We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays

The ten essays written by Epp (political studies, U. of Alberta, Canada) and collected here consist of political, personal, and poetical reflections of life in the North American (primarily Canadian) Prairie West. If the title indicates the overarching theme, it can be said to be the common histories, identities built on land and kinship, and societal marginalization shared by indigenous peoples and by the descendants of farmer-settlers, commonalities that suggest that the agrarian descendants of the settlers and the Indians are "all treaty people." Other topics include the radical-democratic politics of the prairie farm movements, reflections on the shaping of his own family's prairie identity, divergent trajectories of urban and rural Alberta, and the role of the university professor in the rural prairie West. Distributed in the US by Michigan State U. Press. Annotation c2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)