Unsettled : a reckoning on the Great Plains
2022
Book
"A memoir that reckons with the high costs of European settlement and Indigenous dispossession on the Great Plains. A surprise rodeo leaves a buffalo bull dead and a cowboy gored to death. Seeing the death of the one man who was ever kind to him, and believing it was his fault, Dawn Morgan's father goes on a bender and ends up dead. His sudden death and the mystery around it, combined with the blundering way she learns of it, forces Morgan to reflect not only on the events of the bloodied corral, but also the buffalo herds decimated and Indigenous Peoples displaced to make way for settlement in what was becoming ranching country in the prairies. Unsettled is a deeply moving work of literary non-fiction, a probing memoir examining family tragedy in relation to stories--both fact and fiction--of settlers and Indigenous Peoples on the Great Plains. Morgan shares the internal struggle between resistance and allegiance to the settler-descendent stories she grew up with, while paying respects to her father and documenting the censorship she faced from her mother, loyal still to the pioneer myth of the early twentieth century. It is only when both parents are gone that Morgan is liberated to write a story of reckoning on the Great Plains"-- Provided by publisher.
Item Details
ISBN:
- 9780889778573
- 0889778574
Description: xvi, 253 pages : illustrations, map ; 21 cm
Notes:
- Canadiana.
- Includes bibliographical references.
Control Number: 3108522
Publisher: Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada : University of Regina Press, [2022]Subjects:
- Autobiographies.
- Frontier and pioneer life -- Great Plains.
- Great Plains -- Ethnic relations -- History.
- Great Plains -- Race relations -- History.
- Great Plains -- Social conditions -- 20th century.
- Indigenous peoples -- Great Plains -- History -- 20th century.
- Morgan, Dawn, 1957-
- Morgan, Dawn, 1957- -- Family.
Genre: