Why Shoot the Gopher? Reading the Politics of a Prairie Icon
2003; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02722010309481164
ISSN1943-9954
Autores Tópico(s)Canadian Identity and History
ResumoHow do you grow a prairie town? The gopher was the model. Stand up straight: telephone poles grain elevators church steeples. Vanish suddenly: the gopher was the model. --Robert Kroetsch, Seed Catalogue In late winter of 2002, the Saskatoon Branch of the Wildlife Federation announced that it was initiating the Ken Turcot Memorial Gopher Derby (figure 1). It seemed a simple idea: interested sharpshooters would pay a $20 entry fee, then shoot as many gophers as they could between April 1 and June 23. The hunters with the largest number of kills (tabulated daily on a website) would win cash prizes. Proof of the kills would be the gopher tails, frozen and bundled in packs of ten and delivered to the Wildlife Federation Office for tabulation. The plan caused immediate controversy, as hunters and farmers squared off against biologists and environmentalists. We're in the 21st century, surely, not the 14th, wrote one reader of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, who opposed what he termed a mass murder derby carried out by executioners. He asked: why does the SWF--which has ample opportunity for good programs--want to taint itself with such an event? What must the rest of the world think of this province? It's time to challenge head-on the kill-it-for-fun culture of backwater Saskatchewan (Steck). Another reader, responding to this pathetic letter with disgust wrote: suppose this brainwashed do-gooder would prefer to sell his cows and livestock and let the gophers have his pasture and fields. When I was a kid, we got two cents a gopher tail for killing them by any means possible.... I am from backwater and proud of it. I have shot thousands of gophers and taught my kids to handle firearms safely to kill skunks, coyotes, gophers, magpies and any other farm predators. (Morgan) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The heated rhetoric of these letters may seem excessive--surely a gopher is just a gopher. (1) But the extreme terms of this ongoing debate can be understood if, as I contend, the argument is not in fact primarily about gophers, but is rather about those fundamentally western concerns: land and power. Gophers pop up repeatedly in prairie literature and popular culture, but they have received no critical attention. Although most criticism of prairie writing focuses on the prairie environment, animals (indigenous or otherwise) are rarely included in that consideration. (2) Gophers may be so common on the prairie and in literature that their presence is taken for granted by critics; alternatively, models of prairie writing that concentrate on battles between human and landscape may ignore the seemingly trivial presence of small animals. But examining representations of the gopher not only reveals local color--the gopher as scenery--but also reveals fundamental conflicts within the prairie: rural versus urban, cultivation versus conservation, prairie dweller versus tourist, even indigenous culture versus settler/colonizer culture. At the heart of these conflicts, I suggest, are questions of power: whose land is the prairie, and whose interests should be protected? Who is seen to have the right to prairie space? Conflicts centering on gophers are thus analogous to site fights like those over placement of garbage dumps and pig farms, where neighborly concerns about smelly air are deeply rooted in conflicts over whether a specific place is a working landscape or a recreational one (Novek). W.O. Mitchell's classic novel Who Has Seen the Wind provides an example of a gopher used as a symbol that crystallizes regional tensions. Brian, the novel's young protagonist, struggles throughout the book to understand the prairie's awful power (125). He is aided in this understanding by the Young Ben, an unkempt child of nature who comes to symbolize the wild nature of the prairie itself. …
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