A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape

Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book of the Year Bestselling author Candace Savage embarks on a profound and dramatic journey through the eloquent landscape of the northern Great Plains to reveal the haunting untold history of the land. When Candace Savage and her partner buy a house in the romantic little town of Eastend, Saskatchewan, she has no idea what awaits her. From their home on the edge of Eastend, they look out over the tawny sweep of the Frenchman River valley, watch swallows skim the water and deer graze at dusk, and wander among dinosaur bones. The prairie, which once seemed empty, begins to reveal itself as a living archive of history and fragile life. As Savage explores further, she uncovers a darker reality. Archaeological shards, old police forts, and Métis wintering sites lead her into the buried history of the northern plains: the deliberate slaughter of the buffalo, the Cypress Hills Massacre, whiskey forts and starvation camps, the forced herding of Indigenous Peoples onto reserves. Listening to Blackfoot and Assiniboine elders, Métis descendants, and the Nekaneet people who still claim the hills as home, she is compelled to confront the violence that made her own homesteading ancestry possible—and to rethink everything she thought she knew about “pioneer” courage and prairie progress. Beautifully written, impeccably researched, and imbued with Savage’s passion for this place, A Geography of Blood braids memoir, natural history, and Indigenous testimony. Savage’s unforgettable portrait of the Cypress Hills and the surrounding plains offers both a shocking retelling of western Canadian history and an invitation to see the prairies with new eyes.