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.

Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.