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Winner of the 2002 Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize.
Grounded in the fertile soil of Meadow Lake are two historical traditions: Native and settler. Warren Cariou's maternal grandparents were European immigrants who cleared acres of dense forest and turned it into pasture. This land also held traces of centuries of Cree settlement arrowheads, spear points and stone hammers, which Cariou stumbled upon as a boy. In the schoolyard and on the street corners Warren witnessed the discrimination, anger and fear directed at the town's Cree and Metis populations, prejudices he absorbed as his own. As an adult, Warren Cariou was forced to confront the politics of race in Meadow Lake. He then discovered family secrets kept hidden for generations, secrets that would alter forever his sense of identity and belonging in Meadow Lake. Short-listed for the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award.
About this Author
Warren Cariou was born in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan into a family of Métis and European heritage. His first books, The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs: Two Novellas and Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging have won and been nominated for numerous awards, including the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction. He is the editor and co-editor of several books of Indigenous literature. He has also co-directed and co-producted two films: Overburden and Land of Oil and Water. Warren Cariou is a professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media at the University of Manitoba. He lives in Winnipeg.
Reviews
"Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, and the Cariou family are fortunate indeed to have produced so gifted a young writer as Warren Cariou. In Lake of the Prairies, his seach into the delights and difficulties of belonging, Cariou has written a timeless and universal tale, full of charm, humour, intelligence and, above all, love for the people and place of his childhood. With remarkable skill he has woven together a talent for storytelling, keen descriptions of nature, a personal memoir and a social history of Western Canada. Most importantly, he exposes the subtleties and cruelties of racial tension between the European settlers and Native peoples of Canada, not through any dry analysis but through a series of startling revelations."
--Michael Bliss, Ron Graham and Heather Robertson of The Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize jury
"Lake of the Prairies is a fine addition to our literature of exile and belonging. This book arrives as a welcome balm for the wounds we experience as a nation that continues to abandon its rural routes (and roots). Cariou's narrative, with its abundant humour, humanity, and humility, quickens the old and poignant truths that have always attended our wanderings away from home and back again."
--Trevor Herriot, author of River in a Dry Land
"Warren Cariou is humorous while always being thoughtful, and his descriptive power is exceptional. He is one of the very best young writers of our time."
--Alistair MacLeod
"Cariou's writing achieves everything great art should aim to do. It finds something basic and universal in all of us, the beautiful and the profane, and gracefully delivers us to a more enlightened understanding of the relationships that bless and haunt us all."
--Dennis Bock, author of The Ash Garden
"This memoir is beautifully crafted, artful in its construction, and as with all good memoirs is, in the end, truly penetrating in its analysis-by-hindsight of what can happen to those less privileged than Cariou himself was, in such a backwater as Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan. His evocation of this historic area of forests, marshes, muskeg and lakes reveals a world we otherwise would not have been fortunate enough to know."
--Sharon Butala, author of The Perfection of the Morning
"Meadow Lake is now officially on the Canadian literary map, and so is Warren Cariou."
--The Globe and Mail
"It is a superb book, and an honest one too. It is also a gentle book, a humane work that is enlightened and powered by the kind of understanding which can benefit us all."
--Edmonton Journal
"Cariou is wise beyond his years . . . with his lyrical voice, love of nature and sensitivity to place . . . a lovely book . . . dive in and enjoy."
--Calgary Herald
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