and book covers of speculative fiction.

The final section is a collection of artistic representations of outer space. Kyle Flemmer’s “Stellar Sequence” is essentially a high-quality poetry chapbook of a series of poems, each titled after a stellar body, the page colour corresponding to the colour of star poetically represented—“Red Dwarfs” appearing on a red page, “Blue Giants” on a blue page, etc. Elyse Longair engages in a conversation with collage artist Naomi Potter, accompanied by gorgeous reproductions of her work. And Nancy Tousley discusses “You Will Remember When You Need To,” David Hoffos’s mixed media installation piece that also includes some unsettling images from his work.

Mythologies of Outer Space is an aesthetically stunning text. It’s also unapologetically eclectic, so is difficult to summarize without doing it an injustice. Taken as a whole, it traces a history of vision and exploration and points to humanity’s future imaginative interactions with space, both inner and outer.

Jay Gamble teaches English at the University of Lethbridge and is the author of Book of Knots (Book*hug Press)

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by David Martin
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2024/$18.99/136 pp.

Calgary poet David Martin’s third book, Limited Verse, is a brilliant feat of imagination, mashing together poetry, dystopian sci-fi and literary theory. But most of all it is a profound and moving investigation of language: about how language hems in or liberates our thoughts, about its power to preserve memory and forge human connection despite its limits, and about its inherent instability through time.

The book takes the form of an annotated manuscript recovered after the liberation of New Earth, a fictional penal colony of labourers whose memories were wiped and whose language was “Harmonized”—that is, replaced with New English, a rudimentary lexicon of 850 words. (New English is modelled on Basic English, invented in 1925 by the real linguist C.K. Ogden as a means of cross-cultural communication.) On the brink of being shipped out to New Earth and desperate to build a bridge between past and future selves, the manuscript’s anonymous author has translated beloved poems into New English in a notebook to be smuggled into the colony, interspersing the poems with journal entries that ruminate on the looming transformation.

The opening pages of the journal express a searching curiosity rather than pure dread: “Yes, I have fear, but maybe when I am awake with only 850 words I will experience a strangeness that will make the land feel new. I will have less to grip onto with my mind and more to see with feeling.” What ensues is an invitation to the reader to consider the effects of such a radical simplification of language—what is lost, what is gained, what eludes the grip of the mind and what is preserved in the way of feeling.

Working my way through the book, I found myself fantasizing about being an English instructor and designing a course around Limited Verse—I can’t imagine a better teaching tool for conveying poetry as the act of fumbling toward vivid precision within the limits of language and the constraints imposed by poetic form. The original poems upon which the translations are based are all in the public domain and can easily be found on the internet, occasionally with some creative searching. I read each New English poem side by side with its original—first the translation for a first impression, then the original, then back to the translation for a close comparison.

Many of the poems deal with themes of loss, transformation and renewal, as does “Fire-Flowers” by E. Pauline Johnson/Tekahionwake. The ending stanza of the original is:

And only to the heart that knows of grief
Of desolating fire, of human pain
There comes some purifying sweet belief
Some fellow-feeling beautiful, if brief
And life revives, and blossoms once again.

In Martin’s hands—without the pivotal word “grief”— the stanza becomes:

And only to the heart that knows death’s song
Of wasting fire, and of the human pain,
There comes something so clear, so sweet and strong,
Some equal-feeling beautiful, not long.
And time restarts, and opens now again.

The translated poems at times sing and at times strain, but both their beauty and their awkwardness are illuminating and spark reflection: How does a limited verbal palette foreclose opportunities for playing with sound as well as meaning Does a reduced vocabulary for the natural world constitute a tragic form of collective memory loss, as explored by Robert Macfarlane in his book of poems The Lost Words, devoted to items (e.g., “fern”, “heron”, “willow”) dropped from the 2007 edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary Or does the need to express familiar referents with new raw materials allow us to see a thing afresh, as when Martin translates “falcon” as “knifebird” When does the austerity of New English sever our link to the past and when does it lift an already deadened and inaccessible form of language into the present, pulsing with new vitality?

Endnotes, provided by fictional scholars from far in the post-New Earth future, offer analysis and commentary on the recovered notebook. Leveraging an ample lexicon that permits nuance and abstraction, these notes delve into theories of literary translation, George Orwell’s views on language, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis about the relationship between language and thought, the fetishization of simplicity by high modernist writers such as Eliot, Joyce and Pound (who were advocates for the spread of Ogden’s Basic English), and the creative power of constraints on language (“the smaller the room in prison, the greater the mind’s purpose and power of expansion,” writes Martin’s protagonist). An integral part of the text, the notes guide the reader into a deeper experience of the New English poems and journal entries.

