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All this has happened here before. The struggle to make and maintain a sense of place has been at the heart of prairie landscape-making since the whole region was (wrongfully) deemed ‘empty’. Grasslands National Park lies deep inside Palliser’s Triangle – a vast wedge of prairie from the Rocky Mountains eastward along the 49th parallel to southwestern Manitoba. In essence, it’s the land that Palliser bypassed in search of more favourable conditions, establishing a void in our historic consciousness. 1 He warned of an empty and barren desert, useless and unfit for settlement. 2 But only one idea rang in the ears of those pressing west. It was empty. What followed, in the name of place-making, erased deeply rooted cultures, eradicated entire species and remade one of the largest ecologies on earth. An elaborate spatial and political toolkit to carve up and harness empty space was unleashed on the prairie. The transformation unfolded from something seemingly benign: a post. From east to west, the Dominion Land Survey painfully marked out the prairie in posts – each driven into the ground and left there like a magnet to draw in motion and change. Every two posts drew a line to be staked out with fences and trees, a shoreline where the prairie’s ongoing motion would lap up against a relentless grid. And every four posts made a square – an island to be claimed, absorbed, abandoned, re-made. As an act, to survey is to look closely at something, examine it and understand it. But as a thing, the survey is a rigid and unforgiving geometry laid out over land that will never conform. The survey looks at nothing but itself – blind to the underlying forces that define the place. Over time, its incompatibility with the grassland revealed itself.

W e came to the park to get lost – I wanted so badly to be the people in the poster, our tent pitched at the centre of all that space, nothing around us but sky and grass. I’d been daydreaming of this place where I could pick a point on the horizon and walk, aimlessly, into open space. I wanted the thrill of discovering my own sense of place. Among others, I hoped to find it in the park. When Grasslands National Park opened in 2001, it set out to return its visitors to the experience of discovery, as unprescribed and unpolluted as possible. They wanted the public, both local and far-removed, to learn to see the grasslands as a place in itself, rich with complexities to be explored. But restoring this kind of emptiness is no small feat. One of the park’s leading staff members explained it like this: “It’s as if you built a building, something so bewildering people didn’t know how to access it. They couldn’t find the entrance. They think, it’s not for me.” In that soft-spoken candour I was met with throughout Saskatchewan, she admitted that even she’d struggled with the place. It seems there is some primal human skill we have forgotten — to its guests, the park was empty, and we felt out of place. As a result, park management was implementing a grab bag of interventions, including signage, an expansive network of paths and a new fully-serviced campground. This saddens me – after the landscape is framed, its uses and meaning set in place, there won’t be anywhere left to get lost.

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Lindsey Nette

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