Often remembered for its humanitarian platform and its pioneering social programs, Saskatchewan’s Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) wrought a much less scrutinized legacy in the northern regions of the province during the twenty years it governed. Until the 1940s churches, fur traders, and other wealthy outsiders held uncontested control over Saskatchewan’s northern region. Following its rise to power in 1944, the CCF undertook aggressive efforts to unseat these traditional powers and to install a new socialist economy and society in largely Aboriginal northern communities. The next two decades brought major changes to the region as well-meaning government planners grossly misjudged the challenges that confronted the north and failed to implement programs that would meet northern needs. As the CCF’s efforts to modernize and assimilate northern people met with frustration, it was the northern people themselves that inevitably suffered from the fallout of this failure. In an elegantly written history that documents the colonial relationship between the CCF and the Saskatchewan north, David M. Quiring draws on extensive archival research and oral history to offer a fresh look at the CCF era. This examination will find a welcome audience among historians of the north, Aboriginal scholars, and general readers.

From 1919 to 1970, Olaf Hanson was a trapper, trader, prospector, game guardian, fisherman, and road blasting expert in northeastern Saskatchewan. He told his life story to popular Saskatchewan author A. L. Karras, whose manuscript, written in the 1980s, only came to light after his death in 1999. In an uncompromising, straightforward style, Karras and Hanson reveal the geography, wildlife, and natural history of the region as well as the business and social interactions between people. The book offers a look at the vanished subsistence and commercial economy of the boreal forest, wound around a fascinating personal story of courage and physical stamina.

Privileging Indigenous voices and experiences, Intimate Integration documents the rise and fall of North American transracial adoption projects, including the Adopt Indian and M?tis Project and the Indian Adoption Project. The author argues that the integration of adopted Indian and M?tis children mirrored the new direction in post-war Indian policy and welfare services. She illustrates how the removal of Indigenous children from Indigenous families and communities took on increasing political and social urgency, contributing to what we now call the "Sixties Scoop." Intimate Integration utilizes an Indigenous gender analysis to identify the gendered operation of the federal Indian Act and its contribution to Indigenous child removal, over-representation in provincial child welfare systems, and transracial adoption. Specifically, women and children's involuntary enfranchisement through marriage, as laid out in the Indian Act, undermined Indigenous gender and kinship relationships. Making profound contributions to the history of settler-colonialism in Canada, Intimate Integration sheds light on the complex reasons behind persistent social inequalities in child welfare.

From New Peoples to New Nations is a broad historical account of the emergence of the Metis as distinct peoples in North America over the last three hundred years. Examining the cultural, economic, and political strategies through which communities define their boundaries, Gerhard J. Ens and Joe Sawchuk trace the invention and reinvention of Metis identity from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Their work updates, rethinks, and integrates the many disparate aspects of Metis historiography, providing the first comprehensive narrative of Metis identity in more than fifty years. Based on extensive archival materials, interviews, oral histories, ethnographic research, and first-hand working knowledge of Metis political organizations, From New Peoples to New Nations addresses the long and complex history of Metis identity from the Battle of Seven Oaks to today’s legal and political debates.

Saskatchewan is the anchor and epitome of the ‘prairie’ provinces, even though half of the province is covered by boreal forest. The Canadian penchant for dividing this vast country into easily-understood ‘regions’ has reduced the Saskatchewan identity to its southern prairie denominator and has distorted cultural and historical interpretations to favor the prairie south. Forest Prairie Edge is a deep-time investigation of the edge land, or ecotone, between the open prairies and boreal forest region of Saskatchewan. Ecotones are transitions from one landscape to another, where social, economic, and cultural practices of different landscapes are blended. Using place history and edge theory, Massie considers the role and importance of the edge ecotone in building a diverse social and economic past that contradicts traditional “prairie” narratives around settlement, economic development, and culture. She offers a refreshing new perspective that overturns long-held assumptions of the prairies and the Canadian west.

Walking in Indian Moccasins is the first work to offer a different view of the Tommy Douglas provincial government in Sakatchewan: their policies, their applications, and their shortcomings. Much more than that, however, it is a careful account of the development of Indian and Metis people in Saskatchewan in the post-war period. The goal of the CCF was to 'walk in Indian moccasins,' promising a degree of empathy with Native society in bringing about reforms. In reality, this aim was not always honoured in practice and essentially meant integration for the Indians of the province and total assimilation for the Metis.

Encounters with wild animals are among the most significant relationships between humans and the natural world. Presenting a history of human interactions with wildlife in Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan between 1870 and 1960, Wildlife, Land, and People examines the confrontations that led to diverse consequences – from the near annihilation of some species to the extraordinary preservation of others – and skilfully finds the roots of these relationships in people’s needs for food, sport, security, economic development, personal fulfillment, and identity. Donald Wetherell shows how utilitarian practices, in which humans viewed animals either as friendly sources of profit or as threats to their economic and personal security, dominated until the 1960s. Alongside these views, however, other attitudes asserted that wild animals were part of the beauty, mystery, and order of the natural world. Wetherell outlines the ways in which this attitude gained strength after World War II, distinguished by a growing conviction that every species has ecological value. Through a century in which the natural landscape of the prairie region was radically transformed by human activity, conflicts developed over fur and game management, over Aboriginal use of the land, and over the preservation of endangered species like bison and elk. Yet the period also saw the creation of national parks, zoos, and natural history societies. Drawing on a wide array of historical sources and photographs as well as current approaches to environmental history, Wildlife, Land, and People enriches our understanding of the many-layered relationships between humans and nature.