Conor Kerr takes back space through his storytelling, bringing a distinctly Métis perspective in Prairie Edge.Supplied
Conor Kerr’s first thought was, well, maybe he could find a way to buy Saskatchewan. The idea came to him during a bird-hunting trip to the southern part of the province, where he got a chance to see what the land looked like before wheat replaced the grasslands.
“There’s these spaces – they’re very rare – but they’ve kind of been turned back into wild prairie. And it’s beautiful – you’re walking through this wild area that looks like what it looked like before agriculture devastated the land,” he explains over coffee on the southside of Edmonton. “I remember chatting with elders about how the land looked different. They were these spaces shaped by this wild interaction, and especially bison.
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“They would literally shape the landscape – and I started to wonder what it would actually look like for them to shape the landscape again,” he goes on, before detailing his brief daydream to follow in Jeff Bezos’s billionaire footsteps, but with a lot more reverse colonialism. “Like, maybe I could become a hypercapitalist and make $200-billion to buy Saskatchewan and turn it back to its natural prairie state.”
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Kerr’s second thought, fortunately, had more legs. Prairie Edge, his second novel, imagines the first steps of this reclamation project, as carried out by two slightly adrift Métis twentysomethings trying to claw back some purpose by releasing a herd of Elk Island National Park bison into Edmonton’s river valley.
Much like his his debut, 2021′s Avenue of Champions – which won the ReLit Award and was longlisted for the Giller – Prairie Edge is a story that manages to weave together heady discourse about the destruction of Indigenous culture, its resonating effects on contemporary Canadian life and the first grasps at reconciliation into boisterous, grounded characters trying to get a handle on their lives.
Its central focus is Grey, a disaffected former activist who has tired of the politics and perceived pointlessness of attempting to push the cause of Indigenous rights forward and is now holed up in her uncle’s rural trailer. She spends her time there playing crib with Ezzy, a resolutely passive parolee – busted, in an example of how incandescently Edmonton this story gets, for stealing catalytic converters – who is willing to go along with Grey when she gets the idea to start literally taking some land back.
Though never a protest organizer, Kerr deeply identifies with Grey’s wavering desire to do something, born out of his previous career as an administrator in various Indigenous education programs.
“I remember when I was still a bright-eyed intern, talking to one of the middle-aged women who had been there for years, asking her, ‘Why are all these people we’re meeting with and engaging with so disillusioned?’ And she was just, like, ‘You’ll get it.’ And it took 10 years, but yeah, I got it,” Kerr says. “You feel like you’re bashing your head into a wall constantly, with no movement from the wall.”
For as lived-in as the book’s fringe of despair feels, however, it also offers equally potent and practical bits of grace – and a sharp sense of humour. The relocated bison bring out Grey’s resoluteness, and almost everyone else’s ridiculousness. That includes the grasping careerism of her ex-boyfriend, the mushmouth response of the city’s politicians and the less-than-reconciliatory reactions of the wealthy liberals who live by the river and are suddenly confronted with a far more tangible sense of making amends.
“I did want to set it among people who consider themselves very in favour of Indigenous movements and activism – and then all of the sudden they can’t use their dog park, because there’s a bison herd in there,” Kerr explains. “They really like Indigenous rights when it’s looking at beadwork on Aboriginal Day at work, but like, anything, that’s deemed a threat whatsoever to their own entitlement or spaces – they can’t deal with that.”
If Kerr has an eye for the ridiculous edges of the thing, though, the greater metaphorical weight of parking some bison in one of Edmonton’s defining locations isn’t lost, even if the book wears it lightly: There’s a real meaning to taking up/taking back space.
Kerr does so through his storytelling, bringing a distinctly Métis perspective back to a place that, as he points out, traded its Indigenous systems for colonial ones only 150 years ago. The result may not be as obvious as Grey’s bison or his billionaire daydream, but it’s important to him, his own way to both take up and take back space.
For a long time, he says, the books by Indigenous authors that were being published were aimed at a Western audience.
“They weren’t for other Indigenous people, they were trying to show how a Western system could be beneficial for everyone, and all that bullshit,” he says, pointing to writers such as Waubgeshig Rice, Alicia Elliott, Jordan Abel and Jessica Johns as examples of contemporary writers who are pushing back against this style. (He has co-founded Yarrow, an Indigenous literature magazine, with Abel and Johns in the hopes of nurturing more Indigenous writers who can write for themselves.)
“I’m trying to reclaim a narrative and story in a way that young Métis people can see themselves reflected. I think seeing your own histories and your own experiences reflected is a beautiful thing, and that reclamation of narrative is something that goes along with reclaiming lands.”