The mind-wipe and Harmonization process awaited by the protagonist serves to anchor one of the book’s central preoccupations: that language is never fixed in time, that it is always subject to the forces of change, loss and reinvention. It is easy to foreground the losses—in our own historical moment, declining reading habits and the levelling effects of ChatGPT may well be simplifying English, and within our lifetimes many of us will feel the mind-wiping effects that come with dementia or aphasia. But a deeply humane and hopeful vision permeates Limited Verse, reminding us that a creative spirit can withstand what may seem a devastating shrinkage of language. A lexicon of 850 words is enough to grapple with the most profound aspects of human experience: love, religion, trouble, death. Clever and erudite as he is, Martin’s true genius lies in showing, through his rejuvenated—if at times lurching—poems and through the soulful journal entries of the protagonist, that “art is ever the sign of the attempt to connect” and that “the Old English will be gone, but thought is able to stretch beyond the limit of language and touch the deepest part of us.”

Julie Sedivy is the author of Linguaphile (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Memory Speaks (Harvard University Press).

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by Lindsay McLaren, Donald W.M. Juzwishin and Rogelio Velez Mendoza
University of Calgary Press
2024/$49.99/496 pp.

In A History of Public Health in Alberta, 1919–2019, Lindsay McLaren, Donald  W.M. Juzwishin and Rogelio Velez Mendoza seek to “commemorate, critique and learn” from the last 100 years of Alberta’s public health history. Told from a contemporary perspective and informed by critical theory, the authors explore social and political forces that shaped the evolution of public health in this province.

Through an analysis of provincial throne speeches from 1906 to 2017, the authors trace the broad trajectory of public health in Alberta. They demonstrate an overall shift from emphasis on health protection and disease prevention to diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The Manning years (1943–1968) initially saw an expansion of preventive services, with increased training and deployment of public health workers across the province, then a transition to a downstream focus on diagnosing, treating and managing disease through publicly funded physician and hospital services. In the 1980s and 1990s, under premiers Getty and Klein, Albertans experienced public sector cuts and the privatization of services. Revealingly, there was no mention of public health in provincial throne speeches from 1988 to 2006. Ed Stelmach’s years in office (2006–2011) came with an emphasis on primary care, chronic disease management, mental health care and long-term care, and the amendment of the Public Health Act to strengthen the authority of the chief medical officer of health in protecting and promoting the health of Albertans.

Tension between government intervention and individual liberty is a central theme in public health. The value of improved health outcomes from mandatory public health measures versus the importance of personal freedom of choice has been hotly debated. Former provincial chief medical officer of health Jim Talbot asserts that “public health always wins.” This reads as true when we think of policies we take for granted today: milk pasteurization, smoke-free public spaces, air quality standards, mandatory seatbelt use and so much more.

But the authors do not shy away from exposing regrettable public health policies in the past. As part of Alberta’s eugenics program, the Sexual Sterilization Act (1928) was administered by the provincial public health department and involved forcible sterilization of “mentally deficient” patients in health institutions. Public health surveillance and characterization of the health and living conditions of Chinese immigrants reinforced racialized assumptions about uncleanliness and moral bankruptcy, and contributed to policies of social exclusion. Viewed as a threat to the health of the white public, Indigenous adults were denied medical care for tuberculosis and only began receiving treatment after the establishment of a segregated healthcare system in 1940.

Although not within the time period under examination in the book, the authors nonetheless discuss the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, which put a spotlight on public health as a discipline but “portrayed a narrow, reductive and medicalized version.” In contrast, the authors advance an integrated, coherent vision of public health that identifies root causes of illness in populations, addresses social determinants of health and gives a foundational role to health equity.

A History of Public Health in Alberta, 1919–2019 is not a history book that glorifies events, people and decisions with naïve deference. Rather it provides a critical perspective on what happened, why it happened and how events were influenced by prevailing social and political power structures. By putting forth a bold vision for public health, this book is a resounding call to action for all actors in the public health community—practitioners, scholars and decision-makers—to embrace an inclusive and just public health system.

Vamini Selvanandan is a family physician and public health practitioner in Alberta.

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My Journey in Alberta Politics
by Ted Morton
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2024/$38.99/352 pp.

There are few things less satisfying than a character study that reduces life’s rich pageant to ideological sniping. Political scientist and former politician Ted Morton’s new autobiography, unfortunately, is a case in point.

