Jessy Lee Saas PhD Candidate
Supervisor: Dr. Erika DyckCanadian prairie history is interwoven with heroic narratives of ordinary men. Whether the voyageur, the homesteader, the farmer, or the soldier, these white, Christian protagonists become – much like the “cowboy,” the “outlaw,” and the “pioneer” in the American west – a form of national identity in Canada. However, unlike in American stories where the west is often characterized as “wild,” in Canadian stories the west is “mild.” My doctoral research explains how narratives about the “mild west” and the “heroic” characters that populate these stories helped to create Canada’s “peaceful frontier” in the prairie region. These popular understandings of prairie history have provided Canada with powerful, durable, but above all problematic, identity-shaping narratives. My work challenges these settler nation-building identities and narratives found within private memory and public spaces by repositioning them within the context of settler colonialism and Indigenous displacement.
Research Area(s)
- Canadian History
- Prairie History
- Indigenous Histories
- Decolonization
Dissertation Title:
Publications:
“Becoming a Ghost Story,” Folklore 45, no. 4 (Fall 2024). (non-peer reviewed)
“Fence-Line Legacies: The Story of Maria Latham,” Folklore 44, no. 1 (Winter 2022). (non-peer reviewed)
"The 'Queen of Lady Farmers' and Married Women as Landowners on the Canadian Prairies.” Prairie History, no. 9 (Fall 2022): 5-17.
Conference Presentations:
Panelist for “Land-Based Histories: Reappraising Ownership of the Prairies,” Western Canadian History Conference. September 2024. Presentation title: “‘They Were Often in Our Kitchen’: Indigenous Presence in Saskatchewan Settler Family Memoires, 1880-1910”
Public Lecture. “Revisiting Ukrainian Settler Stories in the Context of Colonialism” at Ukrainian Museum of Canada, 13 February 2024.
Panelist for “Identity and Movement in Canadian History,” New Frontiers Conference, York University. March 2022. Presented on “Queen of Lady Farmers”
Other:
Coordinator for the Co-Lab for Community Engaged Research (2022-present).
Contributor. Wrote and researched three historical characters (Maria Latham, Arthur LeMesuier, and Nick Kowalyk) for Homesteaders board game created by Dr. Benjamin Hoy.
Project Lead for "Our History is Our Foundation" (2022-2023), an oral history research project in partnership with Ilarion Residence Retirement Home.