Manitoba is a province of Canada at the longitudinal centre of the country. It is Canada's fifth-most populous province, with a population of 1,342,153 as of 2021. Manitoba has a widely varied landscape, from arctic tundra and the Hudson Bay coastline in the north to dense boreal forest, large freshwater lakes, and prairie grassland in the central and southern regions.
Rupert's Land, or Prince Rupert's Land, was a territory in British North America which comprised the Hudson Bay drainage basin. The right to "sole trade and commerce" over Rupert's Land was granted to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), based at York Factory, effectively giving that company a commercial monopoly over the area. The territory operated for 200 years from 1670 to 1870. Its namesake was Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who was a nephew of King Charles I and the first governor of HBC. In December 1821, the HBC monopoly was extended from Rupert's Land to the Pacific coast.
The Dominion Lands Act was an 1872 Canadian law that aimed to encourage the settlement of the Canadian Prairies and to help prevent the area being claimed by the United States. The Act was closely based on the U.S. Homestead Act of 1862, setting conditions in which the western lands could be settled and their natural resources developed.
The Canadian Prairies is a region in Western Canada. It includes the Canadian portion of the Great Plains and the Prairie provinces, namely Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. These provinces are partially covered by grasslands, plains, and lowlands, mostly in the southern regions. The northernmost reaches of the Canadian Prairies are less dense in population, marked by forests and more variable topography. If the region is defined to include areas only covered by prairie land, the corresponding region is known as the Interior Plains. Physical or ecological aspects of the Canadian Prairies extend to northeastern British Columbia, but that area is not included in political use of the term.
The Métis are an Indigenous people whose historical homelands include Canada's three Prairie Provinces. They have a shared history and culture, deriving from specific mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, which became distinct through ethnogenesis by the mid-18th century, during the early years of the North American fur trade.
Sarah Klassen is a Canadian writer and retired educator living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Klassen's first volume of poetry, Journey to Yalta, was awarded the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award in 1989. Klassen is the recipient of Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry and Klassen's novel, The Wittenbergs, was awarded the Margaret McWilliams Award for popular history.
Cyril Edel Leonoff was a Canadian geotechnical engineer, historian, and author. He was the founding president of the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia.
The Manitoba Day Award is an award presented yearly, since 2007, by the Association for Manitoba Archives which recognizes those users of archives who have completed an original work of excellence that enhances the archival community and contributes to the understanding and celebration of Manitoba history. These works can be fiction or non-fiction and can be in a variety of media, including audio and film. The deadline for nomination is normally March of each year with the award being granted in May.
William Andrew "Bill" Waiser is a Canadian historian and author specializing in western and northern Canadian history.
The following is a bibliography of Saskatchewan history.
Andrew Suknaski was a Canadian poet and visual artist.
Violet Clara McNaughton was a Canadian journalist and agrarian feminist notable for co-establishing The Western Producer and contributing to its "Mainly for Women" pages from 1925 until her retirement in 1950. A settler and farmer of Harris, Saskatchewan, she was an active member of the Women's Section of the Canadian Council of Agriculture as well as the first president of the Women Grain Growers (WGG), a branch of the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association (SGGA). McNaughton is considered the leader of women's suffrage in Saskatchewan and is recognized as the most influential Canadian farm woman of the 20th century. McNaughton was a known pacifist and supporter of women's suffrage and anti-war movements in Canada.
In the 16th century Samuel de Champlain and Gabriel Sagard recorded that the Iroquois and Huron cultivated the soil for maize or "Indian corn". Maize, beans (phaseolus), squash (Cucurbita) and the sunflower were grown throughout agricultural lands in North America by the 16th century. As early as 2300 BC evidence of squash was introduced to the northeastern woodlands region. Archaeological findings from 500 AD have shown corn cultivation in southern Ontario.
Georgina Binnie-Clark was a British farmer, lecturer and author, who became an ardent supporter of female farmers in prairie Canada.
Sarah Alexandra Carter is a Canadian historian. She is Professor and the Henry Marshall Tory Chair at the University of Alberta in both the Department of History and Classics and the Faculty of Native Studies with noted specialties in Indigenous and women's history.
Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life is a 2013 book by Canadian scholar James Daschuk. The book takes an epidemiological approach and documents the historical roots of modern health disparities between Canadians and Indigenous peoples living in what is now Canada. In doing so, Daschuk highlights in particular the role of Canadian policy designed to displace Indigenous populations from their traditional territories to make way for the settlement of the Prairies, including policies that amounted to forced starvation. The book implicates numerous government officials, including John A. Macdonald, Canada's first Prime Minister, in advocating for and designing such policies. Daschuk thus builds on the work of scholars such as Sarah Carter who have highlighted the shortcomings of Canadian Indigenous policies in the settlement period, along with scholarship on the social determinants of health. In an article about his research, Daschuk argued that these types of policies were part of a process of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Wet Prairie: People, Land, and Water in Agricultural Manitoba is a 2011 book by Canadian historian Shannon Stunden Bower. The book examines the history of settlement and farming in the unique landscape of southern Manitoba, notable for its poor drainage and thus high levels of moisture that contrast with the aridity of much of the Great Plains. Stunden Bower uses this unique context to focus on the development of liberalism on the Prairies, from the late nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, highlighting tensions between private property and state intervention and between agricultural development and wetland conservation. The book uses the term "colloquial liberalisms" to describe how variable landscapes shaped local interpretations of liberalism, highlighting the ways in which ideologies interact with the environment. In this case, drainage needs and policy created "differing understandings of the appropriate interplay of individual land rights with government tax or environmental policies." Wet Prairie ultimately demonstrates "that Canada’s political history cannot fully be understood without paying attention to the environment."
Serpent River Resurgence: Confronting Uranium Mining at Elliot Lake is a 2022 book by Lianne C. Leddy, Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University. The book documents the environmental history of uranium mining at Elliot Lake, Ontario, on Serpent River First Nation, including the advocacy of the Serpent River Anishinaabe to raise awareness about mining impacts on the community. Leddy grew up in Elliot Lake and is a member of Serpent River First Nation.
Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930-1985 is a 2018 book by Valerie Korinek, professor of history at the University of Saskatchewan. The book documents the history of queer people and of gay and lesbian activism on the Canadian Prairies, focusing mainly on the region's five main urban centres of Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Edmonton, and Calgary.
