Connor Shaw is a Saskatchewan-based writer who is seeking practical solutions for wide-spanning issues facing the country.Near Abernethy, just east of Regina, sits the Motherwell Homestead National Historic Site. Parks Canada describes the site as “an intersection for many different peoples, including First Nations, Métis, and the waves of new Canadian immigrants.” Despite this, the main focus has been on highlighting homesteading life in Saskatchewan’s early settlement.However, these winds seem to be changing as the Western Standard recently reported on the newly released Motherwell Homestead Management Plan 2026. In the plan, Parks Canada outlines its intent to shift the site’s focus toward so-called “inequities on the Prairies,” while “increasing the diversity of stories presented.” With the ultimate goal to expand “visitor experience beyond the history of European settlement and homesteading.”.LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE REWRITE: Parks Canada targets historic Saskatchewan homestead for revisionist history .Saskatchewan is an enigmatic and poorly understood province. I would personally contend it is one of the most misunderstood provinces in all of Canada. Our culture is so unique yet so difficult to quantify and grasp that most folks simply chalk it up to bunnyhugs, Corner Gas, and flat landscapes. It is my personal opinion that the only person who has ever properly expressed the uniqueness and depth of Saskatchewan is Wallace Stegner in his book “Wolf Willow.”In Chapter 1, Section 2 — “History Is a Pontoon Bridge” — Stegner reflects on the idiosyncrasies that being raised in Saskatchewan instilled in him. Reliance on oral history, belief in old wives’ tales, and the inherent contradiction of being raised in a supplied, civilized frontier. This ultimately builds up to the eponymous diatribe, which reads as follows: “For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he has over the pontoons laid by others he may never have heard of … Whitemud was not a beginning, not a new thing, but a stage in a long historical process.”.What is happening at the Motherwell Homestead is historical revisionism. It is one of the few sites that belongs distinctly to Saskatchewan’s history, yet it is being reappropriated for others who had no hand in its creation. Parks Canada is cutting off a piece of Saskatchewan’s ‘pontoon bridge’ in order to forcibly insert a new raft in its place.Yet the inevitable consequence is that this new piece will not — and cannot — fit neatly in the gap left in our cultural memory. Each erasure of our unique cultural patrimony will further drag us away from shore and leave us adrift in the river of time.Stegner writes: “Events have a way of making other events inevitable; the actions of men are consecutive and indivisible.” Were it not for William Motherwell — Saskatchewan’s first Minister of Agriculture — and the settlers that his homestead was meant to commemorate, Saskatchewan would not exist in the way we see it today. By attempting to erase their legacy in the name of “inequity,” we cannot possibly grasp the continuity of events which led to the formation of our contemporary province.This promotes ignorance of a province whose heritage is already coloured by a lack of widespread understanding. Those old wives’ tales and oral histories which shaped the way Wallace Stegner — and countless other Saskatchewan settlers — led their lives are the stories which are most subject to being lost. These are the stories which ought to receive the most focus for preservation, but instead, the few places where that history could be preserved are instead being “re-interpreted,” “re-examined,” and revised.Connor Shaw is a Saskatchewan-based writer who is seeking practical solutions for wide-spanning issues facing the country.
