Guardians Of The Grasslands

How conservationists and ranchers in Saskatchewan are working to slow the loss of an endangered ecosystem

- Karen Pinchin

FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, Brenda Peterson, the daughter of a rancher, didn’t want Grasslands National Park to exist. In 1975, standing at a packed community hearing in Mankota, Sask., the petite, just-married university student studying education, her hair a mop of chestnut curls, spoke passionately against the park. The Saskatchewan Natural History Society first proposed the preserve in the mid-1950s, and, two decades later, the provincial and federal governments were finally considering it. “I said, ‘My family has looked after this place since 1911,’” she recalls. “‘You think I’m just going to give it to the park? We’re doing a fine job.’” But her group’s protests failed. In 1981, Parks Canada and Saskatchewan signed an agreement to establish the park, and Parks Canada subsequently bought two ranches totalling 140 square kilometres in the Frenchman River area. But when conditions in the agreement about oil and gas exploration and water resource management proved to be unworkable, the acquisition of additional park lands stopped. It wasn’t until 1988 that Saskatchewan and Parks Canada revised their agreement and proceeded with establishing the park, which today is divided into the East Block and West Block and encompasses about 900 square kilometres. Almost overnight, it seemed to Peterson, parks staff posted DO NOT ENTER signs, outraging locals. “One time, they stopped my brother and said he was trespassing — on his own land,” says Peterson. “The park people didn’t know where the border was.”

Now, sitting comfortably on horseback, Peterson, 62, overlooks her family’s historical ranching lands from atop a massive ridge, the wind-whipped grass peeling down along the hillside. She squints into the sun, the horizon a sweep of greys and greens, browns and tans.