A Geography of Blood Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape

When Candace Savage and her partner buy a house near the Saskatchewan-Montana border, her naturalist’s instinct propels her to explore the area. She takes pleasure in the Wild West setting, discovering hidden back roads, dinosaur skeletons at the discovery center, and fossils in the dust-dry hills. She also revels in her encounters with the land’s wild inhabitants — wolves, cougars and howling coyotes. But as Savage explores further, she uncovers a darker reality — the little-known history of the Native people who were displaced from their homes, forced onto reserves, and deliberately starved — and finds that she must reassess her own family’s history as prairie sodbusters. Beautifully written and impeccably researched, A Geography of Blood offers both a shocking new version of Western history and an unforgettable portrait of the windswept, shining country of Cypress Hills, a holy place that helps us remember.

Candace Savage is the author of numerous internationally acclaimed books on subjects ranging from natural history and science to popular culture. She is the author of the best-selling natural history titles Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays and Prairie: A Natural History, for which she won two Saskatchewan Book Awards and a Gold Medal from ForeWord Magazine in 2004. She is also a frequent contributor to numerous periodicals, including Canadian Geographic. She lives in Saskatoon, SK.