Strangers in the House
A Prairie Story of Bigotry and Belonging
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A renowned author investigates the dark and shocking history of her prairie house.
When researching the first occupant of her Saskatoon home, Candace Savage discovers a family more fascinating and heartbreaking than she expected
Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin built the house in the 1920s, an era when French-speakers like him were deemed “undesirable” by the political and social elite, who sought to populate the Canadian prairies with WASPs only. In an atmosphere poisoned first by the Orange Order and then by the Ku Klux Klan, Napoléon and his young family adopted anglicized names and did their best to disguise their “foreignness.”
In Strangers in the House, Savage scours public records and historical accounts and interviews several of Napoléon’s descendants, including his youngest son, to reveal a family story marked by challenge and resilience. In the process, she examines a troubling episode in Canadian history, one with surprising relevance today.
Published in Partnership with the David Suzuki Institute
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nature writer Savage (A Geography of Blood: Unearthing Memory from a Prairie Landscape) blends memoir, reportage, and history in this entertaining profile of the old house "with a view... of downtown Saskatoon" that she acquired in 1990. A deed search establishes her as the eighth owner of the home built in 1928 by Napoleon Blondin; a kitchen renovation reveals "bits of flotsam" abandoned by the Blondin family. When a pair of 21st-century Blondin sisters emerges during her research, the author meets the family, including Napoleon's son Chuck, who greets Savage "like a long-lost cousin" and provides much of the family history the book recounts. Savage narrates how the introduction of rail travel in Canada in the late 1800s drew 400,000 Quebecois west with the promise of a better life, and charts the tension between the Protestant Orange Order and Catholic French speakers that brought in the KKK, who burned crosses on Catholics' lawns. Despite the anti-Catholic sentiment, Napoleon's fortunes rose in the early 20th century, but following crop failure caused by a severe drought in 1919, he was forced to move his family farther west. The book's charm lies in its first-person narrative, which poignantly conjures the Blondin family's challenges along with the author's reactions to historical events. Owners of older homes will appreciate the curiosity that spurred the author to embark on this project.
