Distance and Space

Kristin Catherwood, Intangible Cultural Heritage Development Officer

In Saskatchewan, we spend a lot of time travelling. In a landscape as vast as ours, it takes a long time to get anywhere. Similarly to my last post about the meaning of time, the meaning of distance is difficult to define and fluctuates depending on our personal points of reference, which are often as much cultural as they are based in geographic reality.

How we order the space around us and conceive of distances is culturally determined. Whether it is urban or rural culture, prairie or woodland culture, First Nations or settler culture – there are different ways and means of delineating space and of travelling the distance it creates. “It takes four hours for us to get to Regina, but eight hours for them to get here,” a friend in Shaunavon told me. This refers to the common perceptionthat those who live in the city think of travelling long distances as a rare event. For rural people, it as an everyday experience. Distance and time takes on a different meaning depending on the person experiencing it, whether it is calculated by Google maps or "as the crow flies."

We often estimate distances based on the time it takes to get somewhere rather than the number of kilometres. This changes depending on the means of conveyance. It takes about 45 minutes to drive to Weyburn from my farm in a car; with a grain truck, perhaps an hour. When my great-grandfather hauled grain to Weyburn nine decades ago, it was a three-day trip, with the nights spent sleeping under the wagon. A question I’ll often ask in oral history interviews is, how long did it take to travel to the nearest town by horseback? One rancher answered, “back when horses were in shape, it took two hours to travel twelve miles. A human on foot would take at least twice as long as the horse.  But the prairie was once traversed by foot as a matter of course. My friend, 97 this January, remembers how her uncle once walked from Swift Current to Regina with a load of seedling trees on his back. To read more about travelling the prairies on foot, see the the blog of Dr. Matthew Anderson who undertook a pilgrimage of the NWMP trail last summer.

Distance is different when it’s travelled by water, such as when First Nations, Metis and white fur traders traversed the waterways. Old trails snaked diagonally across the province, before highways and grid roads imposed rectilinear order. The differences between winter travel and summer travel change distance again – how is a river crossed, or not crossed? In the news this winter we heard about inaccessible ice roads due to the mild temperatures – what if climate change makes ice roads obsolete? How then will people living in remote northern communities bridge the immense distance between their homes and the services they need in other places?

We now break the land up into acres, or more accurately hectares, but few people use that terminology in the common parlance. Despite decades of the metric system in Canada, it is still more common in rural areas to hear of miles, feet and inches, not only because that’s the way their parents and grandparents talked, but also because it makes more sense on the landscape. When Saskatchewan as we know it now was surveyed, sections and quarter-sections were divvied up on the imperial system, and landmarks were set up on those reference points. Before European settlement, the land was characterized in a different way. In Black Elk Speaks, the narrator, Black Elk, a Lakota medicine man narrating his memoirs in the early twentieth-century, says, “They told us they wanted only to use a little land, as much as a wagon would take between the wheels.”*

We live in a land of immense distances, of space between places that is almost unimaginable to people living in more crowded parts of the world. Our heritage is bound up in our ordering of that space. How we measure that distance, how we conceive of it, how we speak about it, and how we travel it speaks volumes about who we are, how we live, and what we value. Do we make the distance, or does it make us?

*From Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. John G. Neihardt, ed.