People displaced by pasture program subject of new book by Trevor Herriot

Trevor Herriot was roaming Saskatchewan in the summer of 2015 when he found a story near the Manitoba border at the Spy Hill—Ellice community pasture he just had to write about.

There he learned about the history of people who were pushed off of the land — Michif-speaking Métis — when the Community Pastures Program was created in the 1930s. 

Herriot said that the displacement of the people from what they consider their spiritual homeland near Ste. Madeleine is a social sin.

He spoke of an old graveyard in the area where there are recent graves, signifying people still go there to bury their dead.

"An entire community of people had been removed from a piece of native prairie, this is what people locally call a sand plains, removed them to create a community pasture," Herriot said. 

Herriot said the writer side of him just had to get something written down so he penned Towards a Prairie Atonement.

"If you're removing people from the land, right away we know that something wrong has happened in our history and it's a big part of what we're learning right now about colonialism and our past," Herriot said.

"You want things to be pretty simple, pretty black and white, right, to tell the story and make people care about our grasslands," Herriot said looking at it from the perspective of an activist.

Tension and conflict

He said there were some good things, in general, about the pastures.

"As a writer, it's gold because it's complexity and it's tension and conflict."

Herriot said when people think of the Métis history, they often think of it as being back in the 19th century with Batoche and the Red River Resistance.

"All prairie people lost a way of governing land, a kind of communal land governing system that was nascent and new. They were evolving something there that we nipped in the bud," he said, adding it's something that could be useful today.

"One of the biggest tragedies is we turned that aside," Herriot said.

He said there is some chance for atonement.

"It's a social and historical sin that we all share," Herriot said.

"We're living at a great time of renaissance, I think, with our First Nations people," he said.

Herriot will be reading from the book and signing copies at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum and is open to anyone to attend. 

The event starts at 7 p.m. and will be moderated by CBC's Stefani Langenegger.