The settler ‘reserve’: Jonathan Hildebrand, Land, Water, and Memory: Mennonite Settlement and Indigenous Presence in Southern Manitoba, PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2026 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler ‘reserve’: Jonathan Hildebrand, Land, Water, and Memory: Mennonite Settlement and Indigenous Presence in Southern Manitoba, PhD dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2026

04Sep26

Abstract: This dissertation examines the history of a small colonization reserve to ask how prairie land becomes known and accepted primarily as settler agricultural space even if vaguely understood, at some level, as Indigenous land. The land in question – designated for Mennonite migrants to Manitoba from Imperial Russia in 1875 and often referred to as the ‘West Reserve’ – was one of two block settlements provided to Mennonites in the 1870s. In this micro-historical context, I focus on the interactions between settler history-making, land, and geography, to explore the relationships between material and discursive forms of Indigenous land dispossession, and to consider the roles of water and landscape in the formation of settler identity. As West Reserve settlers became more established, they began to historicize and commemorate their presence there, establishing a corpus of historical understandings of this place that grew stronger and more solidified into the late twentieth century. In many ways this body of knowledge established parameters that defined the region as Mennonite, agricultural, settler space. Yet an analysis of state, settler, archival, and oral history sources reveals that this discursive unmaking of Indigenous space was never totalizing, nor were narratives of agricultural ascendancy the only stories of the region’s environment and geography. Indigenous Peoples continued to utilize, live in, and travel through the region throughout the timeframe of this study (roughly from the time of Mennonite arrival well into the twentieth century). Though the reserve was noted for not having any major water bodies within it, its many small creeks and low areas remained intrinsic, if less-emphasized, features of both the environment and people’s experiences of it.

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