Morton describes Strong and Free as a chronicle “of my three decades in Alberta politics,” starting when he and his wife Bambi and their three children moved from the United States to Calgary in 1981 so Morton could teach in the department of political science at the University of Calgary. Along with Tom Flanagan, Rainer Knopff and Barry Cooper, Morton was a key figure in the “Calgary School,” a cadre of professors at the U of C who promoted hard-right social and economic conservative ideas. He ran as the Reform Party’s Senate candidate in 1997 and signed the “firewall letter” along with Stephen Harper in 2001, advocating for an Alberta police force and pension plan. In 2004 Morton won election as a Calgary-area MLA. He ran for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 2006 (losing to Ed Stelmach) but served variously as the minister of finance and Alberta’s energy minister in the PC government before losing his seat in 2012. In concluding chapters Morton gleefully tells readers that “reforms I had written about and campaigned for, but did not achieve, are now being implemented” under the current United Conservative Party government. He calls the path to these conservative ideas becoming Alberta government policy a “Long March.”

As a memoir from an influential insider within the conservative movement that has tilted ever more rightward over the last 40+ years, this could have been an insightful book. But it’s not. Throughout Strong and Free Morton remains behind his ideological wall, banging away at the usual targets. We know how many votes he earned to become a “senator-in-waiting,” but he barely mentions his personal motivations, the forces that shaped his character, or even his family.

The book is nearly devoid of introspection. Mainly we learn that Ted likes to win. In one scene, Ted the family values politician and self-described “sportsman” stands over the game he’s killed and offers a chilling grace: “Let us prey.”

This is a man so conservative that he advocated using the Charter’s notwithstanding clause to keep gay rights out of the Alberta Human Rights Act. He sponsored a private member’s bill to shield clergy from officiating same sex marriages—something that was never even a legitimate concern. What does any of this say about Morton’s own inner currents All we get in this book is a replay of the Calgary School’s greatest hits. But we never learn why Morton, the American from Wyoming who chose Canada, thinks our institutions should look more like the United States.

Morton claims the infamous “firewall letter” as his legacy because Danielle Smith loyally wields the old weapons. But he has also argued in another recent volume that the issues near and dear to the heart of the prairie right are no closer to being addressed today than they were 40 years ago. So which is it Is firebrand conservatism on the verge of victory, or is it all for naught Extremism did indeed move from the margins to the mainstream. But I maintain the goal was never to convince the rest of the country to amend the constitution and create an elected senate. By the early 1990s it would have been clear to Morton the political scientist that major amendment was impossible. For Ted the emerging politician, however, failure and resentment were rocket fuel for a political career that fed on grievance and resentment.

Sixteen years ago, in March 2008, this magazine published a revealing portrait. Asked about the apparent contradictions in the Morton facade, Tom Flanagan helpfully suggested that his friend was playing a character in the “dramatic production… that we call politics.”

That’s about the size of it. The populist trifecta of God, guns and gays did the trick for awhile. But when Morton’s lust for the big chair conflicted with his Lone Ranger mask, he dropped the act and sided with power. If there’s more to the story, Morton won’t say.

Marc D. Froese is professor of political science and director of the International Studies Program at Burman University.

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by Kit Dobson
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2024/$34.99/232 pp.

Kit Dobson is a writer of many talents. Besides the literary scholarship you’d expect from a University of Calgary English professor, he’s the author of two remarkable non-fiction books, Malled (2017) and Field Notes on Listening (2022), both of which deal, in very different ways, with how we experience place, home and continuity. His first novel, We Are Already Ghosts, shares that concern, but approaches it from that oldest of human activities—storytelling.

The action of the book occurs among the members of an extended upper-middle-class family as they spend a series of summers at their cabin in central Alberta. Imagine the various divisions that naturally occur in such a group—the older generation and the younger one, the separate nuclear families that make up the larger group, men and women, blood relatives and the relatives by marriage. At this point you may be thinking of Chekhov, or perhaps of On Golden Pond. But where stage plays by their nature deal with the relationships between characters, Dobson is just as interested in the interior lives of his characters—most of what happens in the book happens inside the head of one character or another.

So what do these relatively settled, relatively privileged people think, in between their family dinners, their games of cribbage, their days on the lake and their trips to the county dump This sort of thing: “He imagined Clare’s disappointment in him, in his inability to inhabit joy. Still, he was brave enough. For all of his faults, he was constant: he was as loyal as could be.” There’s something extraordinarily calming in the constant flow of self-criticism, self-justification and comparison of the past to the present and of oneself to others that Dobson presents us with. For better or worse, these are the contents of our own minds most of the time. How gratifying it is to think how reasonable they are, how inescapable, and how little they change anything.

