Lake of the Prairies

A Story of Belonging

POWERFUL, FUNNY, MOVING AND PERSONAL, LAKE OF THE PRAIRIES IS A RICHLY LAYERED EXPLORATION OF THE UNIVERSAL CHILDHOOD QUESTION: WHERE DO I COME FROM?

Shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, 2004

Chosen as a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year, 2002

Winner of the Drainie-Taylor Biography Prize, 2003

by Warren Cariou

Just over the Montana border is Eastend, Saskatchewan, home of Wallace Stegner. Warren Cariou's story begins 400 miles north of there, in a town located in a part of Saskatchewan that does not exist in popular imagination: a treed province of rocks, water, and muskeg. Removed from prairie traditions, Meadow Lake is enclosed in the ethos of the north, where there is magic in a story and fiction is worth much more than fact.

Grounded in the fertile soil of Meadow Lake are two historical traditions — Native and settler. Cariou's maternal grandparents were European immigrants. Their stories lived alongside Native legends in Cariou's boyhood imagination and as he dug for arrowheads, spear points, and stone hammers, he stumbled upon evidence of centuries of Cree setlement in the area. But the tragic history of how these traditions came to share the same home would remain hidden from Cariou until much later. In the schoolyard and on the street corners he witnessed the discrimination, distrust, anger, and fear directed at the town's Cree and Metis populations — prejudices he absorbed as his own.

As an adult Cariou has been forced to confront the politics of race in Meadow Lake on a number of occasions — some horrific, others surprising. He learned that Clayton Matchee, a rambunctious Native boy with whom he had gone to school, had been taught to hate so profoundly that he could be involved in a torture and murder that would shock the world. And then Cariou discovered secrets that his family had kept hidden for generations, secrets that would alter forever his sense of identity and belonging in Meadow Lake.

PRAISE FOR LAKE OF THE PRAIRIES

“In Lake of the Prairies: A Story of Belonging, Warren Cariou tells a suspenseful drama of family secrets, exile and unexpected origins. As he awakens to his Métis roots and reveals how myth, place and community prejudice are tragically interconnected, Cariou writes with a strong and poetic vision to show how stories may separate or bring people together.”  — JURY CITATION, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction, 2004

“With the publication of Lake of the Prairies, Meadow Lake is now officially on the Canadian literary map, and so is Warren Cariou.”  — THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“Lake of the Prairies is a lovely book. Dive in and enjoy.”  — THE CALGARY HERALD

“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

“This memoir is beautifully crafted, artful in its construction, and as with all good memoir 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

Praise for Warren Cariou's The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs

“Merciless black humour surges in waves through the ingenious plotting of [The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs]’s opening novella. The second novella, Lazarus ... remains an adroit probing of faith and responsibility.”  — THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“Cariou’s debut [The Exalted Company of Roadside Martyrs] is more than merely promising; it heralds the arrival in Canadian fiction of a fine, new storyteller.”  — NATIONAL POST

(Photo: Robert Tinker)

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320 pages hardcover
Finished books available

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Canada: Doubleday

ABOUT WARREN CARIOU

Warren Cariou is the proud son of a gifted Métis storyteller, Ray Cariou, whose brilliant and hilarious tellings continue to inspire him long after his passing. As a scholar, Warren has devoted much of his career to studying and celebrating the oral stories of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island, especially the Métis and Cree traditions. He was the founding director of the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture at the University of Manitoba, which he led for twelve years, and he remains active in the Centre’s work. He has collaborated with several Indigenous storytellers on film projects, children’s books, scholarly studies and community activism. He has also published works of fiction and memoir, and has edited a number of books by prominent Indigenous writers. He recently completed a ten-year term as Canada Research Chair in Narrative, Community and Indigenous Cultures at the University of Manitoba, and remains a professor there in the Department of English, Theatre, Film & Media. He is a Red River Métis citizen and also has roots in Saskatchewan’s Métis community through the Beaulieu dit Sinclair and Hamelin families.