Thinking environmentally on the oil-rich prairies, an interview with Associate Professor Jenny Kerber

Oct. 9, 2024

Interview and story by Eric Story, PhD (Laurier Centre for the Study of Canada).

Dr. Jenny Kerber (English and Film Studies) was born and raised on the plains of the Saskatchewan prairies. Amidst her rural upbringing, Dr. Kerber could see prairie agriculture undergoing enormous technological change on her own family’s farm. Economies of scale began to dominate the rural landscape, forcing farmers such as her father to adapt and grow their farms if they wanted to remain profitable. History, it seemed, was moving just beneath Dr. Kerber’s feet.

And so, it is no surprise that much of her research on literature and the environment has been shaped by these personal experiences. In her first book, Writing in Dust, she justifies her focus on twentieth- and twenty-first century prairie literature because they were written amidst the unprecedented “pace and extent” of environmental change in the region. These very changes were apparent to her from a young age while growing up in Rosthern, Saskatchewan.

Reimaginging the Prairies

When Dr. Kerber arrived at York University and began to write her dissertation in the Environmental Studies program there, she discovered that two literary narratives dominated perceptions of the prairie region. The first was an “Edenic recovery narrative” where wilderness is effectively transformed into modern civilization.

The second narrative was in many ways the opposite of the first. It saw the tide of technological progress that carried colonial notions of modern civilization to western Canada as both productive and destructive. It may have allowed for the settlement of the prairie west, but it polluted the region along the way and ultimately laid the roots for its demise.

Dr. Kerber found these dominant narratives of the Canadian prairies restrictive and ultimately counterproductive when trying to understand contemporary environmental issues in the region. In taking an ecocritical approach to a set of both well-worn and underappreciated prairie texts, her book Writing in Dust allows for an alternative vision of “sustainable dwelling on the prairies in the twenty-first century.”

An ecocritical approach, according to Kerber, “stretches our imaginations and timelines.” It can tell us new stories of beginnings and endings—even reimagine old ones—and allow us to consider timelines that previously may not have received much consideration, if any at all.

One of these underappreciated voices that Dr. Kerber incorporates into her analysis of prairie literature and the environment is Madeline Coopsammy. Coopsammy is a mid-twentieth century immigrant and poet from the West Indies, who recounts her journey from youth to adulthood and her experiences living in Winnipeg as a woman of colour in a volume entitled, Prairie Journey: In the Prison of My Skin.

In her poem, “Invisible Woman,” Coopsammy explicitly evokes the dominant historical narrative of immigration to the west when her speaker asks rhetorically: “[D]id your people homestead here? / eat the red dust of / Depression years? / Discard the ‘Skis’ and anglicise their names?”

According to Dr. Kerber, these questions illuminate the narrow temporal and ethnic dimensions of prairie immigrant identity, which Coopsammy’s “invisible woman” cannot escape. She’s a “black anomaly within a land of snow” who cannot paper over her minority status by Anglicising her name as early twentieth-century white immigrants from eastern Europe did.

Class, gender and race all have a role to play in shaping a person’s experience and perception of the prairie region. But despite the invisible woman’s different experience of the physical environment in a mid-to-late twentieth century urban setting compared to that of an early twentieth century eastern European immigrant’s in a rural one, Dr. Kerber argues that both can and should be recognized as prairie immigrant stories.

While Madeline Coopsammy speaks to the urban experience of being an immigrant and a woman of colour on the prairies, Louise Bernice Halfe, a Cree poet from Saskatchewan (and a Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate), draws on Indigenous cultures and experiences to elucidate her own understandings of the region.

In Blue Marrow, Halfe poetically gathers the bones of her ancestors and provides them with life—“marrow”— through story. As she writes, “The prairie is full of bones. The bones stand and sing and I feel the weight of them as they guide my fingers on this page.”

Dr. Kerber sees the purpose of Halfe’s bone-collecting as reconstructing cultures and experiences—particularly those of Indigenous women—that have been scattered by colonization. The act of writing gives her the strength to take back some of the power she and her female ancestors lost to their colonial oppressors.

