Androsoff, Ashleigh2022-08-262022-08-2620222022-112022-08-26November 2https://hdl.handle.net/10388/14119At the beginning of Saskatchewan’s homesteading period, from 1880 to 1910, the Homesteading Hero Myth – a narrative that celebrates the courageous white farmer who entered an unknown landscape and faced numerous hardships, only to succeed in breaking the land and creating home – took shape. The Homesteading Hero Myth presents agricultural development of Saskatchewan land as an epic quest and casts settlers as the winsome protagonists who prevail despite the challenges they face. This same Myth downplays or ignores the roles of Indigenous peoples who are represented neither as main nor as supporting characters: when they are given a role to play at all, it is minor, on the sidelines, typecast, or silent. Yet, despite the Homesteading Hero Myth relying on the idea of the Canadian prairies being an “open” landscape ripe for the settlers’ taking, the settlers who came did not actually see the land as empty. Settlers recognized evidence that Indigenous peoples had recently occupied the territory they now claimed, and in many cases recognized Indigenous peoples as neighbours. Settler family narratives about the homesteading period provide an alternate account in which incoming settlers recognized and understood that they were arriving on Indigenous lands. Ultimately, this thesis argues that homesteader hero narratives need to be “unsettled” and reframed into the uncomfortable reality that they are really stories about imperial dispossession, suppression, and oppression of Indigenous peoples.application/pdfenCanadian prairie historyhomesteadingBritish settlersUkrainian settlersIndigenous peoplesstoriesSaskatchewanThesis2022-08-26