Some Reflections of My Own on Clearing the Plains

I would like to thank my colleagues for putting so much time and thought into their papers along will all of those who attended the roundtable discussion of Clearing the Plains at the 2015 meeting of the Canadian Historical Association. I have been both humbled and amazed at the response the book has received since it was published three years ago. By the time of the 2016 Congress in Calgary, there will be over 20,000 copies in print. As Ian Mosby mentioned, MP Charlie Angus wrote a song about it and the video produced in collaboration with the University of Regina Press has had almost 17,000 hits. Maori artist Brett Graham was inspired to produce the installation entitled Pioneer which was recently purchased by the National Gallery of Canada and, if things were not surreal enough, Clearing the Plains was sold at Costco. In December 2015, the French translation, La destruction des Indiens des Plaines. Maladie, famines organisées et disparition du mode de vie autochtone was launched by Les Presses de l’Université Laval. Over the past two years, I have done more than 100 presentations and interviews including at a dozen universities, public spaces, and schools, among others. Despite the harsh message my work conveys, people seem genuinely interested in hearing it. As Ian said, we all aspire to make a substantive contribution to both an academic and public understanding of the past, and I am thankful to have had the opportunity to do so. I am grateful too, because it almost did not happen. In the decades (yes, decades) it took to complete this project, so many things happened to undermine its progress that I seriously began to think it was cursed. The first hurdle I encountered was in defending a dissertation that was unabashedly a scholarly synthesis rather than a deep-dig archival study of a specialized topic. “Why make a brick when I can build a wall” I naively thought to myself. I also wanted to do something important. From my perspective, tracing the roots of the chasm between the living conditions of Indigenous people and the rest of us was the issue that was (and still is) dragging us down as a society. At my defence, a committee member did not consider a scholarly synthesis to be a dissertation and I was lucky to have made it through. For years after graduation, I continued to work on the manuscript, adding my findings from a number of research jobs in medicine, climate change, and others, to the story. In 2009, the manuscript was sent to the Aid to Scholarly Publications Program (ASPP), the final step in a process that had already taken 15 years. An anonymous reviewer concluded with the statement, “zero scholarly value, do not publish.” If Clearing the Plains had been submitted to any of the large university presses (dependent of ASPP funding), it would never have been published. Fortunately, my regional study of Indigenous health on the plains fit the publishing program of the Canadian Plains Research Centre (CPRC) at the University of Regina and it continued without ASPP support. Unfortunately CPRC was almost closed down completely in 2012. For at least six months, I had no idea if my publisher was going to survive. During those months in limbo, the manuscript underwent a major editing, with copy editor Dallas Harrison cleaving off 20 percent of the manuscript’s volume. My luck changed with the hiring of Bruce Walsh as Director of the newly-minted University of Regina Press, in early 2013. Bruce had more than 20 years of experience in both academic and commercial publishing …