Will I love Clearing the Plains?

I’m a prairie boy, son of the pioneers and all that. But I, like other prairie settlers’ descendants, grew up blissfully ignorant of our history. Daschuk’s book shatters that ignorance. It should be required reading for every child and adult in Canada, and it wouldn’t hurt Americans to read it too, as the story of colonial disaster for the Indigenous people throughout the continent is all of a kind. It is so very sad.

But ”the truth shall set you free.” We need this book as a foundation for reconciliation for past and present wrongs, to inform a new society… show more.

I have long been interested in Native American history (I even wrote my dissertation on it), but for a long time, I had a typically American ignorance of Canadian history.

I had a general sense that Canada had treated their indigenous population “better” than the United States had. This book blows that general sense to smithereens.

Once the Canadian government decided that they wanted white settlers on the plains of Canada, they undertook a deliberate campaign of isolation, starvation, and abrogation of treaty promises to clear those lands of Native people.

It is a depressing story backed up with a… show more.