Dr. Kerber sees Halfe’s exploration of a process of co-creation amongst humans, animals and elements as an acknowledgement of the mystery and power of the prairie as well as the human place within it.

In a powerful conclusion to her chapter on prairie identity and regionalism, Dr. Kerber writes, “I would venture to assert that writing the prairie poetically today is less about forging an explicit or ‘authentic’ connection between particular landscapes and certain modes of expression than it is about making an ethical commitment to place in a self-conscious matter.”

Simply residing on the prairies does not give one ownership over its stories. The new prairie citizenry Dr. Kerber envisions is one that “takes responsibility for acts done to place and in place and uses one’s creativity to imagine an alternative future in which varied forms of life might flourish.”

Petroliterature

Prairie literature and the environment is only the beginning of Dr. Kerber’s research journey. Some of her most recent work focuses on oil and gas—also known as petroliterature.

Much like her work on the prairie environment, her interest in oil and gas came from the rapidly changing environment she grew up observing in Saskatchewan.

Similar to the widespread transformational changes taking place within prairie agriculture, the prairie economy writ large was also undergoing momentous change throughout the latter half of the twentieth century—especially at its close as well as the early years of the twenty-first century. Non-renewable natural resource extraction effectively replaced agriculture as the leading sector of the prairie economy.

In one of her most recent publications, she explores these ideas and more in a critical essay on Fred Stenson’s 2014 novel, Who By Fire, which is structured in two temporal settings.

The first situates the story in the context of Tom Ryder and his family farm, located beside a sour gas plant in southern Alberta in the 1960s. They are subjected to repeated hydrogen sulfide exposure after the Aladdin Corporation opens a processing plant on a neighbouring plot of land. Such exposure kills much of their livestock and forces the family to repeatedly evacuate their property when they became sick.

The latter setting moves to present-day Alberta in the tar sands region where natural gas is used primarily to liquefy bitumen, and the now-grown up Bill Ryder of the Ryder family is working as an engineer for the same company (renamed “New Aladdin Corporation”) that owned the sour gas plant located beside his family home.

Dr. Kerber explores Stenson’s metaphor of corrosion, seeing it as an apt representation of western Canadian life in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Corrosion’s process of silent and gradual degradation, whose effects are not often seen until the damage is complete, is not only a constant source of frustration for natural gas extractors but also a defining characteristic of the lives of Stenson’s characters over a fifty-year period.

The corrosive nature of this story bleeds into the present-day. Tom’s son, Bill, grows up seeing the family’s frustration and gradual destruction at the hands of the sour gas plant. He eventually becomes a petroleum engineer partially out of a desire to bring about change in the industry.

But he, like his father, becomes worn down by his relationship to oil and gas. He falls into patterns of addiction, gambling and drinking away his guilt and anxiety for working in an industry that has harmed him, his family and so many others.

According to Dr. Kerber, Bill’s addictions, in many ways, show a remarkable resemblance to the fossil fuel industry itself and western Canada’s relationship to it. The boom and bust cycles of the oil economy reflect Bill’s highs and lows on the VLTs, and his abuse of alcohol serves as a “metonym for a larger social addiction to cheap energy.”

At the end of her essay, Dr. Kerber provides penetrating commentary: “Even if the system were to function perfectly, at a larger scale even seemingly non-polluting pipes cannot contain themselves: there are emissions that will still be experienced by someone, somewhere.”

“The issue in the novel and beyond is thus partly about vast differentials in economic and political power,” Dr. Kerber concludes. “But it is also an epistemic problem that stems from how different kinds of knowledge about oil are valued.”

Alternative Futures

In Dr. Kerber’s work, her guiding principle has always been to envision alternatives to the problematic and destructive status quo.

In Writing in Dust, she challenges us to sustainably reimagine origins and endings on the prairies, so that more stories and people can flourish in the prairie literary canon, and that that “bigger tent” can live sustainably with its environment.

In her recent turn towards the energy humanities, she considers the consequences of “living in oil” and how to imagine a future beyond it. As the best of Arts research should strive to do, Dr. Kerber’s work pushes us to rethink our boundaries and consider what we might do differently.

This interview has been edited for length.