In the world Dobson creates, what does change comes in two forms. The first, and the most important, is the inevitable—children grow up, old people retire and even older people die. These inevitabilities are matched by the daily inevitable fluctuations of lake life—the changing weather, the changing meals, the beginnings and the ends of the two-week vacations. All of these remind the characters and us of the inevitabilities that have already happened, and of the ones to come.

And then there are the surprises—the tragic events that happen offstage, and which force the characters and us to assimilate them into the genteel routine to which we have all become accustomed. In We Are Already Ghosts, Dobson gives us life just as it is.

Alex Rettie is a long-time reviewer for Alberta Views.

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by Cristalle Smith
University of Calgary Press
2024/$26.99/114 pp.

How do poetry and lyric language sort trauma into meaningful pieces of discourse?” This question in Cristalle Smith’s “Lyric Lab Report,” from her searing debut Invisible Lives, could serve as the crux of this entire collection. As could the admission that she is “a scientist, scholar, artist, and mother. I am all things at once. My poetry is all things at once. It is only though the layering of constituent parts that resonance is achieved.”

My caveats on the book are few—mainly that the text-style exchanges between identities such as Submissiveattack and Flakjacketblitz feel out of place and also, strangely, dated, and that at times an excess of details can bog down in prosaic listing. But overall Invisible Lives is a brave and startling assemblage of admissions of abuse, neglect, recklessness and rejuvenation.

Beginning a book with the widely spaced lines “In 2012 my ex-husband tried to choke me to death while I was sleeping./ I was 23 years old,” takes the reader powerfully in from the get-go without apology, and the text rarely relents. Smith is highly adept at the vivid descriptor and her sensory evocations of childhood’s abject poverty are brutal: “Cockroaches scurried over my face…. I slept on mouldy green carpets with my little sister. My mother’s belly grew round with pregnancy.” The piece “Ladybug, ladybug” is a creepy triumph of staccato revelations that make even an act of nature seem unforgiveable: “I hunt aphids to bring to my carnivorous beetles in a margarine tub. I close the lid. They eat them up.”

Akin to the work of Beth Goobie, Elizabeth Bachinsky or even Frank O’Hara, Smith can sketch a scene’s mood fast, scarring the reader with place, sexuality, the relentlessly unheimlich quotidian such as the sonorous “ruffles filled with noodles” or “the vellus hair.” There are pages crammed with text and others that liftoff with white space to give absorptive balance. Chunky prose paragraphs alternate with hewn triplet lyrics. Sometimes the book feels like a violent disgorging; other moments it’s a scraping of the surfaces of what was.

Experimental, innovative and stark, Invisible Lives is an unforgettable first book—even when it has instances of over-the-top rattling off—and the concluding acts of homage to those who shaped her central pieces such as “Fragments of Ficus” deepened the contexts of these compositions. The linkages between abuse, addiction, mental illness, poverty and neglect, but also science and art and mentors and mothering are key to Smith’s book as she fleshes out a world of painful puzzle pieces that eventually merge into a kind of home found in living on within acts of poetry: “the vehicle that will drive us there.”

Catherine Owen is the author of Moving to Delilah.

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by Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation
with Sabina Trimble and Peter Fortna
University of Calgary Press
2024/$34.99/352 pp.

Canada has a tragic and shameful history of evicting Indigenous Peoples from their homelands when national parks were carved out of their territory. Wood Buffalo National Park (WBNP) is the largest such park in Canada, encompassing nearly 45,000 km². Created in 1922, it led to the expulsion and exclusion of Dënesųłıné (Dene) Peoples from their land. Remembering Our Relations centres on the oral histories of Dënesųłıné Elders, taking their experiences and knowledge seriously, and exposing the traumatic intergenerational harm of WBNP and how the creation, expansion and management of the park violated their Treaty 8 rights to their territories. The book demonstrates that Elders retain deep and detailed knowledge and interpretations of events, experiences and promises that were never included in or were erased from the documentary record. It also demonstrates their strength and resilience.

Drawing on dozens of interviews completed over several decades, the book is not just a community “engaged” history, it is a community–directed history. Willow Springs Strategic Solutions historians Peter Fortna and Sabina Trimble worked with the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) and that community planned and conceived the project, developed the research plan and worked on the manuscript at every stage.

WBNP spans the boundaries of Alberta and the Northwest Territories and contains vast forests, wetlands, grasslands, salt plains and boreal plains. It houses the Peace–Athabasca Delta, the world’s largest inland boreal delta and second-largest freshwater delta. It is home to multiple species of waterbirds, fish and mammals. This abundant area was the traditional territory of at least 11 Dene, Métis and Cree communities. The ACFN is one of these, and their oral history and the archaeological record indicate they thrived for thousands of years here—until the park was founded.

The federal objective for the park was to preserve the last remaining wood bison herd. In 1926 over 6,500 plains buffalo were brought in and the park expanded, absorbing land the ACFN had lived on and harvested from for generations. Initially the Treaty 8 Peoples were permitted to live and harvest in the park, but after the expansion a permitting system regulated access and harvesting laws were introduced. Dene access to the park was eroded and restricted and people were evicted from their homes. In some cases wardens burned their cabins. People faced severe hardship and even starvation. Over decades, park officials repeatedly ignored attempts by the Dene to assert their rights. Racist rhetoric about Indigenous harvesters was deployed to justify their exclusion and eviction. But contrary to settler stereotypes, as the book demonstrates, responsible stewardship practices were at the heart of Dene legal systems and social worlds.

Important features of the book include a review of the scholarship on national parks that displaced, excluded and impoverished Indigenous Peoples in Canada. This is situated within a global pattern of settler colonial work to advance control over Indigenous land and resources. Yet we learn that the creation of WBNP is distinct in several ways, as here settler hunting and tourism were not central priorities, and some Indigenous harvesting was allowed within park boundaries. There is a useful appendix on building a community-directed work of oral history, and digital copies of archival documents can be viewed by scanning the QR codes. Links to the voices of the Elders themselves, some in Dene, are also provided through QR codes. Excellent maps and stunning photographs both historic and recent are included, though I wished some were in colour. Overall, this is an important book that Albertans should read and reflect on.

Sarah Carter is a professor in the department of history, classics and religion at the University of Alberta.

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by Judith Pond
UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PRESS
2024/$38.99/384 pp.

Calgary writer Judith Pond’s debut novel, The Signs of No, does for its middle-aged characters what necessity is said to do for invention: it engenders or “mothers” interesting possibilities for characters in the throes of mid-life (an amorphous span from the late 30s to mid-50s). Challenging conventional gender roles in a culture that aggressively promotes individuality even as it markets and reinforces conformity, the novel ambitiously tracks multiple characters who, for the most part, are convincingly ventriloquized as distinct voices.

In her 50s, Rose is fiercely independent: She is the single mother of a similarly loner daughter, a wilful kid immersed in medieval history who resists all authority: “I can’t, I won’t, you can’t make me. The signs of No.” A troubled teen, she runs away from home and mails a cryptic postcard to her mother praising the idealism and communalism of her newfound community. “We have a whole system,” she writes. “Everybody works together… we haven’t sold out.” Grieving this loss, Rose slides into an affair with twice-divorced Morrison, whose mid-life CV covers being a womb-twin (I had to Google it), as well as an empty-nest father, counsellor for angry men, marathon runner, master gardener and winemaker. He nurtures Rose in a “motherly” way—feeding her, looking after her when she is ill. Abbey, Morrison’s latest ex, slides into an affair with Parker, a man-boy bike courier who collects toenails and calls it art. Parker is a lackadaisical father to Iris, a spirited daughter who finds a bonus mother in Abbey and a bonus father in Dave, Iris’s mother’s boyfriend—a 40-something nice guy who missed out on fathering his own kids. You get the picture. Pond artfully connects these characters who variously experience the shifting currents of each other’s psychic weather and life choices.

For me, the novel falters in its insistent quotidian accounts of appetizers and meals eaten, wine drunk, bills argued over. Some characters seem forced, as with Abbey’s Newfie-isms and Morrison’s guiltily surreal conversations with his ghostly womb twin. The novel’s title, which signals no as half of a binary, implicitly predicts it will get to yes. Still, when the prose lifted, which it often did, Pond’s wit shines and her lyric voice sings. Her description of Rose as a new mother after 40 “caught in the crosshairs of rampaging hormones and impending divorce,” with no extended family support and her best friend miles away, is beautiful and heart-wrenching. I was reminded of writer Ben Lerner who, like Pond, published a novel after three collections of poetry (Pond has published four). “Poets haven’t gotten the news that the novel is dead,” Lerner said in a Guardian interview. This novel is very much alive.

Jannie Edwards is a poet, teacher and editor in Edmonton.

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